We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.
Caesar and Cleopatra
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
"There is no disputing about tastes," says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.
Marchbanks' Almanac
Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
Let your voice be heard, whether or not it is to the taste of every jack-in-office who may be obstructing the traffic. By all means, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's -- but this does not necessarily include everything that he says is his.
The Brazen Horn
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.
You could augment an earwig to the point where it understood nuclear physics, but it would still be a very stupid thing to do!
In Robert Holmes' The Two Doctors
I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical, / I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical, / About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot of news--- / With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
The Pirates of Penzance
Should I not have changed either the day for carrying out my scheme, or the scheme itself -- but preferably only the day?
The Metamorphoses
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker?... Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created."
Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.
It is great good health to believe, as the Hindus do, that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
A person who lacks the means, within himself, to live a good and happy life will find any period of his existence wearisome.
"On Old Age"
The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.
Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back.
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought -- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river, you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours, wasted minutes, years of repetition and time that has been killed.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment.
The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive... No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as a superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.
A Coffin for Dimitrios
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.
In David Agnew's The Invasion of Time
Cities do not change over the centuries. They represent the aspirations of particular men and women to lead a common life; as a result their atmosphere, their tone, remain the same. Those people whose relations are founded principally upon commerce and upon the ferocious claims of domestic privacy will construct a city as dark and as ugly as London was. And is. Those people who wish to lead agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful and as elegant as Paris.
Dickens
The words figure and fictitious both derive from the same Latin root fingere. Beware!
The average man who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
A print addict is a man who reads in elevators. People occasionally look at me curiously when they see me standing there, reading a paragraph or two as the elevator goes up. To me, it's curious that there are people who do not read in elevators. What can they be thinking about?
"The Pastimes of a Print Addict"
You know what misery I went through there, listening to lawyers day and night. If you'd had experience of them yourself, as brave as you think you are, you'd have preferred to clean out the Augean stables...
The Apocolocyntosis
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
The work of Leslie is particularly confusing. The mischievous muse of thermodynamics made him inweave his simple statements about heat in a horrid mess of difficult, irrelevant, and unexplained calculations. His and other early theories of heat make much of entities as imperceptible as voids and vortices or, for that matter, angels. They belong not to physics but to what would now be regarded as speculative philosophy.
Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance, / And toss them on the wheels of Chance.
Methusalem might be half an hour in telling what o'clock it was: but as for us postdiluvians, we ought to do everything in haste; and in our speeches, as well as actions, remember that our time is short.
Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
Stockbroker (John Cleese): Well, speaking as member of the Stock Exchange I would suck their brains out with a straw, sell the widows and orphans and go into South American Zinc.
Monty Python: "Sex and Violence"
Tetsuo's kind see only the power of Western scientific reductionism. They wish to combine it with our discipline, our traditional methods of competitive conformity. With this I fundamentally disagree. What the West really has to offer -- the only thing it has to offer, my child -- is honesty. Somehow, in the midst of their horrid history, the best among the gaijin learned a wonderful lesson. They learned to distrust themselves, to doubt even what they were taught to believe or what their egos make them yearn to see. To know that even truth must be scrutinized, it was a great discovery, almost as great as the treasure we of the East have to offer them in return, the gift of harmony.
"Dr. Pak's Preschool"