Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.
"The Secret Life of James Thurber", in The Thurber Carnival
Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.
The Silver Poppy
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir -- especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased -- I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture -- a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.
"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
... many other means there be, that promise the foreknowledge of things to come: besides the raising up and conjuring of ghosts departed, the conference also with familiars and spirits infernal. And all these were found out in our days, to be no better than vanities and false illusions...
The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
I am not an irretrievable skeptic. I am not hopelessly prejudiced. I am perfectly willing to believe, and my mind is wide open; but I have, as yet, to be convinced. I am perfectly willing, but the evidence must be sane and conclusive.
In Houdini on Magic
I don't think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.
Quoted in the Washington Post, Nov 28 2000
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.
The Devils of Loudun
And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, / Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, / Lift not your hand to It for help -- for It / As impotently moves as you or I.
All this progress is marvelous... now if only it would stop!
From the horridness of this crime, I do conclude that, of all others, it requires the clearest relevancy and most convincing probature; and I condemn, next to the witches themselves, those cruel and too forward judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty of this crime.
So then, these are the foundations, as they call them, of all mixt bodies, and of all wonderful operations: and whatsoever experiments they proved, the causes hereof rested (as they supposed) and were to be found in the Elements and their qualities.
Natural Magick
Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?
You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing."
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.
My early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India...
The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.
... nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
The Drowning Pool
Mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars.
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family...
Bloom Country Babylon
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I'm deaf.
Blackadder III: "Nob and Nobility"
We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle... chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Life's too short for chess.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Be as decent as you can. Don't believe without evidence. Treat things divine with marked respect -- don't have anything to do with them. Do not trust humanity without collateral security; it will play you some scurvy trick. Remember that it hurts no one to be treated as an enemy entitled to respect until he shall prove himself a friend worthy of affection. Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And, finally, most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
In his Nobel Prize Address
As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.
"Here Lies Miss Groby", in The Thurber Carnival
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Theorem, Tarski's Truth Theorem -- all have the flavor of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that "To seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on any map, will never halt, cannot be described."
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid