Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase "being born" is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while "dying" means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
The Metamorphoses
You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.
"Doctor, we did good, didn't we?"
"Perhaps. Time will tell. Always does."
In Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks
There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.
The true poet and the true scientist are not estranged. They go forth into nature like two friends. Behold them strolling through the summer fields and woods. The younger of the two is much the more active and inquiring; he is ever and anon stepping aside to examine some object more minutely, plucking a flower, treasuring a shell, pursuing a bird, watching a butterfly; now he turns over a stone, peers into the marshes, chips off a fragment of rock, and everywhere seems intent on some special and particular knowledge of the things about him. The elder man has more an air of leisurely contemplation and enjoyment, is less curious about special objects and features, and more desirous of putting himself in harmony with the spirit of the whole. But when his younger companion has any fresh and characteristic bit of information to impart to him, how attentively he listens, how sure and discriminating is his appreciation! The interests of the two in the universe are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile or mutually destructive.
Things are not as bad as they seem. They are worse.
I am afraid of the worst, but I am not sure what that is.
Ideally, you should be your own hero, just as I am mine.
I have seen the future and it doesn't work.
... one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
Accountant (Graham Chapman): Oh well, I'm a chartered accountant, and consequently too boring to be of interest.
Monty Python: "Sex and Violence"
The most extensive computation known has been conducted over the last billion years on a planet-wide scale: it is the evolution of life. The power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty of its crowning achievement, the human brain.
"Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory"
Planet Bog -- Pools of toxic chemicals bubble under a choking atmosphere of poisonous gases... but aside from that, it's not much like Earth.
The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes
Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him... But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming -- and a little mad.
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good... luckily, it's not difficult.
In Canada Month.
... no man of genuinely superior intelligence has even been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
"The Allied Arts"
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
K is for KENGHIS KHAN. He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
"From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"
. . . all men and women, in couples or otherwise, who fall into exclusive habits of self-indulgence, and forget their natural sympathy and close connection with everybody and everything in the world around them, not only neglect the first duty of life, but, by a happy retributive justice, deprive themselves of its truest and best enjoyment.
Sketches of Young Couples
I want to know the truth, however perverted that may sound.
It is unnecessary to understand electromagnetic theory before wiring a lamp or to study physics in order to repair a pump. We count on our fingers and give no heed to the proliferating implications of the act.
[He]... was a letter writer of the type that is now completely extinct. His circle of correspondents was perhaps no larger but it was easily more bewildered than that of any other American of his generation...
In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.
I'm lost, but I'm making record time.
Cartesian, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum... The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am"; as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary
Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
Paper has a genius for multiplication that cannot be equalled anywhere else in nature.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.
Q. "Do you listen to your own music?"
A. "No ... It was bad enough having to play the shit without having to listen to it."
I can't see the point in the theatre. All that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home. Apart from the sex, of course.
Baldrick, in Blackadder III: "Sense and Senility"
Someone once said that the two most important things in developing taste were sensitivity and intelligence. I don't think this is so; I'd rather call them curiosity and courage. Curiosity to look for the new and the hidden; courage to develop your own tastes regardless of what others might say or think.
The Composer in the Classroom
The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more we see that all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence as liable to work for our disadvantage as for our advantage. It flows like the water of a river, it falls like rain, it is as impartial as the sea. It is as innocent of malice as it is of compassion.
The Pathetic Fallacy
My house is small, but you are learned men / And by your arguments can make a place / Twenty foot broad as infinite as space.
The Reeve's Tale, in The Canterbury Tales
America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.
This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls. "To keep your head," wrote Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem "If", which articulated the code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age, "when all about you are losing theirs"; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit!
From "Faking It", in Manhood for Amateurs
There's certainly a growing atmosphere of academic totalitarianism. It shows up in things like the attacks on the legitimacy of the more eclectic and interdisciplinary fields, or in the increasing constraints on student choice.