The Quotes Basement
Sub-Level 5
'Mirrors in a room, water in a landscape, eyes in a face-those are what give character.'
'We are all refugees of a future that never happened.'
'Everyone should learn to do one thing supremely well because he likes it, and one thing supremely well because he detests it.'
'The difference between dogs and cats is that dogs come when they're
called. Cats take a message and get back to you.'
"Right now I feel that I've got my feet on the ground as far as my head
is concerned."
No artist wants to be "understood." If he's "understood," he feels superficial. What an artist wants is not to be misunderstood.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
A sense of humor ... is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
"To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up."
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
'Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.'
'A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.'
"Another Armenia, Belgium ... the weak innocents who always seem to be located on a natural invasion route."
'When you think you've seen the light at the end of a tunnel, take care. It's probably a train comming from the opposite direction'
'We are always more afraid than we wish to be, but can always be braver than we expect.'
'My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.'
'A bore is a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you.'
'From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.'
"We are all pretending ... The important thing is to maintain a straight face."
Rob Quantock: What is the meaning of life?
Nothing wrong with private schools! At lunch you could go down to the tuckshop and have a sausage roll with sun-dried tomato sauce.
'It is never wise to try to appear to be more clever than you are. It is sometimes wise to appear slightly less so.'
He longed to be lost but he couldn't bear not to be found.
Wit is a treacherous dart. It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible to stab oneself in one's own back.
Beauty ... is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.
'An A-grading is, and I quote, "serious illness, likely to result in death at an early age." That's got to be bad for your career.'
'The excellence of every art is it's intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.'
'The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. The one pours out a balm upon the world, The other vexes it.'
"A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence."
'A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the non-self that there is no self left to die'
'The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows that the average man can see much better than he can think.'
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
'Work like you don't need the money,
"Our audience has kept us alive when we've been right out on a limb and someone's been chain sawing it off"
"This is Elvis Costello on JJJ which I always thought was a kind of lemon juice, but there you go!"
"... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end."
"We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and IBM."
'There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.'
"It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed."
"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time."
"It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely used higher level language for systems programming."
"The fortune program is supported, in part, by user contributions and by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities."
"I look at life as being cruise director on the Titanic. I may not get there, but I'm going first class."
"Children are like cats, they can tell when you don't like them. That's when they come over and violate your body space."
Mandrell: "You know what I think?"
'Behind the longing for immortality is the idea of being able to do nothing while knowing that you have forever to do everything.'
A kiss is a course of procedure, cunningly devised, for the mutual stoppage of speech at a moment when words are superfluous.
"I'm glad we don't have to play in the shade."
'Wish and hope succeed in discerning signs of paranormality where reason and careful scientific procedure fail.'
"The time spent on any item of the agenda [of a finance committee] will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."
"If Karl, instead of writing a lot about Capital, had made a lot of Capital, it would have been much better."
'Riches: A gift from Heaven signifying, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."'
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
"The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in 1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert."
'Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.'
"I'd probably settle for a vampire if he were romantic enough. Couldn't be any worse than some of the relationships I've had."
"George Washington was first in war, first in peace -- and the first to have his birthday juggled to make a long weekend."
'So so is good, very good, very excellent good:
You can fool some of the people some of the time,
The Official MBA Handbook on business cards: 30
Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
"I met my latest girl friend in a department store. She was looking at clothes, and I was putting Slinkys on the escalators."
"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called 'brightness', but it doesn't seem to work."
"Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, But it's very funny -- did you ever try buying them without money?"
"The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy."
'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."'
"The games have always strengthened us. Death becomes a familiar pattern. We don't fear it as you do."
Those who have had no share in the good fortunes of the mighty
"It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
"The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon."
'Darling: the popular form of address used in speaking to a member of the opposite sex whose name you cannot at the moment remember.'
"dud? hmm.. well,thanks to napster, i don't buy many dud CD's anymore"
"Actually, typing random strings in the Finder does the equivalent of filename completion."
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"He didn't run for reelection. `Politics brings you into contact with all the people you'd give anything to avoid,' he said. `I'm staying home.'"
Bug, n.:
"The honeymoon is over when he phones to say he'll be late for supper and she's already left a note that it's in the refrigerator."
'The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for everything that goes wrong -- until the next person quits or is fired.'
"The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting."
The First Rule of Program Optimization:
Thus spake the master programmer:
'The gods do bear and will allow in kings
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
"Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms."
"The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed,"
"One of the problems in life exists in trying to find out something you should know without letting on you don't already know"
Next Sub-Level? Right Here
"I am an inventor of music."
-Igor Stravinsky (declaring profession at French border during World War I, quoted in NY Times 7 Apr)
- Brooke Astor (Architectural Digest Mar)
-Lee Weiner (on failure to achieve goals of the 1960s, People 12 Sep)
-Baseball pitcher Bo Belinsky
-Aaron Copland
-Albert Einstein (quoted in Washington Post 6 Mar)
-Clifton Fadiman (Santa Barbara Center Magazine Jul/Aug)
-John C Holmes ("The Philosophy of the Beats" Esquire Feb)
-Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird, Lippincott)
-Charles Scribner Jr (Publishers Weekly 30 Mar)
-John Updike (Assorted Prose)
-Kirk, ("Errand of Mercy", stardate 3198.4)
-Rossiter
-The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
- Igor Stravinsky
-Maurice Valency (Ashby Schocken 84, quoted in NY Times 30 Nov)
Anthony Morgan (reaching into a Big Mac): Take the of the pickle, but never eat it.
-James O'Loghlin
-William Whitlaw
- Ronald Blythe (on T E Lawrence, The Age of Illusion Houghton Mifflin)
- Geoffrey Bocca
-Nikos Kazantzakis (report to Greco Simon & Schuster)
-John Keats
-John Keats
-reprimanding talkative audience
- Bernard Berenson
-Ladies' Home Journal
Love like you've never been hurt,
And dance like there's nobody watching.'
[Drive like the car's been stolen]
-Peter Garratt (may 1998)
-Elvis Costello (1982)
-Vernor Vinge ("The Peace War")
-Edsger Dijkstra
-G.K. Chesterton
-Goethe
-E. B. White
-J. Sammet
-Art Buchwald
Doctor: "Ah, ah that's a catch question. With a brain your size you don't think, right?"
-Dr. Who
-Golfer Bobby Jones (on being told that it was 105 degrees in the shade.)
-James E. Alcock (The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12)
-C.N. Parkinson
-Karl Marx's Mother
-John D. Rockefeller (slander by Ambrose Bierce)
-Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
-D. Letterman
-Richard Bach ("Illusions")
-Brenda Starr
-Ashley Cooper
and yet it is not; it is but so so.'
-William Shakespeare ("As You Like It")
and some of the people all of the time,
and that is sufficient.
Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of Corporate Planning."
-Steven Wright
-Gallagher
-Ogden Nash
-Edwin Edwards (Louisiana governor)
-Isaac Asimov
-Proconsul Marcus Claudius ('Bread and Circuses', stardate 4041.2)
Often have a share in their misfortunes.
-Bertolt Brecht ("The Caucasian Chalk Circle")
-Mark Twain ("Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar")
-Nietzsche
-Charles Schulz ("Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over")
-Oliver Herford
-a Triple J listener, when asked about the worst CD they'd bought that year
-(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands: file
completion vs. the Mac Finder.)
-Douglas Adams ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy")
-Garrison Keillor (_Lake_Wobegone_Days_)
An aspect of a computer program which exists because the programmer was thinking about Jumbo Jacks or stock options when s/he wrote the program.
-Bill Lawrence
-T.H. White
Don't do it.
The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!):
Don't do it yet.
-Michael Jackson
"Let the programmers be many and the managers few -- then all will be productive."
-Geoffrey James ("The Tao of Programming")
The things which they abhor in rascal routes.'
-Buckhurst (Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex)
-Groucho Marx
-Alan Coren (British humorist)
- Lloyd Jones
-P.K.Shaw