Let us not speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Silence). Let us not speak well of it either. (Silence). Let us not speak of it at all. (Silence). It is true that the population has increased.
Pozzo in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed anyway.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Estargon: You and your landscape! Tell me about the worms!
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
We were at an age when our beliefs influenced our behaviour, a characteristic of the young which it is easy for the middle-aged to forget.
Maynard Keynes
Never have I met an absolutely more sterile mind – and yet how wonderfully cultivated! It’s like a piece of flannel with watercress growing on it.
Lytton Strachey
A definition of surprise:
A patient English judge, seeking to assess the varying degrees of responsibility for a collision between a warship and a commercial vessel, had intervened to ask one of the ship’s engineers; “Tell me, were you really surprised when the crash happened?” “Surprised, your honour,” replied the witness, “I was so flabbergasted you could have buggered me through my oilskins.”
For we are all selfish & I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
Lord Byron
A bad artist copies the object and is in a state of imitation, a good artist represents the object and is in a state of equivalence.
Fernand Leger
Remember each day
That you are an architect
Of new relationships
And new loves
Mayakovsky
Here I am, my nerves tense and my muscles taut, ready to leap into reality.
Blaise Cendrars
Because things are as they are they will not remain as they are.
Bertolt Brecht
Your manuscript I’ve read my friend
And like the half you’ve pilfered best;
Be sure the piece you yet may mend –
Take courage man and steal the rest.
Anon
The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
Wilhelm Stekel
A weed – a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered.
Emerson
When Helena Rubinstein heard that a horse had bitten off one of Elizabeth Arden’s fingers she is reputed to have asked “Is the horse all right?”
Insanity – the inability to function properly in society.
J D Salinger
There will be a time, there will be a time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T S Eliot
As to Annabella, she requires time & all the cardinal virtues, & in the interim I am a little verging towards one who demands neither, and saves me besides the troubler of marrying by being married already.
Lord Byron
I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her.
Lord Byron
The work of art is only a halt in the becoming and not a frozen aim on its own.
El Lissitzky
Thou hast committed –
Fornication: but that was in another country.
And besides, the wench is dead
Christopher Marlowe
Dusting
The dust comes secretly day after day,
Lives on my ledge and dulls my shining things.
But O this dust that I shall drive away
Is flowers and kings
Is Solomon’s temple, poets, Nineveh.
Viola Meynall
I am a sundial, and I make a botch
Of what is done much better than a watch.
Hilaire Belloc
When a colleague in the House of Commons pointed out to Churchill (in his later years) that several of his fly-buttons were undone, he said “No matter. The dead bird does not leave the nest.”
A Frenchman, when asked if a gentleman must know Latin and Greek replied: “No, but he must have forgotten them.”
On nait demi-dieu et l’on meurt epicier.
Andre Gide
Tout choses sont dites deja, mais comme personne n’ecoute, il faut toujours recommencer.
Andre Gide
