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Quote File. If you have submissions, please send them to patchmonkey@patchmonkey.net |
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|J|K|L|M|N|O|P|R|S|T|V|W|Z|Anon.|Unknown
“You can take two substances, put them together, and produce something powerfully different (table salt), sometimes even explosive (nitroglycerine).” – Diane Ackerman
“At first, Senseless as beasts, I gave men sense, Possessed them of mind… In the beginning, seeing, the saw amiss, and hearing, heard not, but like phontoms huddled, In dreams, the perplexed story of their days, Confounded.” – Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
“Is in not hunger, but love and fear and sometimes wonder, that make us create…to give poetic form to the pragmatic.” – Emilio Ambasz
“If we can’t fix it, it ain’t broke.” – American Garage Sign
“Even when I’m railed at, I get my quota of renown.” – Pietro Aretino
“…Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes.” – Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“Wit is educated insolence.” – Aristotle
“There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and
fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.” – Honore de Balzac
“At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that: The universe is even bigger than they thought! There are even more subatomic particles than
they thought! Whatever they announced last year about global warming is wrong.” – Dave Barry
“The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.” – Dave Barry
“You the butterfly – I, Chuang Tsu’s dreaming heart. ” – Haiku of Basho
“I have thought about the nature of this creative process, and have reached a somewhat aberrant conclusion. I don’t understand it and I don’t think anyone else does either.” – William Beck
“Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo.” – Henri Bergson
“Art is I… Science is We.” – Claude
Bernard
“A human is an arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees.” – Ambrose Bierce
“God is on the side of the heaviest cannon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“Still searching, still hoping, still alone.” -Nathan Brazil
“A man brings together two facets of reality and by discovering a likeness between them, suddenly makes them one.” -
Jacob Bronowski
“Man is a singular creature… he is not a
figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and mind
his is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal who did not find but has
made his home in every continent.” – Jacob Bronowski
“To appreciate nonsense requires a serious
interest in life.” – Gelett Burgess
“With the first step by which the first man
made the first human footprint on the surface of the moon, mankind became conscious
of a new era in its evolution. It is difficult to think of an equally momentous
event in human history which so convincingly demonstrated what man can accomplish
when he has a plan by which he designs the organization, materials, power resources
and a multitude of devices that can transport his functioning body from its
earth home to a faraway point in universal space and back. The significance
of the epochal event was further magnified by a sophisticated communication
technology which – at the instant it occurred – encircled the earth with the
images and sounds of man’s first advance into a new future. Regardless of age,
nationality, social class of political system, all people watching television
screens saw themselves and felt like this first man. Television turned his individual
feelings and observations into an earthwide mass communication experience.”
- Will Burtin
“I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.”
- John Cage
“Jokes join up the ivisible dots between two
subjects.” – Mel Calman
“The lines of communication between the conscious
and unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have split
in two.” – Joseph Campbell
“…one of the hallmarks of a creative person
is the ability ot tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistence, things out
of place. But one of the rules of a well-run coporation is that surprise be
minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth
reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth
liiving with and using would ever get designed.” – Ralph Caplan
“Thus for my own part I have more than once
been deceived by the person I loved most and of whose love, above everyone else’s,
I have been most confident. So that I believe that it may be right to love and
serve one person above all others, according to merit and worth, but never to
trust so much in this tempting trap of friendship as to have cause to repent
of it later on.” – Baldassare Castiglione
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the
line somewhere.” – G.K. Chesterton
“Man did not weave the web
of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to
himself.” — Chief Seattle, Amerindian
“Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar;
never spread it around like marmalade.” – Noel Coward
“Oysters open completely when the mooon is
full; and when the crab sees on it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it
and the oyster cannot close again so that it serve the crab for meat. Such is
the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the
mercy of the listener.” – Leonardo daVinci
“Humor reveals a whole different universe
of information processing.” – Edward de Bono
“It is even more damaging for a minister to
say foolish things than to do them.” – Cardinal deRetz
“Our navigators and cosmographers have traced
the outlines of Atlantis, or the New World, where have been found the crocodiles
that lives for a thousand years and the quail that has the falling sickness:
certain provinces or domains there we have named Norumbega, Nova Fancia and
Mocosa, in which latter part of the world has been found the horse that weeps
and signs like a man. There also is the agopithecus, an ape-like goat whose
voice is very like a man’s but not articulate, sounding as if one did speak
hastily with indignation or sorrow. Africa is underneath my hand, and within
in Barbarie whre live the lions that couple backwards and the panthers that
have the color of the sweetest sprices. In Numida, not so far distant, live
men with the tails and heads of dogs, as well as the infamous yena that inhabit
the tombs of the dead and eat only corpses. In Libya dwells the monoceros that
feasts upon poison, and can make it self into male or female as it wishes; there
are people here called Astomii, who live very long and neither eat or drink
but feed upon air and the smell of fruits. In Selenetide there are women who
lay eggs and hatch them, from which come children fifty times greater than those
which are generally born, and the far-off Land of the Negroes is inhabited by
the basilisk that kills at a look, the hydrus of two heads, and the salamander
of perfect coldness…and I find myself suddenly aloft in the yellow land of
Samotrea and on a wonderful path to Monacabo, Capasiasa, Taprobana, Bacornara,
and Birae. Then I can see the men whose bodies shine at night, and the phoenix
tree which blood for a hundred years and imparts and odor more perfumed than
musk or civet or ambergris. On this far-off shore I view the wonders of the
world beneath the stars, and see before me the creature that is born twice,
crying out upon the top of a mountain and saying ‘I am the white of the black,
and the red of the white, and the yellow of the sun, I tell truth and lie not’…at
which I started and awakened, for I was in a dream of my own devising.”
- Doctor John Dee
“What we wish, that we readily
believe.” — Demosthenes
“How many ‘faces’ lie hidden, waiting for
the time when curious eyes will find them in their secret places. In the heart
of a leaf or the bark of a tree. In a frozen pond or the turning sea. Inthe
twist of a chair or the look of a key or the shrivelled skin of an elepant’s
knee.” – Irwin Dermer
“…when the serious is tinted with humor,
it makes a nicer color.” – Marcel Duchamp
“The obsidian flake and the silicon chip are
struck by the light of the same campfire that has passed from hand to hand since
the human mind began.” – George Dyson
“By means of the sign man frees himself from
the here and now for abstraction.” – Umberto Eco
“To invent, you need a good
imagination and a pile of junk.” – Thomas Edison
“Creating a new theory is not liking destroying
an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing
a mountain and gaining new and wider views.” – Albert Einstein
“Imagination is more important
than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
“The most important human
endeavor is striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even
our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty
and dignity to life.” – Albert Einstein
“I know not with what weapons
World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and
stones.” – Albert Einstein
“Culture is everything you don’t have to do…
cuisine is culture, but eating is not; fashion is culture, but clothing isn’t.”
- Brian Eno
“You think a minor thing
like the end of the world was going to do me in?” – Sabin Rene Figaro (FF6)
“Humor is the enemy of Authority.” -
Alan Fletcher
“Inhibition is a nail in the head.” -
Alan Fletcher
“History is bunk!” – Henry Ford
“The answer you seek is in an envelope.”
- fortune cookie
“All pasts are life poems; one can derive
a thousand things, but not live in them.” – John Fowles
“I see this strange tool, my brain, that sees
itself and calls itself a tool and tries to find in itself a thing not a tool
that it is a tool for!” – John Fowles
“The creative person’s simplest purpose is
to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about that
outer world, and his last to express his feelings about himself.” – John
Fowles
“Science disembodies; art embodies.”
- John Fowles
“You’re as sensual as a pencil!” – Frank
N. Furter
“What’s the most important thing in life?
To be free of obligations! Otherwise you lose the ability to gamble…”
- Setzer Gabbiani (FF6)
“Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea.”
- Mahatma Gandhi (attrib.)
“The sudden hunch, the creative leap of the mind that ‘sees’
in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different
from general intelligence.” – Martin Gardner
“Technology is best defined as the production of the superfluous.”
- Ortega Y Gasset
“Blue Movies in Full Colour.” – German Porn Shop Window
Sign
“It is true the white man can fly; he can speak across
the ocean…but he has no songs like ours, no poets to equal the island singers.”
- a Gilbert islander
“Darwinian man, though well behaved, is really just a monkey
shaved!” – W.S. Gilbert
“The problem with the global village
is all the global village idiots.” – P. Ginsparg
“When he reached the place he was aiming for, he began
making holes in the ground with his rod, putting an acorn in each and then covering
it up again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land was his. He
said it wasn’t. Did he know who the owner was? No, he didn’t. He thought it
must be common land, or perhaps it belonged to people who weren’t interested
in it. He wasn’t interestedin who they were. And so, with great care, he planted
his hundred acorns.” – Jean Giono
“Computers are to design as mircowaves are to cooking.”
- Milton Glaser
“Wit is insight.” – Milton Glaser
“[Creativity is]…where the imaginative and the functional
fuse and finally become indistinguishable.” – Milton Glaser
“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from
hand to mouth.” – Johann von Goethe
“The only means to gain one’s ends with people are force
and cunning. Love also, they say, but that is to wait for sunshine, and life
needs every moment.” – Johann von Goethe
“Dear friend, theory is all grey, and the golden tree of
life is green.” – Wolfgang Goethe
“… human thought and emotion have a universality that
transcends time and converts the different stages of history into theaters that
provide lessons for modern players.” – Stephen Jay Gould
“Do not be held a cheat, even though it is impossible to
live today without being one. Let your greatest cunning lie in covering up what
looks like cunning.” – Baltasar Gracian
“Love is a snowmobile racing across the
tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the
ice weasels come.” – Matt Groening
“The ways of creativity are infinite: the ways of formal
learning are numbered. Restless, curious, playful, contriving, the innovative
mind feeds on challenge and makes its home in the province of mystery.”
- Robert Grudin
“It didn’t strike me as odd that you
were making duck noises. It struck me as odd that it didn’t strike me as odd
that you were making duck noises.” –Fred H, Fallout 2 Development Team
“…invention or discovery takes place by combining ideas.”
- Jacques Hadamard
“As you journey through life, take a
minute everynow and then to give a thought for the other fellow. He could be
plotting something.” – Hagar the Horrible
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently
there.” – L.P. Hartley (The Go Between)
“Theology is never any help; it is searching
in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can
persuade themselves of anything.” – Robert A. Heinlein
“Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has
been created.” Werner Karl Heisenberg
“The unlike is joined together, and from difference results
the most beautiful harmony.” – Heraclitus
“Technology is the name we have for stuff that doesn’t
work yet.” – Daniel Hills
“…Qualities like quiveriness and vulnerability come to
mind when I think of creativity…Creativity requires a sense of smell, a palate
to taste the scents that make brilliance. All life feeds upon the random. Creativity
is the haute cuisine.” – Douglas Hofstadter
“Man’s mind stretched with a new idea, never goes back
to it’s original dimension.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Of men who have a sense of honor, more
come through alive than are slain, but from those who flee comes neither glory
nor any help.” – Homer (~700 BC)
“They’re all idiots.” – Ruri Hoshino
“The cleverer we get, the more ‘civilised’ we become, the
more we seem to hunger for that old sense of mystery that must have brmmed up
in us when we looked out cross our extraordinary world and understood none of
it.” – Waldemar Januszczak
“Sometimes it is said that man cannot
be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the
government of others?” – Thomas Jefferson
“Question with boldness even the existence
of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blind-folded fear.” – Thomas Jefferson
“The ability to speak does not make you
intelligent.” -Qui-gon Jinn, a Jedi
“…In our domains live elephants, dromedaries, camels,
hippopotami, crocodiles, metagallinari, cametennus, tinsirete, panthers,
onagers, red and white lions, white bears and blackbirds, mute cicadas, gryphos,
tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild oxen, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, and
women of the same species, pygmies, men with dogs’ heads, giants forty cubits
tall, monocles, cyclops, a bird called the phoenix, and almost every kind of
animal that lives beneath the vault of the heavens…In one of out provinces
the river known as Indus flows…This river, whose source is in Paradise, winds
its way along various branes through the entire province and in it are found
natureal stones, emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, onyx, beryl, amethyst,
sardonics, and many other precious stones…” – Prester John (c.1175)
“Come back anytime. We’ll ride the wind,
baby.” -Johnny (Chrono Trigger)
“Well, that’s another triumph for clean
hands, a pure heart, a good soul… and automatic weapons.” – Dr. Henry
Jones, Jr.
“Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color
is the keyboard, the eyes the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings.
The artisit is the hand which places, touching one key or another to cause vibration
in the soul. It is therefore evident that color harmony must rest only on a
corresponding vibration in the human soul.” – W. Kandinsky
“The arrow shot by the archer may or may not kill a single
person. But stratagems devised by a wise man can kill even babes in the womb.”
- Kautilya (Indian philosopher, c. 300 BCE)
“There is a utopian dream that the coming of the Net will
bring positive social changes. I have my doubts about that. It is going to bring
great social changes, but they won’t all be positive. At the same time, if I
have a positive feeling about what’s happening with digital technology and the
revolution that it brings, it is because netification, computerization, and
digitalization all increase choices. That is about all that technology gives,
but that is a very large thing. For example, a person born now who is interested
in the arts can paint, sculpt, amkes films and make music in many different
speheres. Two centuries ago, there were fewer choices. Each time the media reinvent
themselves, the expand the number of choices without excluding any of the previous
ones. On this simple level, the Net and the literary space – the thinking space
that it creates – will allow a whole new space for the arts. It is also a space
that will aloow new kinds of political and social structures, and it will allow
them as a net gain.” – Kevin Kelly
“Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make
a tree.” – Joyce Kilmer
“Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”
- Paul Klee
“Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.”
- Arthur Koestler
“[Creation]…any mental occurance simultaneously associated
with two hibitually incompatible contexts.” – Arthur Koestler
“Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it
were predictable it would not be a discovery. Creativity exposes unpredictable
things to be discovered.” – Arthur Koestler
“The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting,
at the proper moment, what we know.” – Arthur Koestler
“The word had originated in an articulated verbal insight,
but this evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a
fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arror in the blue.” – Arthur Koestler
“…perceiving analogies and other relations between apparently
incongruous ideas or forming unexpected, striking or ludicrous combinations
of them.” – Rem Koolhass
“..apparently unrelated things become interesting when
we start fitting them together…” – John Kouwenhoven
“Science is spectrum analysis; art is photosynthesis.”
- Karl Krauss
“Laughter… the most democratic of all facial aspects.”
- Milan Kundera
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to
see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
“…the association of two, or more, apparently alien elements
on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry.” – Comte
del Lautreamont
“Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions
of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.” – D.H. Lawrence
“It may be those who do most dream most.” – Stephen
Leacock
“I see life as basically tragic and futile, and the only
thing that matters is making little jokes.” – Edward Lear
“I’ve found the link between apes and civilized men – and
it’s us.” – Konrad Lorenz
“Every time I bestow a vacant office I make a hundred discontented
persons and one ingrate.” – Louis XIV
“The planet is not inanimate. It is a
living organism. The earth, its rocks, oceans, atmosphere and all living things
as one great organism. A coherent holistic system of life, self-regulating,
self-changing.” – James Lovelock
“[To] me organized religion, the
formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a
sunset. – John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold
“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to
come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants
to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge,
or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
“Eventually, we all face the reaper, Are you truly so eager
to take your turn?”- Magus
“An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in
it.” – Don Marquis
“Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.”
- Groucho Marx
“We are no more than God’s curiousity about himself.”
- Thomas Mann
“I’m interested in the moment when two objects collide
and generate a third. The third object is where the interesting work is.”
- Bruce Mau
“Art is what you can get away with.” – Marshall McLuhan
“I quote others only the better to express myself.”-
Michel de Montaigne
“Americans make money by playing ‘money
games,’ namely mergers, acquisitions, by simply moving money back and forth
… instead of creating and producing goods with some actual value.” -
Akio Morita, chairman of Sony
“Humans are so…silly! It’s how you USE the sword that’s
important…not who owns it!” – Mune (CT)
“A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.” – Friedrich
Nietzsche
“In revenge and in love, woman is more
barbarous than man.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“[Is] man one of God’s blunders, or is
God one of man’s blunders?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking nbirds
of prey, but this now reason for holding it against large birds of prey that
they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, ‘These birds
of prey are evill, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is
the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?’ there is nothing intrinsically
wrong with such an argument – though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically
and say, ‘We have nothing against these good lambs, in fact, we love them; nothing
tastes better than a tender lamb.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.”
- Georgia O’Keeffe
“If you want to walk on water, you’ve
got to get out of the boat” – John Ortberg
“Only the spirit has the power of unamimously embracing
contradictory aspects and fusing them into one.” – Amedee Ozenfant
“Wit has a truth to it, wisecracking is simply calisthenics
with words.” – Dorothy Parker
“Don’t think of it as retreating… think
of it as a strategic advance to the rear.” – Rich Parker
“I do not seek – I find.” – Pablo Picasso
“..all behaviour is an interaction between nature and nurture,
whose contributors are as inseparable as the length and width of a rectangle
in determining its area.” – Steven Pinker
“We make tools, and as we evolved, our tool make us.”
- Steven Pinker
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
- Edgar Allen Poe
“To have a good enemy, choose a friend: He knows where
to strike.” – Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II of France
“A [person] without religion is like
a fish without pajamas.” – J. Powers .sig
“A book is a product of another self
to the one we display in our habits, in Society, in our vices.” – Marcel
Proust
“The frame of mind that looks a humor as trivial and flighty
mistakes the shadow for the substance.” – Paul Rand
“Art is pattern informed by sensibility.” – Sir Herbert
Read
“The more distant and distinct the relationship between
the two realities that are brought together, the more powerful the image.”
- Pierre Reverdy
“The smart man can pick up a grain of
sand and envision a whole universe, but the stupid man will find some seaweed
and roll around until he’s all covered in it and go, ‘Hey! I’m vine man!’”
- Mike Reynolds
“I think God’s silly because he should have painted everybody
the same colour and then they wouldn’t fight.” – David Ricardo (Age 4)
“The concept of culture leapt fully armed form the head
of Johann Gottfried Herder in the mid-eighteenth century, and has been embroiled
in battles ever since. Kultur, for Herder, is the life-blood of a people,
the flow of moral energy that holds society intact. Zivilisation, by
contrast, is the veneer of manners, law and technical know-how. Nations may
share a civilization; but they will always be distinct in the culture, since
culture defines what they are.” – Roger Scruton
“It is not so hard to be original, what is hard,
is to be original with continuity.” – Andres Segovia
“You see things; and you say, “Why?” But I dream
things that never were; and say “Why not?” – George Bernard Shaw
“…creativity seems to be something which links things
together…withing a new whole, which didn’t exist before.” – Rupert Sheldrake
“These days, all it takes for your dreams
to come true is money and power.” – President Shinra (Final Fantasy VII)
“The way it ends so totally, with nothing to put on the
wall or in the bookcase. Just a lot of yesterdays, and then you have to start
out all over again.” – Maggie Smith (on acting)
“Yesterday an idea is mine, today it is yours, and tomorrow
it belongs to the whole world.” – Konstantin Stanislavsky
“…I don’t work. I just dream. My best office is my bed.”
- Philippe Starck
“The life of the creative man is led, directed, and controlled
by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also
one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and
on a higer level. So we are on a kind of spiral. The higher you go, the narrower
the circle. As you go ahead, the field of choice becomes more meager.”
- Saul Steinberg
“New discoveries in science and mathematics often consist
of a synthesis between theories or concepts which have hitherto been regarded
as unconnected.” – Anthony Storr
“Pick up a bee from kindness, and learn the limitations
of kindness.” – Sufi proverb
“One albino doesn’t a summer make.” – Surrealist proverb
“When reason is away, smiles will play!” – Surrealist
proverb
“Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit,
because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.” – Tacticus
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty
only because there is ulginess.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.
- Tao poem (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 2)
“England, that was called Britannia.
Then the Jewish tribes came in and they were Yiddish and they used a lot of
‘ish’ so they called them British.” – from Taxi Driver Wisdom
“Art… the one achievement of man which has made
the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.” – James Thurber
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin
with a single step.” – Lao Tsu
“Always do right. This will gratify some
people and astonish the rest.” – Mark Twain
“Humor is like a frog; if you dissect it, it dies.”
- Mark Twain
“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before thier
union were not perceived to have any relation.” – Mark Twain
“All life begins with Nu and ends with
Nu… This is the truth! This is my belief. At least for now…” -The Mystery
of Life Vol 841, Chapter 26
“We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!”
- Dr. Peter Venkman
“Beware of artists – they mix with all classes of soceity
and are therefore most dangerous.” – Victoria, Queen of England
“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my
enemies.” – Voltaire
-W-
“I met God. He’s a little guy that makes everything green.” – Andrew
Watson
“You hear people all the time saying rediculous things
like, ‘I could write a book’, or ‘I could compose a piece of music’. Well, of
course they couldn’t. They might have an idea in their head, but it’s realizing
that idea that counts.” – Wivienne Westwood
“Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness
when they are first produced.” – Alfred N. Whitehead
“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys
banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works
of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”
- Robert Wilensky
“Reality is what you can get away with.”
- Robert Anton Wilson
“Why the toil, yearning, honesty, aesthetics, exaltation,
love, hate, deceit, brilliance, hubris, humility, shame, and stupidity that
collectively define our species?” – Edward O. Wilson
“A serious work in philosophy could be written entirely
of jokes.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Consider the doorway as a metaphor for information, humor
a passageway to understanding.” – Rich Saul Wurman
“There’s an enormous difference between beating a notion
to death and beating an idea into shape.” – Rich Saul Wurman
-Z-“She’s pretty good lookin…for a woman.” -
Anthony Zangara
“Develop an infallible technique and then place yourself
at the mercy of inspiration.” – Zen Buddhist Maxim
“Civilization is only chaos taking
a rest.”
“Culture is something you grow tomatoes or
viruses in.”
“Doppler Effect: the tendency of
stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.”
“It’s a sad commentary when
Americans come to assume that the use of FREE indicates no monetary cost instead
of a reference to liberty.”
“It is better to have loved
and lost than to have hated and won.”
“Good luck is often with
the man who doesn’t include it in his plans.”
“The fact that I’d be a
member of Procrastinators ‘R’ Us if I ever manage to remember to fill out the
membership card and send it back has *nothing* to do with this!”
“In this world, there are
two kinds of people — those who Get It and those who Don’t. If the meaning
of this is not immediately obvious to you, count yourself as one of the latter.”
“In today’s racially tense
American society, I find it ironic that according to Webster’s Thesaurus, a
synonym of discrimination is intelligence.”
“Reality is stranger than
fiction, and so we write stranger things to compensate…A vicious cycle.”
“When life gives you lemons,
throw them at people”
“Adde parvum parvo magnus
acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile]“
“Brilliant ideas, like truffles, are rare
and only possible given special conditions.”
“Dragon, schmagon. I’ve
got a plan!”
“Even the reverse side has
its reverse side.” – Japanese proverb
“Good health is merely the
slowest possible rate at which one can die.”
“If history is to change,
let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die,
I must simply laugh.”
“Man invented things by imposing a shape on
nature. Man discovered things by revealing the pattern of nature.”
“The only reason God created
demons was for virtuous heroes to run around defeating them!”
“You think a minor thing
like the end of the world was going to do me in?”