You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named ‘Bush’, ‘Dick’, and ‘Colon’. Need I say more?
CHRIS ROCK
The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.
GEORGE ORWELL
England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses; Italy a paradise for horses, hell for women, as the diverb goes.
ROBERT BURTON From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). A ‘diverb’ is an antithetical proverb. Burton’s gloomy masterpiece is full of them.
My one claim to originality amongst Irishmen is that I have never made a speech.
GEORGE MOORE
We do not regard Englishmen as foreigners. We look on them only as rather mad Norwegians.
HALVARD LANGE Norwegian Foreign Minister from 1946 to 1965, a member of the Nobel Committee, and strong advocate of NATO.
The Cuban movement is not a communist movement. Its members are Roman Catholics, mostly.
FIDEL CASTRO In April 1959, during his unsuccessful trip to the Unites States to woo President Eisenhower.
When you sing in Danish, it sounds like you have throat disease.
MORTEN CARLSSON Former head of Danish Eurovision song contest delegation and now executive producer of the Eurovision live broadcast.
The Swazis despise sheep.
EDWARD FOX Not the plummy-voiced actor but the American writer, now based in London. Just one of many excellent one-liners from his diverting travel book Obscure Kingdoms: Journeys to Distant Royal Courts (1993).
Neither good winds nor good marriages come from Spain.
PORTUGUESE PROVERB
France is a country where the money falls apart in your hand and you can’t tear the toilet paper.
BILLY WILDER
The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people’s feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language.
P J. O’ROURKE
To all the world’s nations let it be known that the Poles are not geese, but have a tongue of their own.
MIKOLAJ REY
Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one.
POPE JOHN XXIII
It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless.
BENITO MUSSOLINI
The Welsh are the Italians in the rain.
RENÉ CUTFORTH
There are still parts of Wales where the only concession to gaiety is a striped shroud.
GWYN THOMAS
Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing ‘Embraceable You’ in spats.
WOODY ALLEN
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
JOHN BURROUGHS
Nature, my dear Sir, is only a hypothesis.
RAOUL DUFY
Laws of Nature are human inventions, like ghosts.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
T. H. HUXLEY
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself – my disgust at her barbarity – clumsiness – darkness – bitter mockery of herself – is the most desolating.
JOHN RUSKIN
Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh.
MARTIN BORMANN
I do not believe Nature has a heart; and I suspect that, like manyanother beauty, she has been credited with a heart because of her face.
FRANCIS THOMPSON
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
JOHANNES KEPLER
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
MARCEL PROUST
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
WILLIAM STYRON From his interview with the Paris Review in 1958. He knew what he was talking about: a severe bout of depression in 1985 produced his short masterpiece Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1989). Styron described his experience as ‘despair beyond despair’.
Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.
MARLON BRANDO
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.
MIGNON McLAUGHLIN
Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
RITA RUDNER
News travels faster than the mail.
CONFUCIUS
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
JERRY SEINFELD
I always turn to the sports page first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.
EARL WARREN
I am unable to understand how a man of honour could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction
ANEURIN BEVAN
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
CHARLES LAMB
A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.
RICH SAUL WURMAN
A man is a small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.
LORD DUNSANY
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
HENRY BESTON
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The mind excels in its effortless ability to treat the world as if nothing it contains is entirely strange.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
ALBERT CAMUS
The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.
JOE ANCIS
Society highly values its normal men. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
R. D. LAING
Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.
ELBERT HUBBARD Leader of the American Arts and Craft movement, his short essay A Message to Garcia became one of the world’s best-selling books, as its tale of a soldier who ‘gets the job done’ commended it to American employers as an inspirational text for staff. Written in an hour ‘after supper’ in 1899 it sold over forty million copies. Hubbard and his wife died on the Lusitania in 1915.
A hole is nothing at all, but you can break your neck in it.
AUSTIN O’MALLEY
There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle – to do nothing at all.
SYDNEY SMITH
The best screen actor is one who can do nothing supremely well.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving evidence of the fact.
GEORGE ELIOT
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
WILL DURANT
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
HENRY FORD
There is no such thing as nothing.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Nothing is more real than nothing.
SAMUEL BECKETT
We turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
LAOZI (LAO-TZU)
Uh-oh, I’ve lost a button-hole.
STEVEN WRIGHT
Doughnut holes are made of the same thing as the hole in your toilet seat, but nobody ever publicizes that.
MEGAN COUGHLIN
God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
PAUL VALÉRY Many consider La Jeune Parque (1917) to be the greatest French poem of the twentieth century. It came nineteen years after the death of his mentor, Stéphane Mallarmé, during which time he didn’t publish a single word. Luckily, he did continue to fill his notebooks with quotable aphorisms.
Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.
VICTOR HUGO
Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.
IAN FLEMING
The Pythagoreans say the world, and all that is in it, is determined by the number three.
ARISTOTLE
All is numbers.
PYTHAGORAS The first man to call himself a philosopher (i.e. ‘lover of wisdom’), he is now more famous for his theorem about triangles than for his philosophy, which is, as this quote shows, based on mathematical ratios expressing the ultimate reality. Some have pointed out that his teachings show remarkable similarities to Buddha’s, who was his close contemporary.
If an angel were to tell us something of his philosophy, I do believe that some of his propositions would sound like 2 + 2 = 13.
G. C. LICHTENBERG
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
JAMES THURBER
Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.
RONALD L. GRAHAM
I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,964,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons.
SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON – the number is more conveniently written as 2256 X 136.
I’ve dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won’t think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he’s told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.
PAUL AUSTER