It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.
HOWARD RUFF Larger-than-life Mormon who advised his readers that the US was heading for a hyper-inflationary depression in the early 80s, and that they should store a year’s worth of food just in case. A decade earlier he practically invented the modern survivalist movement with his 1974 book Famine and Survival in America.
A wet man does not fear rain
RUSSIAN PROVERB
The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is, ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, ‘Probably because of something you did.’
JACK HANDEY
Oregonians don’t tan, they rust.
OREGON SAYING
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH American bookman, scholar and aphorist who settled in England (Cyril Connolly was his secretary). Best remembered for a sequence called Trivia he began in 1902: short, polished essays, vignettes and musings. They have a great deal more charm and intelligence than most modern ‘trivia’ books, but are definitely for dipping into.
If you believe everything you read, better not read.
JAPANESE PROVERB
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O’ROURKE
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, not any pleasure so lasting.
LADY MARY MONTAGU WORTLEY
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
WALLACE STEVENS
I would not exchange my early and invincible love of reading for all the treasures in India.
EDWARD GIBBON
Some people read because they are too lazy to think.
G. C. LICHTENBERG
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
CHARLES LAMB
He [Hobbes] had read much, but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.
JOHN AUBREY
Of this there is no academic proof in the world; For it is hidden, and hidden, and hidden
RUMI
We are all captives of the picture in our head – our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Nothing exists but thoughts! The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!
SIR HUMPHREY DAVY On surfacing from a nitrous oxide trip in 1799.
It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much, much better.
GIUSEPPE VERDI
They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI
The nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts that we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible and unlikely they seem.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
There is no such thing as reality. There is only perception.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
LILY TOMLIN
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
PHILIP K. DICK
‘Reality’ is some kind of ontological silly-putty.
ROBERT ANTON WILSON One of the big figures of the 1970s American underground, futurologist and friend of Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller, whose interests ranged from the occult to quantum physics and from Sufism to neuro-linguistic programming. He died in 2007, his last blog urging friends to ‘keep the lasagna flying’.
One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.
SALVADOR DALÍ
The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Nihil est sine ratione. Nothing is without reason. There is a reason for everything. Nothing happens without a reason.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
LORD BYRON
Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life’s vast flock of wild irrationalities.
PAUL ELDRIDGE
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
SAMUEL BUTLER
The last function of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which surpass it.
BLAISE PASCAL
Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss-up.
C. S. PEIRCE His work was neglected in his lifetime (most of it has still not been published). A friend of William James and thought by Bertrand Russell to be ‘the greatest American thinker ever’, his decision to live with a woman before they married destroyed his academic career and condemned him to a life of dire poverty.
Imagine yourself alone in the midst of nothingness, and then try to tell me how large you are.
SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position through out the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.
GIORDANO BRUNO The first to propose that the universe was infinite, all made from the same elements and that matter was composed of intelligent atoms. He was burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1600. The Church admitted its error 400 years later and expressed ‘profound sorrow’ at his death.
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
I don’t understand my husband’s theory of relativity, but I know my husband, and I know he can be trusted.
ELSA EINSTEIN
Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.
WILLA CATHER
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
There are many religions, but there is only one morality.
JOHN RUSKIN
I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The only good thing to come out of religion was the music.
GEORGE CARLIN
I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation’s attention from the rest of the service.
ANDREW CARNEGIE
I have never read any theologian who claims God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.
ANNIE DILLARD
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all – that has been my religion.
JOHN BURROUGHS With Thoreau, the inventor of the American nature essay and one of the most popular writers of any kind active in the late nineteenth century. All the great men of the day – Teddy Roosevelt, Edison, Ford – visited his cabin in the Catskills. Burroughs was also responsible for securing the literary reputation of his great friend and mentor, Walt Whitman.
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H. L. MENCKEN
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
LIONEL TRILLING
An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.
AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI
The theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other people with respect finds no support in the Gospels.
ARNOLD LUNN Originally found fame as a mountaineer and skier, inventing the slalom race in 1922. His father Henry was a Methodist minister and founder of the Lunn Poly travel company. Arnold rejected religion until 1933, when a debate with Ronald Knox transformed him into one of modern Catholicism’s most tough-minded and persuasive zealots.
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
BILL GATES
Like a bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.
THE SRIMAD BHAGAVATAN Also known as the Bhagavata Purana, its 18,000 verses describe the life and incarnations of Krishna. Often referred to as the ‘Hindu Bible’, it may date from as early as 3,000 bc. According to Hindu commentators, it is to the Bhagavad Gita what the New Testament is to the Sermon on the Mount.
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK
We must be on our guard against giving interpretations that are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.
FRED HOYLE
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
LOUIS NIZER
Science tells us how the heavens go. Religion tells us how to go to heaven.
GALILEO GALILEI
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
STENDHAL
One is all for religion until one visits a really religious country. Then, one is all for drains, machinery and a minimum wage.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The clergy of England have no more influence over the people at large than the cheesemongers of England.
SYDNEY SMITH
As for the British churchman, he goes to church as he goes to the bathroom, with the minimum of fuss and with no explanation if he can help it.
RONALD BLYTHE
Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.
LENNY BRUCE
Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire.
MILAN KUNDERA
The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.
ALAN WATTS
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
THOMAS PAINE
As to the squabbles of the Jews and the Christians, I can only say that these sects remind me of a cluster of bats or ants escaping a nest, a bunch of frogs holding council in a swamp, or a clutch of worms assembling in the muck: all of them disagreeing over who is the worst sinner.
CELSUS From The True Word, an anti-Christian polemic probably written in Alexandria in the second century ad.
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity, which religion is powerless to bestow.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
… and with the bowels of the last priest let us strangle the last king.
DENIS DIDEROT
Research! Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
BENJAMIN JOWETT
Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.
WERNER VON BRAUN
The trouble with research is it tells you what people are thinking about yesterday. It’s like driving a car using a rear-view mirror.
BERNARD LOOMIS One of the great toy visionaries, developer of Barbie and Hot Wheels, the man who made film merchandising into a huge industry, even coining a word – ‘toyetic’ – to describe properties ripe for exploitation. Famously he told Spielberg that Close Encounters wasn’t one of these, so Spielberg put him on to his friend George Lucas, then struggling to make an apparently unpromising sci-fi film called Star Wars. You know the rest.
To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.
JOSEF STALIN To Lev Kamenev while they were exiled in Siberia in 1915. Kamenev was Trotstky’s brother-in-law and a member of the first Politburo in 1917. He and most of his family perished in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.
Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
CHARLOTTE BRON TË
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
FRANCIS BACON
When you go out to seek revenge, dig two graves.
CHINESE PROVERB
To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.
MARCUS AURELIUS
There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.
JOSH BILLINGS
There is the risk you cannot afford to take; there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.
PETER DRUCKER
What you risk reveals what you value.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
He that leaves nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.
GEORGE SAVILE, 1ST MARQUESS OF HALIFAX
Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.
WILL ROGERS
Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.
DON MIGUEL RUIZ
Four Rules For Life. Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don’t be attached to the results.
ANGELES ARRIEN
There are two rules for success: 1) Never tell everything you know.
ROGER H. LINCOLN
If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something.
THOMAS ALVA EDISON
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
White’s Rule: The magnitude of any non-trivial task can only be known after the information has ceased to be of any practical value.
BRENT WHITE Another mystery. Obviously not the Nashville singer or the editor of the Apatow brothers’ comedies. One other attribution suggests a computer programmer at work in the mid-1980s but there are no obvious candidates. Otherwise, Mr White might be a New York corporate lawyer, a Chicago market research exec, a professor of psychology in Kentucky or an evangelical blogger.
There are those whose sole claim to profundity is the discovery of exceptions to the rules.
PAUL ELDRIDGE