Pensées of Mauritian aphorist Malcolm de Chazal:

• Birdsong is always in pitch. Birds sound wrong only when frightened.
• The underbrush makes the light chubby.
• A trotting dog: his hind legs knit and his forelegs crochet.
• Night softens the mind’s irritations and inflames the body’s.
• The mouth and eyes are each anagrams of the other.
• An animal’s feet are as intelligent as a man’s hands.
• Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
• A cat purrs himself to sleep, being the only creature who sings his own lullaby.
• Shadows round everything out. The lacework of light is based on a circular pattern.
• Good taste has no fixed rules, though fashion has. Taste amounts to being fashionable with a sense of style.
• The eyes of the overly fearful stammer.
• Servants eventually come to resemble their masters. “Professional” churchgoers end up looking like priests.
• Suffering doesn’t ennoble unless there is greatness to begin with.

And “Number is the alphabet of form, which is why children always want to touch whatever they count.”

“We discover in ourselves what others hide from us, and we recognize in others what we hide from ourselves.” — Vauvenargues

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980

“A footnote is like running downstairs to answer the doorbell during the first night of marriage.” — John Barrymore

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.” — Aldous Huxley