“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” — G.K. Chesterton
Quotations
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“To himself every one is an immortal: he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” — Samuel Butler
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“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.” — Virginia Woolf (diary, Aug. 13, 1921)
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“The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.” — W.H. Auden
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“When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.” — George Bernard Shaw
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“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” — Robert Oppenheimer
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“Outside of the proven impossible, there probably can be found no better example of the speculative tendency carrying man to the verge of the chimerical than in his attempts to imitate the birds, or no field where so much inventive seed has been sown with so little return as in the attempts of man to fly successfully through the air. … It may be truly said that, so far as the hope of a commercial solution of the problem is concerned, man is to-day no nearer fulfillment than he was ages ago when he first dreamed of flying.” — Rear Admiral George W. Melville, engineer-in-chief, U.S. Navy, 1901
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“Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.” — Francis Bacon
Misc
- Holmes and Watson never address one another by their first names.
- Until 1990, the banknote factory at Debden, England, was heated by burning old banknotes.
- The vowels AEIOUY can be arranged to spell the synonyms AYE and OUI.
- 741602 + 437762 = 7416043776
- “In all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.” — Mark Twain
Two trick questions:
Who played the title role in Bride of Frankenstein? Valerie Hobson — not Elsa Lanchester.
Did Adlai Stevenson ever win national office? Yes — Adlai Stevenson I served as vice president under Grover Cleveland in 1893.
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“Great good nature, without prudence, is a great misfortune.” — Benjamin Franklin