“We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.” — Nietzsche
“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” — Shakespeare
“Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.” — Defoe
Quotations
Unquote
“History may be read as the story of the magnificent action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.” — Robert Lynd
“Perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age.” — Albert Einstein
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” — H.G. Wells
Unquote
“The mind is at its best when at play.” — J.L. Synge
In this spirit, Synge invented Vish (for “vicious circle”), a game designed to illustrate the hopeless circularity of dictionary definitions.
Each player is given a copy of the same dictionary. When the referee announces a word, each player writes it down and looks up its meaning. Then she chooses one word from the definition, writes that down and looks up its meaning. A player wins when the same word appears twice on her list.
The point is that any such list must eventually yield circularity — if it’s continued long enough, the number of words in the list will eventually exceed the total number of words in the dictionary, and a repetition must occur.
“Vish is no game for children,” Synge writes. “It destroys that basic confidence in the reasonableness of everything which gives to society whatever stability it possesses. To anyone who has played Vish, the dictionary is never the same again.”
Unquote
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” — Samuel Johnson
“If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.” — Thomas Fuller
“Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.” — Baltasar Gracián
Unquote
“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” — Daniel Dennett
Anthropology
“Man is a biped without feathers.” — Plato
“Only man has ears that do not move.” — Pliny the Elder
“Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.” — Pierre Beaumarchais
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.” — Samuel Butler
“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” — William Hazlitt
“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.” — Joyce Carol Oates
“The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.” — Lewis Carroll
Unquote
“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
Unquote
“Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.” — Flaubert
Misc
- Christopher Lee is Ian Fleming’s cousin.
- £12.12s.8d = 12128 farthings
- ii is real.
- Shouldn’t Juliet have asked, “Wherefore art thou Montague?”
- “Of soup and love, the first is the best.” — Thomas Fuller
Unquote
“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” — Lewis Carroll