“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” — George Orwell

“Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” — Winston Churchill

“Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.” — Aaron Copland

“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

“Who would write, who had any thing better to do?” — Lord Byron

On seeing Niagara Falls, Gustav Mahler exclaimed: “Fortissimo at last!”

Irish sayings:

• “You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.”
• “It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.”
• “A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures.”
• “You’ll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.”
• “Both your friend and your enemy think you will never die.”
• “Don’t give cherries to pigs or advice to fools.”
• “Anything will fit a naked man.”
• “The only cure for love is marriage.”

And “He who gets a name for early rising can stay in bed until midday.”

“Humankind cannot stand very much reality.” — T.S. Eliot

The couch used by Sigmund Freud during psychoanalytic sessions. “I have found little that is good about human beings,” he wrote. “In my experience most of them are trash.”