A person who lacks the means, within himself, to live a good and happy life will find any period of his existence wearisome.
"On Old Age"
The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.
Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back.
"Problems", in Grooks 1
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought -- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river, you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours, wasted minutes, years of repetition and time that has been killed.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment.
The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive... No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as a superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.
A Coffin for Dimitrios
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.
In David Agnew's The Invasion of Time
Cities do not change over the centuries. They represent the aspirations of particular men and women to lead a common life; as a result their atmosphere, their tone, remain the same. Those people whose relations are founded principally upon commerce and upon the ferocious claims of domestic privacy will construct a city as dark and as ugly as London was. And is. Those people who wish to lead agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful and as elegant as Paris.
Dickens
The words figure and fictitious both derive from the same Latin root fingere. Beware!
The average man who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
A print addict is a man who reads in elevators. People occasionally look at me curiously when they see me standing there, reading a paragraph or two as the elevator goes up. To me, it's curious that there are people who do not read in elevators. What can they be thinking about?
"The Pastimes of a Print Addict"
You know what misery I went through there, listening to lawyers day and night. If you'd had experience of them yourself, as brave as you think you are, you'd have preferred to clean out the Augean stables...
The Apocolocyntosis
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
The work of Leslie is particularly confusing. The mischievous muse of thermodynamics made him inweave his simple statements about heat in a horrid mess of difficult, irrelevant, and unexplained calculations. His and other early theories of heat make much of entities as imperceptible as voids and vortices or, for that matter, angels. They belong not to physics but to what would now be regarded as speculative philosophy.
Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance, / And toss them on the wheels of Chance.
Methusalem might be half an hour in telling what o'clock it was: but as for us postdiluvians, we ought to do everything in haste; and in our speeches, as well as actions, remember that our time is short.
Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
Stockbroker (John Cleese): Well, speaking as member of the Stock Exchange I would suck their brains out with a straw, sell the widows and orphans and go into South American Zinc.
Monty Python: "Sex and Violence"
Tetsuo's kind see only the power of Western scientific reductionism. They wish to combine it with our discipline, our traditional methods of competitive conformity. With this I fundamentally disagree. What the West really has to offer -- the only thing it has to offer, my child -- is honesty. Somehow, in the midst of their horrid history, the best among the gaijin learned a wonderful lesson. They learned to distrust themselves, to doubt even what they were taught to believe or what their egos make them yearn to see. To know that even truth must be scrutinized, it was a great discovery, almost as great as the treasure we of the East have to offer them in return, the gift of harmony.
"Dr. Pak's Preschool"
Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.
"The Secret Life of James Thurber", in The Thurber Carnival
Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.
The Silver Poppy
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir -- especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased -- I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture -- a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.
"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
... many other means there be, that promise the foreknowledge of things to come: besides the raising up and conjuring of ghosts departed, the conference also with familiars and spirits infernal. And all these were found out in our days, to be no better than vanities and false illusions...
The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
I am not an irretrievable skeptic. I am not hopelessly prejudiced. I am perfectly willing to believe, and my mind is wide open; but I have, as yet, to be convinced. I am perfectly willing, but the evidence must be sane and conclusive.
In Houdini on Magic