You can observe a lot by watching.
Yogi Berra
I have no enthusiasm whatever about dying. I think it’s a terrible waste of time, and I don’t want to participate in it.
Edward Albee
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein
It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Barbara Kingsolver (novelist)
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. White
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Hilaire Belloc
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford
Photography [is] a discret form of imperialism.
Bob Shacochis, Swimming in the Volcano (1993)
Tension gets in the way of mastery.
Paul Katz, while teaching a cello master class
The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure.
The Duke of Edinburgh, to the Dean of Windsor, re length of sermons
You should always trust a man just as far as you must.
Colonel Sept, in The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1894)
It is the mark of an educated man, and a tribute to his culture, that he look for precision in a thing only as its nature allows.
Aristotle
Historical research as to begin somewhere; if nothing can be trusted, nothing can be known.
James Romm, Ghost on the Throne (on the sources for the conflict among the successors to Alexander)
If a man wants to quarel with all his friends, and to double the hatred of all his enemies, he had better become Prime Minister.
Glencora, Duchess of Omnium and wife of the Prime Minister, in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876).
My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always good ideas.
H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (1911)
A reliable rule of literary reputations is that whatever your own time jeers at is the one thing that will prove most lasting in your work.
Adam Gopnik, in “As Big as the Ritz,” an essay about Scott Fitzgerald in The New Yorker, September 22, 2014
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
A. J. Liebling
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Pablo Picasso
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
The Old Testament God repeatedly says he wants praise, and I translate that to mean that the world wants describing.
John Updike
Heraldry is a manifestation of cultural rather than legal history. [Das Wappenwesen is eine Erscheinung der Kultur-, nichts aber der Rechtsgeschichte.]
Freidrich Philippi (1853–1930)
He knew when to lift his hand from the picture.
Pliny the Elder (of Appelles the sculptor, 4C BC)
Commonplace Book 6
You can observe a lot by watching.
Yogi Berra
I have no enthusiasm whatever about dying. I think it’s a terrible waste of time, and I don’t want to participate in it.
Edward Albee
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein
It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Barbara Kingsolver (novelist)
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. White
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Hilaire Belloc
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford
Photography [is] a discret form of imperialism.
Bob Shacochis, Swimming in the Volcano (1993)
Tension gets in the way of mastery.
Paul Katz, while teaching a cello master class
The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure.
The Duke of Edinburgh, to the Dean of Windsor, re length of sermons
You should always trust a man just as far as you must.
Colonel Sept, in The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1894)
It is the mark of an educated man, and a tribute to his culture, that he look for precision in a thing only as its nature allows.
Aristotle
Historical research as to begin somewhere; if nothing can be trusted, nothing can be known.
James Romm, Ghost on the Throne (on the sources for the conflict among the successors to Alexander)
If a man wants to quarel with all his friends, and to double the hatred of all his enemies, he had better become Prime Minister.
Glencora, Duchess of Omnium and wife of the Prime Minister, in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876).
My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always good ideas.
H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (1911)
A reliable rule of literary reputations is that whatever your own time jeers at is the one thing that will prove most lasting in your work.
Adam Gopnik, in “As Big as the Ritz,” an essay about Scott Fitzgerald in The New Yorker, September 22, 2014
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
A. J. Liebling
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Pablo Picasso
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
The Old Testament God repeatedly says he wants praise, and I translate that to mean that the world wants describing.
John Updike
Heraldry is a manifestation of cultural rather than legal history. [Das Wappenwesen is eine Erscheinung der Kultur-, nichts aber der Rechtsgeschichte.]
Freidrich Philippi (1853–1930)
He knew when to lift his hand from the picture.
Pliny the Elder (of Appelles the sculptor, 4C BC)