Quotes to inspire and reflect

And make each prisoner pent

To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,

[ Yum-Yum :] Everything is a source of fun.

Three little maids who, all unwary,

Behold the Lord High Executioner!

And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist—

My family pride is something inconceivable. I can’t help it. I was born sneering.

When the enterprising burglar isn’t burgling, When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime.

When a felon’s not engaged in his employment

Our feelings we with difficulty smother

I’m very well acquainted too with matters mathematical,

When the foeman bares his steel Tarantara! tarantara!

I am the very model of a modern Major-General,

You shall quickly be parsonified,

Here’s a first-rate opportunity

Poor wandering one!

He is an Englishman!

Things are seldom what they seem,

When I was a lad I served a term

Bad language or abuse,

To return the compliment.

And I think it only right

Then give three cheers, and one cheer more,

[ Captain :] I do my best to satisfy you all—

[ Captain :] I am the Captain of the Pinafore ;

[ Captain :] And I’m never, never sick at sea!

[ In response to being asked who was the greatest nineteenth-century poet :] Hugo,—hélas!

Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent .

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

Everything has been said before; but since nobody listens, we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

If you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.

[ Remark to reporters after his grandson had been kidnapped and a ransom payment was demanded, Guildford, England, 26 July 1973 :] I have 14 other grandchildren and if I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 other kidnapped grandchildren.

I know you lawyers can, with ease,

Life is a jest; and all things show it.

A miss for pleasure, and a wife for breed.

Toute passe.—L’art robuste

640K ought to be enough for anyone.

I confess indeed that the Fermat theorem as an isolated proposition has little interest for me, since a multitude of such propositions, which one can neither prove nor refute, can be easily promulgated.

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on the earth.

[ Upon being asked what he thought of Western civilization :] It would be a good idea.

“Hate the sin and not the sinner” is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.

Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. But in the past, noncooperation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evildoer. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent noncooperation only multiplies evil and that evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence.

I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.