OTHER PEOPLE’S WIT AND WISDOM
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
- Ogden Nash
In Germany after World War II, the authors of what was called Trümmerliteratur, rubble literature, felt the need to rebuild their language, poisoned by Nazism, as well as their country, which lay in ruins. They understood that reality, truth, needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, with new language, just as the bombed cities needed to be rebuilt…And it is for us…to undertake the task of rebuilding…faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.
Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth
I love to laugh
Loud and long and clear
I love to laugh
It's getting worse ev'ry yearMary Poppins
You and I are birds that don't fly together.
- A J, Cronin
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
Lord Acton
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it.
Bob Hope
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way...
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Tell me where all past years are...
John Donne, 'Go Catch a Falling Start'