OTHER PEOPLE’S WIT AND WISDOM
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, Song: Go and catch a falling star
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
- James Baldwin
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move…
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses
Napoleon went forth to seek Virtue, but since she was not to be found, he got power.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.
- P. G. Wodehouse, Eggs, Beans and Crumpets
Nothing is wrong with our stars. It is just that some men misread the skies.
- Dalai Lama
And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant conditions
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
"Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!"
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone