Eccentric Muse

(Archive)

I’ll store here all the quotations I select and use for the Words of Wisdom (WoW) area of the site. Similar to Dorothy Parker, I can never remember the damn things when I need them! Soon, this will become a handy reference centre –suitable, as my friend Lynne has said, for dinner party research!

07-28-08

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

–Oscar Wilde

07-30-08

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

–H.G. Wells

08-01-08

We see things not as they are, but as we are.

–Anaïs Nin

08-03-08

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

–Mark Twain

08-04-08

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

–Magdalena Abakanowicz

08-06-08

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t squeak.

–Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

08-10-08

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

–Mata Hari

08-13-08

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

–Paul Gaugin

08-15-08

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

–Kenneth Tynan

08-18-08

Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.

–Albert Einstein

08-23-08

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem.

–Bob Dylan

08-28-08

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

–Lao Tzu

08-30-08

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

–George Orwell

10-02-08

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

–George Bernard Shaw

10-18-08

If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.

–Albert Einstein

10-28-08

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”

–Kurt Vonnegut

11-02-08

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

–Thomas Jefferson

11-05-08

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

–Voltaire

11-15-08

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

–Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

12-06-08

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either–but right through every human heart.

–Alexander Solzhenitsyn

12-27-08

Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to conquer the universe.

–Kurt Vonnegut

12-20-09

Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.

–Bob Dylan