The Quotes Thread

[snilloc]

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."



- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

[workerbee]

"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe . . . but not for us."

-- Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

[iv0live]

“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.” - Osho

[GodPirate]

'If this is your 1st night here, then you have to fight.' -Tyler Durden(Brad Pitt) in Fight Club (1999)

“I only sound intelligent when there's a good script writer around.” -Christian Bale

[Arzoo]

Typical hilarious Flaubert stuff :

"I have a specific purpose in my mind with Bouvard et Pecuchet. It is to exhale my resentment, vomit my hatred, expectorate my gall, ejaculate my anger, purge my indignation.” (1872)

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up." (1846)

[workerbee]

Typical hilarious Flaubert stuff

You can't get much better than Flaubert.

[contrail]

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." -Albert Einstein

This one is for joew771 & LZA.

[Arzoo]

"There is a custom in Ireland called “taking the last look.” When you find yourself bedridden, with death approaching, you rouse yourself with effort and, for the last time, make the rounds of your territory, North, East, South, West, as you contemplate the places and things that have constituted your life. After this last task, you can return to your bed and die. W. B. Yeats recalls in letters how his friend Lady Gregory, dying of breast cancer, performed her version of the last look. Although for months she had remained upstairs in her bedroom, three days before she died she arose from her chair—she had refused to take to her bed—and painfully descended the stairs, making a final circuit of the downstairs rooms before returning upstairs and finally allowing herself to lie down. And Yeats himself, a few years later, took his last look in a sonnet called “Meru,” which cast a final glance over all his cultural territory: “Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!”

- Helen Vendler; Last Looks, Last Books

[Arzoo]

"Armstrong is a curious figure in the history of Shakespeare criticism. It rather looks as if he set out to write what would have been a very boring book on '‘birds in Shakespeare”  (he was an ornithologist) but then noticed something; if Shakespeare mentioned kites within a few lines, for no evident reason, he would mention sheets and death. Armstrong had happened upon one of the "image clusters" that were to become famous. Others soon appeared. Shakespeare, it seems, could not think of dogs without thinking, within a few lines, of sweetmeats. These loose clusters and skeins, the Lucretian linked atoms of his poetry are oddly persistent.  Caliban's 'cluster', 'berries', 'cave', 'pinch', 'feeding' strong in Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, can be glimpsed in the early Titus Androticus, where it is attached to Aaron the Moor."

- A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker

[Arzoo]

Some talk off the cuff or (off-the-Nabocuff) :

"Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth. It does not uplift the spiritual organ of man, nor does it show humanity the right exit. It contains far fewer “ideas” than do those rich vulgar novels that are acclaimed so hysterically in the short echo-walk between the ballyhoo and the hoot."

- Nabokov, Foreword