Of the future only one thing is certain.>  There will be comedy.

Carlton, De Rerum Comoedia [Eric Idle, The Road to Mars]

The time to be happy is now.  The place to be happy is here.  The way to be happy is to make others so.

robert green ingersoll

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.

Fran Lebowitz

e=mc²

Big Al the Noodle

Végre nem butulok tovább. (Finally I am becoming stupider no more.)

the epitaph Paul Erdös wrote for himself

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

Justice Robert H. Jackson

Dying is easy.  Comedy is difficult.

Edmund Kean

What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Richard Feynman

Generally speaking, it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight.

Fran Lebowitz

When you make a mistake, throw your hands in the air and say “How fascinating!”

benjamin zander

There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.

father of benjamin zander

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?

Ronald Reagan

There is nothing which can better deserve out patronage than the promotion of science and literature.  Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

George Washington

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Ernest Hemingway

I stopped believing in God when I found they’d lied to me about the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny.

Lewis Ashby [Eric Idle, The Road to Mars]

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman

The savage prays to a stone that he calls a god, while the Christian prays to a god that he calls a spirit, and the prayers of both are equally useful.

robert green ingersoll

Spilling your guts is exactly as charming as it sounds.

Fran Lebowitz

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way.  Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

G. H. Hardy

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

Edward de Bono

Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

Last words of Oscar Wilde

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom.  There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom.  But reading is still the path.

Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Karl Marx

Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.l">

Dorothy Parker

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

Horace Walpole

It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.

Kin Hubbard

Candied violets are the Necco Wafers of the overbred.

Fran Lebowitz

Tragically, I was an only twin.

Peter Cook

Life is tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Charlie Chaplin

You don’t age while you’re playing music.

Pete Kennedy

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

Albert Einstein

The SF [Supreme Fascist, i.e. God] created us to enjoy our suffering.  The sooner we die, the sooner we defy His plans.

Paul Erdös

Candy is dandy But liquor is quicker.

Dorothy Parker

It is, in fact, safe to assume that, more often than not, life imitates craft, for who among us can say that our experience does not more closely resemble a macramé plant holder than it does a painting by Seurat.  When it comes to art, life is the biggest copycat in the matter of the frame.

Fran Lebowitz

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

e^ip+1=0

Leonard Euler

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World

Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.

Fran Lebowitz

A graduate student at Trinity
Computed the square of infinity But it gave him the fidgits
To put down the digits,
So he dropped math and took up divinity.

Anonymous

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
Might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

I was standing there, hoping for the best, when my meditations were broken in upon by an odd gargling sort of noise, something like static and something like distant thunder, and to cut a long story short this proved to proceed from the larynx of the dog Bartholomew.

He was standing on the bed, stropping his front paws on the coverlet, and so easy was it to read the message in his eyes that we acted like two minds with but a single thought.  At the exact moment when I soared like an eagle on to the chest of drawers, Jeeves was skimming like a swallow on to the top of the cupboard.  The animal hopped from the bed and, advancing into the middle of the room, took a seat, breathing through the nose with a curious, whistling sound, and looking at us from under his eyebrows like a Scottish elder rebuking sin from the pulpit.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

I can well imagine that a casual observer, if I had confided to him my qualms at the idea of being married to this girl, would have raised his eyebrows and been at a loss to understand.  "Bertie," he would probably have said, "you don't know what's good for you," adding, possibly, that he wished he had half my complaint.  For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

But where the casual observer would have been making his bloomer was in overlooking that squashy soupiness of hers, that subtle air she had of being on the point of talking babytalk.  It was that that froze the blood.  She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband's eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: "Guess who!"

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

He looked like a bishop who had just discovered Schism and Doubt among the minor clergy.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the hotel at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

It looked something like a pen-wiper and something like a piece of hearth-rug.  A second and keener inspection revealed it as a Pekinese puppy.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

Something of the gallant fire which was animating him seemed to pass out of Sir Aylmer Bostock.  He blinked like some knight of King Arthur's court, who, galloping to perform a deed of derring-do, has had the misfortune to collide with a tree.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

A gaping chasm opened in the hillside.  The air became full of a sort of macédoine of grass, dirt, flowers, and beetles.  And dimly in the centre of this moving hash, one perceived the ball traveling well.  Accompanied by about a pound of mixed solids, it cleared the brow and vanished from our sight.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

"Man and boy, Jeeves, I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster."

"Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir."

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

"They say fish are good for the brain.  Have a go at the sardines and come back and report."

P. G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

... in the field of jazz ... the players frequently perform on-the-spot dialogue not very different from our daily conversations.

The classical player, ... more like an actor giving voice to lines already prepared, ... must voice this "dialogue" as though spontaneously cast, lest they lose their audience ...

victor margolis, the plate spinner

... in a relatively short time you will be playing the music that you love, and shaping this music in a way that becomes you.  You will be part of a great collaborative process with partners of unimpeachable credentials, great masters who must trust you with the reins.

victor margolis, the plate spinner

As long as we begin the process of becoming whoever or whatever we want to be, it doesn't matter if we are early, average, or late.  Each of us will bloom in our own way, in our own time.

carol colman, late bloomers: how to achieve

 your potential at any age

[The problem of the adult beginner] lies not, as he supposes, in relative speed of advancement -- for he usually learns at least as rapidly as the child – but in his attitude toward his progress.  Too often he is impatient because his more mature tastes and interests remain far ahead of his abilities.

william s. newman, the pianist's problems: a modern approach to

 efficient practice and musicianly performance

narratorThis is the story of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor--more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than 53 More Things To Do In Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is This God Person Anyway?

Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

    ford   Drink up, the world's about to end.

arthur   This must be Thursday.  I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

marvin   Life!  Don't talk to me about life.

Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

narrator In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.  Many races believe that it was created by some sort of God, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle Six firmly believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.  The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they called The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

For the civilized man there are none of those swift transitions of joy and pain which possess the savage; words form slowly like pus about his hurts; there are no clean wounds for him; first a numbness, then a long festering, then a scar ever ready to reopen.  Not until they have assumed the livery of the defence can his emotions pass through the lines; sometimes they come massed in a wooden horse, sometimes as single spies, but there is always a Fifth Column among the garrison ready to receive them.  Sabotage behind the lines, a blind raised and lowered at a lighted window, a wire cut, a bolt loosened, a file disordered—that is how the civilized man is undone.

Evelyn Waugh, ‘Work Suspended’ (The Complete Short Stories)

… Then one morning, when I made my now habitual call at Victoria Square, Lucy, not yet up but lying in bed in a chaos of newspapers, letters and manicure tools, greeted me by saying, "Roger's writing."

Couched as she was, amid quilted bed-jacket and tumbled sheets—one arm bare to the elbow where the wide sleeve fell back and showed the tender places of wrist and forearm, the other lost in the warm depths of the bed, with her pale skin taking colour against the dead white linen, and her smile of confident, morning welcome; as I had greeted her countless times and always with a keener joy, until that morning I seemed to have come to the end of an investigation and hold as a certainty what before I had roughly surmised -- her beauty rang through the room like a peal of bells; thus I have stood, stunned in a Somerset garden, with the close turf wet and glittering underfoot in the dew, when, from beyond the walls of box, the grey church tower has suddenly scattered the heavens in tumult.

“Poor fellow,” I said.  "What about?"

Evelyn Waugh, "Work Suspended" (The Complete Short Stories)

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.  Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the world's full octave.  Love as agape, Eros and philos; love as romance, friendship and adoration; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

All the rest of it, parking your dick up an arse, slurping at a helmet, whipping, frotting, peeing, pooing, squatting like a dog, dressing up in plastic and leather -- all these go on in the world of boy and girl too: and let's be clear about this, they go on more -- the numbers make it so.  Go into a sex shop, skim through some pornography, browse the internet for a time, talk to someone in the sex industry.  You think homosexuality is disgusting?  Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.

Stephen Fry, Moab is My Washpot