"I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information."

Quentin Crisp Literature See all quotes by Quentin Crisp →

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“I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.”

“To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.”

“I never saw Portsmouth by day.”

“Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots and, greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope. The fathers superior of the order do not try to influence their children in Satan; they merely shake their heads in sorrow. They know that the apostate must work out his own damnation.”

“If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.”

“I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Information retrieval is the name for the process or method whereby a prospective user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in stora…"

— Calvin Mooers

Mathematics1919–1994

#knowledge

"There are hells into which we can fall, as well as heavens to which we can climb, when we take with absolute seriousness the invitations and avowals which are wafted to us across the paraconscious. An…"

— R. W. K. Paterson

Philosophy1933

#music

"What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face ev…"

— Sadegh Hedayat

Literature1902–1951

#health

"The Congress, befitting its name of Indian National Congress, had declared itself a representative body of all groups, religious or otherwise, in the country. It was, therefore, its pre-eminent duty t…"

— H.V. Sheshadri

#wisdom