"There is no arguing with Johnson: for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it."

Oliver Goldsmith Literature See all quotes by Oliver Goldsmith →

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“These little things are great to little man.”

“As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent.”

“And learn the luxury of doing good.”

“The best-humour'd man, with the worst-humour'd Muse.”

“I...chose a wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.”

“But winter lingering chills the lap of May.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The prosecutors say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn "forced" the complainant to have oral and other sex with him. How? Did he have a gun? Did he have a knife? He's a short fat old man."

— Ben Stein

Politics1944

#humor

"For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened—an utter emptiness. There was neithe…"

— Clifford D. Simak

Literature1904–1988

#time

"There was power in the work of Jack Kirby that changed the way I looked at things. There was no one else like him and there never will be."

— Jack Kirby

Art1917–1994

#change

"Formal proofs, where there is deliberately no meaning, can convince only formalists, and of the results they themselves seem to deny any meaning. Is that to be the mathematics we are to use to underst…"

— Richard Hamming

Mathematics1915–1998

#knowledge