More Favourite Quotes
If...I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my
life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
Samuel Johnson.
There's a fine line between a groove and a rut
Christine Lavin
My great-great-grandparents living here, going about their daily
affairs, producing their children, bringing them up as best they could
- are responsible for me and the fact that we happen to be sat here
this morning. In turn, my behaviour ... the pattern of behaviour that
I try to pass on to my children, I hope will gradually be transmitted
through their children into the future. In other words, one begins to
realise oneself, not as an isolated speck in eternity, but as part of a
continuing process which we call history, but which is people.
Wilfred Micah Spencer, historian, genealogist, and my father, in an
interview with BBC Radio Blackburn in the early 1970s.
I wanted to come here again with someone I loved and
say, "Look."
Paul Theroux, visiting the Cuillin mountains on the Isle of Skye,
Scotland. From A Kingdom
by the Sea
The Mind of God:
An inordinate fondness for beetles
J.B.S. Haldane, on being asked (so the story goes) what
he had learned about the Creator from his studies of nature.
Who Is This God Person Anyway?
God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become
something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of
explaining.
Douglas Adams in an interview with American Atheists, from the book The
Salmon
of Doubt.
Words of caution:
Don't believe everything you think.
T-shirt, Science Artworks, Boulder, Colorado.
I beseech you, by the bowels of Christ, think it possible
that you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are
dreamt
of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Give yourself a break:
This day I completed my thirty-first year. I reflected that
I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further
the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information
of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many
hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want
of that information which those hours would have given me had
they been judiciously expended.
Meriwether Lewis, August 1805, six days after becoming the first
American
to cross the Continental Divide.
More explorers:
...you look out the window and you're looking back at the most
beautiful star in the heavens- the most beautiful because it's the
one we understand, and we know- it's our home, it's humanity,
it's people, family, love, life- and besides that it is
beautiful-
you can see from pole to pole and across oceans, and you can
watch it turn, and there's no strings holding it up, and it's
moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.
...and not being a machine, but being a human being, you have
to stop and say, "do you know where you are, and what you're
looking at?", and try to take in in those few moments of privacy that
you have, everything that there is to take in at that moment, and all
of a sudden you've got to get
back to work.
One of the things different about a lunar trip is that you
don't pass any place on the way...
Apollo astronauts, quoted in the film For All Mankind
Great God! This is an awful place
Robert Falcon Scott, at the South Pole (or perhaps in Phoenix)
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is
constantly
making exciting discoveries
A. A. Milne
Being English:
I felt jolly near blubbing and could not speak for several minutes
Frank Wild, 2nd in command on the Shackleton Antarctic expedition,
October 1915, on seeing that Ernest Shackleton had returned to Elephant
Island to rescue his marooned crew. Shackleton had left five months
earlier to get help, on an 800-mile voyage
across the Antarctic Ocean to South Georgia by open boat.
English Channel Blocked by Fog: Europe Isolated
Alleged British newspaper headline, many years ago.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable
George Bernard Shaw
See also my Favourite Poetry page.
Return to John Spencer home page