Quotes

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Her secret? It is every artist’s secret . . . passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate!

[Marriage] is the tomb of love.

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

Life, what is it but a dream?

I am fond of children (except boys).

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream.

“O oysters,” said the Carpenter.

But four young oysters hurried up,

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!” “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

The sun was shining on the sea,

You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

Who can tell whether the parallelogram, which in our ignorance we have defined and drawn, and the whole of whose properties we profess to know, may not be all the while panting for exterior angles, sympathetic with the interior, or sullenly repining at the fact that it cannot be inscribed in a circle?

I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning . . . but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.

“Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

“I only took the regular course.” “What was that?” inquired Alice. “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

[ The Queen of Hearts speaking :] Off with her head!

Why is a raven like a writing-desk?

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. “I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.” “You mean you can’t take less ,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

[ Of the Cheshire Cat :] “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

Speak roughly to your little boy,

Oh my fur and whiskers!

One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.

You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

Down the Rabbit-Hole.

[ The White Rabbit speaking :] Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!

[Economics is] not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one: what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science .

[ Commenting on Margaret Fuller’s remark, “I accept the universe,” ca. 1843 :] Gad! she’d better.

All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate , more important far than they all.

It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that constitutes the happiness or misery of him. Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

[ Comment in television discussion about writers of the “Beat Generation” :] That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.

I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

Rossum’s Universal Robots.

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

N’attendez pas le jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours .

Can one be a saint without God? That’s the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.

Je vais vous dire un grand secret, mon cher .

I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux .