“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it; in other words, we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about it, and for the sheer pleasure of seeing things we could never hope to describe to others.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“one of the wisest lessons you learn after you’ve spent enough time in the present to have a past is that the future never works out the way all the seers and the romantics were so sure it would.”
While I try to provide detailed (and reliable) sources for these quotations, I’m embarrassed to say that my notes for this one just say “National Post March 18, 2000 p. A8” and not the author. If you wrote it, or know who did, please let me know.
“Time is money? Got it ‘A U.S. inventor has created an alarm clock that shreds your money if you fail to get up to turn it off,’ says Orange Co. U.K. ‘Rich Olson combined a Sparkfun Clockit and a USB paper shredder to create the bizarre machine. He programmed the device to tear up a $1 bill if the user doesn’t turn it off within a few seconds.’”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 19, 2013
“For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August…”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“Boys will quarrel, and when they quarrel will sometimes fight. Fighting with fists is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels. What substitute for it is there, or ever was there, amongst any nation under the sun? What would you like to see take its place?”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth…”
John Keats, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism
“A grandfather and grandson who intended to fly to Australia instead found themselves in Nova Scotia... The elder Mr. [Joannes ] Rutten, who speaks German, Dutch and some English, said they didn’t know there was another Sydney.”
National Post August 11, 2009 (OK, it’s not exactly a zinger... until you add “Or such things as maps.”)
“I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.”
William Safire, quoted in Federalist Patriot No. 04-38 22 September 2004 (from Federalist.com)