“‘Shucks,’ he [Thomas Edison] told a discouraged co-worker during one trying series of experiments, ‘we haven’t failed. We now know a thousand things that won’t work, so we’re that much closer to finding what will.’”

Edison’s son Charles, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [BTW a friend once emailed me this version: “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” They attributed it to Benjamin Franklin which appears to be spurious, but it is also widely available on line as being from Edison and I suspect it is an erroneous version of the above.]

“fairy land arouses [in the child] a longing for he knows not what.”

C.S. Lewis quoted by David W. Fagerberg in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #1 (9-10/13)

“The were-Scot appears to be a normal human being, but under the influence of a full wallet sprouts red hair, a kilt and a thick brogue and roams the land in quest of haggis.”

I hope it's funny because it's one of mine, from July 14, 2002.

“If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”

La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Globe & Mail October 18, 1999

“People tell me they get depressed reading about the Middle East. Well, I get depressed writing about it. There’s supposed to be progress in human history, but the Middle East is moving backward.”

Leonard Stern in Ottawa Citizen January 17, 2009

“Of other Nobel Prize winners who make many grandiloquent statements on things they know nothing about, Stigler said that they ‘issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.’”

Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?

“[T]he absorption of the man and the exclusion of other matters show not how dull the subject is, but how fascinating it is. Because a man refuses to come out of Eden, they assume that he is being detained in gaol.”

G.K. Chesterton on absorption in apparently trivial hobbies, in “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

Confucius, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go