People who never stop talking think their companions very dull.

While tasting the world's diversity on short wave I came across an English church service in the midst of the Dutch comedians and the French North African commentators. So beautiful, until the priest began to speak.

The British do not write aphorisms, only jokes. Since Oscar Wilde they have believed that wit is both cruel and funny, while the profound is dull, and the dull profound. We have come very far since the seventeenth century.

Physical grace is essential for a good after dinner speaker. He must be able to rise to to his feet and sit again in one flowing movement of twenty minutes.

Mixed company is preferable, of course. – One knows what people are up to.

He says he's a bad cook, which isn't true, but he says it so vehemently that in the end you have to say he's a good cook, which isn't true either.

Are authors good critics? It would be a poor watchmaker who couldn't tell the time, or a blind one.

The Acliotic people could not be brought to understand law, and a great many other things, because their language did not have a tense in which they could refer to the past, and while it was, of course, possible to do things, it was impossible to say that they had been done.

The mediocrity cultivates himself for himself, since no one else is interested, and why should they be? It is the most private life imaginable.

It is a common belief that nature provides a remedy close to a source of poison, as dock by nettles. – So, the early stages of technology make alcohol as well as anxiety and exhaustion. The wonder of it!

Criticism is never a precise instrument: – In order to hit anything at all you must choose very big targets.

In Aristotle to Zoos (1985, p. 199) the Medawars report J. B. S. Haldane's remark that a chemical compound with the properties of DNA was "inconceivable". Perhaps there is a tinge of a sneer, a little delight in the great man's embarrassment. But perhaps he was right enough, at the time. There almost certainly is a limit to what may be conceived by an age, a period. Rationalists should be more tolerant of empiricists, for it is evidence which the material out of which even Rationalism makes it web. – Nothing comes of nothing. What is rationally inconceivable at one moment may, with the advent of further data, become instantly obvious to all who consider the matter.

One might define vanity and pride as, respectively, abhorrent self-regard preceding action and sometimes leading to achievement; and abhorrent self-regard consequent upon achievement. Thus, vanity and pride are often found together, the former becoming the latter. Nevertheless, in spite of this close relation, there are distinctions. We can say, for example, that vanity is the patron vice of the arts, which live upon promise even in their achievements, and pride that of the sciences, for without delivery they are quite simply nothing.

The indicating finger and the tail of the scorpion are remarkably similar.