I collect things that people say. This includes things that I overhear, or am told, as well as more famous lines that particularly resonate with me. Here is a small selection of my favourites:
Overheard:
Tim: I’ll close my eyes and look around...
Tim: "Wow! I feel like I’m going faster than I am!"
Marie: "You are!"
Tim: "Look at the moon! Why is it so small?"
Marie: "Because it’s so far away?"
Digby: Y’see, I had one, right, and then I had another one - funny how they come in ones...
Nathan: Anyone who can play chess right, they can!
Tim: [concerning Star Wars films] They always think they do, so, they don’t…
Tim: It’s Quieter than it sounds.
Donovan: Oh, it may look attractive…
Donovan: There’s no such thing as nothing.
Bill Murray [Groundhog day]: Oh Yeah? Well what if there IS no tomorrow?! There wasn’t one today!
Tom: What use is a bloody real number?
Tim: "But some people aren't overweight!"
T. Mayers: "Yes they are!"
Mr. Orr: There will be a time when things appear to go backwards in a funny kind of way.
Tim: No, he didn’t say he didn’t say he did, he just said he said he did.
Tom: Maybe it’s an anagram of itself!
Digby: Did you know, it’s lucky to die on your birthday?
Koestler: In a word, astrological determinism to a scientific mind like Kepler’s was the forerunner of biological and psychological determinism.
Tim: You’ve got to identify the things that will never happen, and avoid them.
Marie: It’s funny, this year our things are a bit like all of the other ones.
Mr. Orr: If it says do something then you must do that, unless it says otherwise.
Jason: When you’re with a schizophrenic, you’re never alone.
Tim: "Yes, but looking both ways before you cross the road
is like checking a map before running across a minefield."
Ross: "Ah, but the mines might all be duds."
Tim: "Yes, you never know when safety is lurking around the corner..."
Neil: "If you could live forever - the first thing you’d want
to do would be to die."
Mike: "I’d have a meal first."
Nick: Oops – I’ve killed us both! ... except me.
James: What do you call it when things happen?
Mandy: Just because it’s a fish, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Alfred Whitehead: No-one goes out to buy zero fish.
?: The first to discover water was unlikely to have been a fish.
Nick: Is it one of those things that you can only see if you look at it?
Ross: It looks like there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Ross: I wouldn’t trust it with a barge pole.
Ross: Ah, you’ve got the short end of the stick there...
Chris Isham [paraphrased]: Something that is right may or may not be useful - this does not bother mathematicians. Something that is useful may or may not be right - this does not bother physicists.
Quotes of the famous:
Richard Feynman: Damn it, don’t listen to what I say, listen to what I mean.
?: There are two kinds of people who never amount to very much. Those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.
Friedrich Nietzsche: God is a comedian performing before an audience that is afraid to laugh.
Pablo Picasso: Good taste is the enemy of creativity.
Bloke on Radio: I heard a woman say a good man is hard to find, so I hid.
H. L. Mencken: Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
Ancient British saying (apparently): You never see a dead donkey.
Old English verse: Whoever be born on Friday or its night, he shall be accursed of men, silly and crafty and loathsome to all men, and shall ever be thinking evil in his heart, and shall be a thief and a great coward, and shall not live longer than to middle age.
Phillip Pullman, in ‘The Tin Princess’: Jim Taylor: "You’re
an optimistic so-and-so, aren’t you?"
Dan Goldberg: "Realistic, dear boy. It’s being right all the time that keeps
me cheerful."
Arthur C Clarke: When a scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Dunninger: For those that believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, none will suffice.
Arthur Schopenhauer: Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Don Marquis: The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
Me: Originality is undeteced plagiarism.