One day Diogenes was washing lentils to cook himself a stew. Aristipus, a student of Socrates, the king’s favorite, remarked with a grin: “If you had learned to flatter the king, you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.”
“And if you learned to eat lentils, you wouldn’t have to flatter the king,” answered Diogenes.
Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our affections; and even then they don’t go very far. And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I’ve already said, we aren’t a sympathetic race.
– Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow (1921)
“Danger lies not in the power given to the Lower Orders, who are
daily becoming more well-informed and more intelligent, and who will deservedly
work themselves up to the top by their own merits, labour, and good conduct,
but in the conduct of the Higher Classes and of the Aristocracy.”
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of him as somewhat of a recluse.
“No” is the wildest word we consign to Language.
– Emily Dickinson
Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.
Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance into the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other God than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.
Yoke, n. […] one of the most illuminating words in our language – a word that defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy.
Youth, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
Yesterday, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.
Yankee, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See Damyank.)
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
X in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language. X is the sacred symbol of ten dollars, and in such words as Xmas, Xn, etc. stands for Christ, not, as is popularly supposed, because it represents a cross, but because the corresponding letter in the Greek alphabet is the initial of His name.
hamiltonbeck 