A new book called They Never Said That debunks some famous phrases that were never actually said by those that supposedly coined them. "Hundreds of pithy remarks from 'Let them eat cake' to 'Elementary, my dear Watson', turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring -- or which were never said by those thought to have coined them."
List of great insults. It may be apocryphal, but I've always loved the exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill: "Lady Astor: 'Sir, if you were my husband, I would poison your drink.' Churchill: 'Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.'" (via dooce)
Brian Beatty: "Nobody important is keeping score, so do what you think is interesting."
Five quotes
A quick meme I found on Rivers are Damp:
Go here and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.
Here are my five:
- Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields. (Peter Borden)
- The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind. (May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, 1965)
- Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. (Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden)
- It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. (W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915)
- Your best shot at happiness, self-worth and personal satisfaction - the things that constitute real success - is not in earning as much as you can but in performing as well as you can something that you consider worthwhile. (William Raspberry)
The world's best short inspirational quotes including "no great thing is created suddenly" and "well done is better than well said".
QuotationsBook offers its quotations and search results via RSS. If someone were to write a plug-in for Movable Type for this, you could display related quotations alongside blog posts using tags (e.g. tag an entry with "friends" and you get a quotation about friends). Cool.
