The Galaxy of Quotes

The maxim of the British people is 'Business as usual'

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Order is Heaven's first law; and this confessed, some are, and must be, greater than the rest, more rich, more wise; but who infers from hence that such are happier, shocks all common sense. Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; bliss is the same in subject or in king.

A man should never be ashamed to own that he is wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

To err is human, to forgive is divine.

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

The present is the only reality and the only certainty.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.

The final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Whoever is happy will make others happy too.

Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.

At my age I do what Mark Twain did. I get my daily paper, look at the obituaries page and if I'm not there I carry on as usual.

I'm only a four-dimensional creature. Haven't got a clue how to visualise infinity. Even Einstein hadn't. I know because I asked him.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.