• Arithmetic

    Four people are in a room and seven people leave it. How many must go in before the room is empty?

  • G K Chesterton

    There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in one who eats grape-nuts on principle.

  • C S Lewis

    Angel’s Song

    I know not, I,
    What the men together say,
    How lovers, lovers die
    And youth passes away.

    Cannot understand
    Love that mortal bears
    To native, native land,
    All lands are theirs;

    What at grave they grieve
    For one voice and face
    And not, and not receive
    Another in its place.

    I above the cone
    Of the circling night
    Flying, never have known
    Less or greater light.

    Sorrow it is they call
    This cup whence my lip
    (Woe’s me!) never in all
    My endless days can sip.

  • Patrick Blackett

    May every young scientist remember… and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.

  • Alfred North Whitehead

    “Necessity is the mother of invention” is a silly proverb. “Necessity is the mother of futile dodges” is much nearer the truth.

  • C S Lewis

    I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.

  • Winston Churchill

    Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

  • Confusion

    A centipede was happy quite,
    Until a frog in fun
    Said, “Pray which leg comes after which?”
    This raised her mind to such a pitch,
    She lay distracted in the ditch,
    Considering how to run.

  • G K Chesterton

    The Donkey

    When forests walked and fishes flew
    And figs grew upon thorn,
    Some moment when the moon was blood,
    Then, surely, I was born.

    With monstrous head and sickening bray
    And ears like errant wings –
    The devil’s walking parody
    Of all four-footed things:

    The battered outlaw of the earth
    Of ancient crooked will;
    Scourge, beat, deride me – I am dumb –
    I keep my secret still.

    Fools! For I also had my hour –
    One far fierce hour and sweet:
    There was a shout around my head
    And palms about my feet.

  • A A Milne

    One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

  • C of E

    The great strength of the Church of England is that it allows its followers to believe almost anything. But of course hardly any of them do

  • Winston Churchill

    (of Clement Atlee)

    A modest little man with a lot to be modest about

    A sheep in sheeps’ clothing.

    (attributed)

    An empty taxi arrived at Downing Street, and when the door opened Attlee got out

  • Malcolm Muggeridge

    Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.

  • Royal Navy Toasts

    Sunday …………… Absent friends.
    Monday ……………Our ships at sea.
    Tuesday …………..Our men.
    Wednesday ………Ourselves (as no one else is likely to concern themselves with our welfare).
    Thursday ………….A bloody war or a sickly season.
    Friday ………………A willing foe and sea-room.
    Saturday …………. Sweethearts and wives (may they never meet).

  • Stevie Smith

    Not Waving but Drowning

    Nobody heard him, the dead man,
    But still he lay moaning:
    I was much further out than you thought
    And not waving but drowning.

    Poor chap, he always loved larking
    And now he’s dead
    It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
    They said.

    Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
    (Still the dead one lay moaning)
    I was much too far out all my life
    And not waving but drowning.

  • John Ruskin

    Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.