• James Leigh Hunt

    Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard

    We, the Fairies, blithe and antic,
    Of dimensions not gigantic,
    Though the moonshine mostly keep us,
    Oft in orchards frisk and peep us.

    Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
    Stolen kisses much completer,
    Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
    Stolen, stolen, be your apples.

    When to bed the world are bobbing,
    Then’s the time for orchard-robbing;
    Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
    Were it not for stealing, stealing.

  • Friedrich Nietzsche

    ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’ – says my pride, and remains adamant. At last memory yields.

  • Samuel Butler

    The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

  • Carol Ann Duffy

    Mrs Darwin

    7 April 1852.
    Went to the Zoo.
    I said to Him –
    Something about that Chimpanzee over there
    reminds me of you.

  • G K Chesterton

    Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes – our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

  • Jorge Luis Borges

    History of the Night

    Throughout the course of the generations
    men constructed the night.
    At first she was blindness;
    thorns raking bare feet,
    fear of wolves.
    We shall never know who forged the word
    for the interval of shadow
    dividing the two twilights;
    we shall never know in what age it came to mean
    the starry hours.
    Others created the myth.
    They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
    that spin our destiny,
    thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
    who crows his own death.
    The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
    to Zeno, infinite words.
    She took shape from Latin hexameters
    and the terror of Pascal.
    Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
    of his stricken soul.
    Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
    like an ancient wine
    and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
    and time has charged her with eternity.

    And to think that she wouldn’t exist
    except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

  • James Graham

    He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all.

  • Shel Silverstein

    Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich

    A hippo sandwich is easy to make.
    All you do is simply take
    One slice of bread,
    One slice of cake,
    Some mayonnaise
    One onion ring,
    One hippopotamus
    One piece of string,
    A dash of pepper —
    That ought to do it.
    And now comes the problem…
    Biting into it!

  • Mary Cornish

    Numbers

    I like the generosity of numbers.
    The way, for example,
    they are willing to count
    anything or anyone:
    two pickles, one door to the room,
    eight dancers dressed as swans.

    I like the domesticity of addition–
    add two cups of milk and stir–
    the sense of plenty: six plums
    on the ground, three more
    falling from the tree.

    And multiplication’s school
    of fish times fish,
    whose silver bodies breed
    beneath the shadow
    of a boat.

    Even subtraction is never loss,
    just addition somewhere else:
    five sparrows take away two,
    the two in someone else’s
    garden now.

    There’s an amplitude to long division,
    as it opens Chinese take-out
    box by paper box,
    inside every folded cookie
    a new fortune.

    And I never fail to be surprised
    by the gift of an odd remainder,
    footloose at the end:
    forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
    with three remaining.

    Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,
    two Italians off to the sea,
    one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

  • Dixon Lanier Merritt

    A wonderful bird is the pelican,
    His mouth can hold more than his belly can,
    He can hold in his beak,
    Enough food for a week!
    I’m damned if I know how the hell he can!

  • John Maynard Keynes

    When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?

    (on being accused of expressing views that were inconsistent with views he had previously held)

  • Emily Dickinson

    I stepped from plank to plank
    So slow and cautiously;
    The stars about my head I felt,
    About my feet the sea.

    I knew not but the next
    Would be my final inch, —
    This gave me that precarious gait
    Some call experience.

  • A A Milne

    Happiness

    John had
    Great Big
    Waterproof
    Boots on;
    John had a
    Great Big
    Waterproof
    Hat;
    John had a
    Great Big
    Waterproof
    Mackintosh —
    And that
    (Said John)
    Is
    That.

  • G K Chesterton

    Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast iron code of morals.

  • Sir William Temple

    Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.

  • Leopold Staff

    Foundations

    I built on the sand
    And it tumbled down,
    I built on a rock
    And it tumbled down.
    Now when I build, I shall begin
    With the smoke from the chimney.

  • John Stuart Mill

    The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.