• G K Chesterton

    Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

  • Rory Motion

    Carnival

    Ladbroke Grove is funkier than York
    In York you see policemen walking
    On the beat
    But in Ladborke Grove
    You see them walking
    On the off-beat

  • William Butler Yeats

    On Being Asked for a War Poem

    I think it better that in times like these
    A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
    We have no gift to set a statesman right;
    He has had enough of meddling who can please
    A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
    Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

  • Lewis Carroll

    “Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
    “Would you tell me, please,” said Alice “what that means?”
    “Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
    “That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
    “When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

  • Mark Twain

    Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

  • Dr D D Perrin

    A mosquito was heard to complain

    A mosquito was heard to complain
    That a chemist had poisoned his brain
    The cause of his sorrow
    Was paradichloro
    Diphenyltrichloroethane.

  • W S Anglin

    Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

  • F E Smith

    Judge: Are you trying to show contempt for this court, Mr Smith?
    Smith: No, My Lord. I am attempting to conceal it.

  • W H Auden

    Every autobiography is concered with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

  • George Mackay Brown

    Language unstable as sand, but poets
    Strike on hard rock, carving
    Rune and hieroglyph , to celebrate
    Breath’s sweet brevity.

  • A E Housman

    Here Dead We Lie

    Here dead we lie
    Because we did not choose
    To live and shame the land
    From which we sprung.

    Life, to be sure,
    Is nothing much to lose,
    But young men think it is,
    And we were young.

  • Tom Stoppard

    Words … are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, defining that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos… They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.