To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly;
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.

The fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog one good one.

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

“?”

Single letter telegram sent by Wilde from Paris to his publisher in Britain inquiring how his new book was doing.

The publisher cabled an, arguably, marginally briefer reply:

“!”

Clement Freud (grandson of Sigmund) was visiting China as part of a parliamentary delegation with Winston Churchill MP and he asked of the authorities…

“I am in your country with a colleague, than whom I am older, have been in parliament longer, have held higher positions in our respective political parties: we are both staying at the Peking Palace Hotel and his suite is bigger than mine. Why?”

The Minister, very embarrassed, finally said: “It is because Mr Churchill had a famous grandfather.”

Clement reflected that “It is the only time that I have been out-grandfathered.”

Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.

Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

(in slightly different words previously incorrectly attributed to C S Lewis)

You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature…

Travel is highly educational.

I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.

Most political sermons teach the congregation nothing except what newspapers are taken at the Rectory

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.