The Chester Beatty Library - Information on the collections, publications, exhibitions and some good links.
Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on
tormenting the generations to come.
-- Montesquieu I hate it in friends when they come too late to help.
-- Euripides Always talk to your wife while you're making love... if there's a phone handy. Fine art and pizza delivery: what we do falls neatly in between.
-- David Letterman He who kisses the joy is it flies lives in eternity's sunrise
-- William Blake Libraries "In married life three is company and two is none." (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest) I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
-- Nancy Mitford Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way
around the laws.
- Plato Libraries
"Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected..." (Chuck Jones) "The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties." (Oscar Wilde) Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
-- Samuel Johnson "Where there's a marriage without love there will be love without marriage." (Benjamin Franklin) "I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs
long enough."
-- Arizona senatorial candidate Claire Sargent, on women candidates Libraries I do not see the EEC as a great love affair. It is more like nine desperate middle-ages couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope. -- Tynan Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does
come, we no longer exist.
-- Epicurus There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and
discipline.
-- Michel de Montaigne Libraries
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." (Edger Allen Poe) "If I work toward an end, meantime I am confined to a process. The rainbow is more beautiful than the pot at the end of it, because the rainbow is now. And the pot never turns out to be quite what I e Silence is argument carried out by other means.
- ErnestoCheGuevara Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you
have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
-- Aldous Huxley If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, 'cause there's a million ways
to be, you know that there are...
-- Cat Stevens, from a song lyric Libraries "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach) "In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself." (John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley) Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and
cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
-- Tom Robbins Libraries
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.
-- Richard Bach He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.
-- Richard Darman, director of OMB, explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his
campaign pledge that there would be "To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one
thing.
-- Abraham Lincoln "No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." (Calvin Coolidge) Libraries The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may
well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same
time, and still retain the ability to function.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald "Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." (William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II:5) Libraries
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the
next meal would come from.
-- Peter F. Drucker Marriage isn't a word... it's a sentence.
-- King Vidor, in the 1928 film, The Crawl Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
-- Typewriting exercise A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.
-- Elsa Schiapirelli It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
-- Henry James Libraries I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.
-- Wayne Gretzky It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
-- St. Francis of Assisi "How is it that we never have time to do a job right, but we always have time to do it over?" (Anonymous) Libraries
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
-- Thornton Wilder Bachelor: the only man who has never told his wife a lie. There is no future in any job. The future lies in the man who holds the job.
-- George Crane He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own.
-- Aesop The days just before marriage are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book. Libraries Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.
-- Groucho Marx "As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it." (Dick Cavett) Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
-- James Baldwin Libraries
Love is blind -- marriage is the eye-opener.
-- Pauline Thomason Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition.
-- Walter Prager May you grow so rich your widow's second husband never has to worry about a living, God forbid. Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of
poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
-- John Cage Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-- George Saunders - last words Libraries "Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences." (Isadora Duncan) Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as
saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.
-- Deborah Tan The English country gentleman galloping after a fox--the unspeakable in full pursuit of the
uneatable.
-- Oscar Wilde Libraries
"It ends not with a bang, but a whimper." (Thomas Stearns Eliot, aka T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Man) It is a product of Einstein's genius -- taking a commonplace observation, combining it with some
simple imaginary experiments, and arriving at a revolutionary conclusion.
-- Clifford M. Wills, 1986 If your professor wrote it, it's as near to the truth as you ever need to get.
-- John Watson, University of Canterbury We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind
her stands his wife.
-- Groucho Marx Love matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn
themselves to a life of vinegar.
-- Countess of Blessington Libraries I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it.
- Steven Wright We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.
-- Joan Borysenko Libraries
A husband is a guy who tells you when you've got on too much lipstick and helps you with your
girdle when your hips stick.
-- Ogden Nash When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole nearby.
-- Nigerian Proverb Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on
a date.
-- Caroline Rhea I am in total control, but don't tell my wife. We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.
-- Anatole France Libraries Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
-- Semisonic, Closing Time Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-
proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe
is "A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." (James Joyce) Libraries
"I should reproach him for not giving us enough evidence." (Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 1872-1970, what he would say to God if they 'met') "Dreams are the touchstones of our personality." (Henry David Thoreau) Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
-- Groucho Marx Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
-- Tom Robbins Marriage is an institution in which a man loses his Bachelor's Degree and the woman gets her Masters. Libraries "Vegiburgers are wrong." (Mike Kaup) You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little
plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now.
-- Ha The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or
theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
-- George Santayana Libraries
"Plato was a bore." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) Despite the high cost of living it remains a popular item.
-- Anonymous "Use what talents you possess; The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best." (William Blake) I take my wife everywhere I go. She always finds her way back.
-- Henny Youngman Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.
-- General Douglas MacArthur Libraries A man should be taller, older, heavier, uglier, and hoarser than his wife.
-- Edgar Watson Howe The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
-- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer It's true that I did get the girl, but then my grandfather always said, "Even a blind chicken finds a
few grains of corn now and then."
-- Lyle Lovett, musician, upon marying actress Julia Roberts, Libraries
