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Friday 16 March 2018

A First Basket of Quotations

"It's cute how food labels think there are 
eight servings in a pie!"
I do like a pithy quotations and I collect them from all sorts of sources and store them in a word document which I keep on my desktop. I run a once-a-month charity walking group and send out emails to about 150 people and, on each mailing, I use a different quotation; a few of them are my own (but I usually describe them as 'anonymous' but the ones here not mine - I think....). There many categories of  types - wisdom, humour, thought-provoking etc. Often I relate the quote to something relevant to the particular post or time of the year and so on. Sometimes I add a cartoon but, as drawing them takes so long, I don't do that too much nowadays.
Here is a selection of some that I have used and some that I have waiting in the wings:
"I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed." - William Shakespeare, (As You Like It) (Apparently 'Good Reads' was wrong about this being by Shakespeare!) 
When Winston Churchill was asked to cut Arts funding in favour of the war effort he replied “Then what are we fighting for?”
“Of course I can keep secrets. It’s the people I tell them to that can’t keep them.” - Anthony Haden-Guest
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose - Anonymous
"If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name?" - Billy Connolly
"God endowed a woman with keener judgement than man" - The Talmud
“Always be sincere, even when you don’t mean it.” - Irene Peter
Never laugh at your wife's choices..... you are one of them!
“Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud”-Maya Angelou
“If your brains were made of gunpowder they wouldn’t blow your hat off!” – Anonymous
"My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's eighty-six now and we don't know where the hell she is." Ellen Degeneres
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” – Aesop
“I’ve written a book about DIY First Aid. It’s called ‘Suture Self’ - Anonymous
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” - George Carlin
Last year I joined a group for procrastinators, We haven't met yet...- Anonymous
“If you light a lamp for someone it will also brighten your path.” - Buddhist saying.
“No one has ever become poor by giving.”-Anne Frank


I'm listening to the late JJ Cale 
singing his own song, City Girls
Very laid back and charming, listen here.

14 comments:

Hels said...

Wellllll. I told my husband that he should never laugh at his wife's choices... since he was one of them.

He responded that she was 20 at the time and therefore not responsible in law *sigh*

bazza said...

Hels: Tell Hubby that, today, 18 would be old enough. Good heavens, you ladies will be wanting to vote next!

Parnassus said...

Hello Bazza, I do wonder about that "battle of wits" quote; it does not seem up to Shakespeare's standard. I checked As You Like It, and could not find anything directly comparable, but I did find the following: "who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses and hath sent this natural for our whetstone." And also: "It is meat and drink to me to see a clown: by my troth, we that have good wits have much to answer for." Both of these dance around the "unarmed" idea but not quite exactly.

Still, I can empathize with the above. Your bouquet of quotes is impressive, and my mind goes blank trying to think of a spur of the moment addition to it.
--Jim

bazza said...

Jim: What! You mean I can't trust the Internet? That's totally shocking! I originally got it from the Good Reads site. Never again....

Anonymous said...

George Carlin nailed it about driving.

bazza said...

Andrew: Didn't he just do that!

David said...

Hi bazza,
One of my favourites comes from the French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright Jean Giraudoux and goes as follows: "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." I think the American comic George Burns also used a similar quote. I also quite like one from my very own hairy friend, Gary, who you know from his blog, "Klahanie", which goes thus: "I was going to write a blog about apathy, but then couldn't be bothered."
Best Wishes,
David.

bazza said...

Hi David: I think Giraudoux's quote has been 'borrowed' by many including film mogul Sam Goldwyn. I not sure our mutual friend Gary's quote is entirely his own either! But I like it...

Hilary Melton-Butcher said...

Hi Bazza - those are all great ... however many times one sees these quotes they always resonate. I know it's not a quote per se ... but I've never quite got over Tesco advertising straight croissants! I used their boxes when I moved. David using Gary's quote is fun too - life is life isn't it ... and what were we fighting for: our freedom, culture and traditional life - ours not someone else's. I've always loved the aspect that Maynard Keynes bid for art works in Paris in the middle of WW1 as a part payment for the war debt - it was a BBC Radio 4 article - and I wrote about it. So much is reinvented and re-used ... cheers Hilary

bazza said...

Hilary: Yes, a good quote is forever. I think the Churchill one says so much about the man in a very few words. It's interesting than many good quotes have been assigned to various different people sometimes over a large number of years. They can go on forever.....

Susan Flett Swiderski said...

I've got a notebook filled with quotes that capture my fancy, too. That's probably why I enjoy adding a "thought for the day" and a quotation or two to most of my blog posts. During the years I served as Section Manager for the state of Georgia (an amateur radio-connected position) I, too wrote a monthly newsletter, and I always included one-liner jokes and various quotations after each distinct section of that too-long newsletter. Of alllll the useful information in those monthly "War and Peaces," those one-liners and quotations always got the most feedback. :)

bazza said...

Susan: I really enjoy the quotes you use. As you know, I have 'nabbed' some of them!
I can imagine you being very good at that job. People love good quotations; naturally I am too modest to use my own - you can't very well quote yourself can you?

Sherry Ellis said...

Those are funny! I like the self-help jokes.

bazza said...

Sherry: Me too! But I don't know who said it. Sounds a bit like Woody Allen.