Epigraphs, aphorisms and quotes with teeth

 Ask yourself, where would you go to find bits like this to kick off an essay, a talk, a chapter or a book?

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
— Richard W. Hamming, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, 2nd edition, 1973.

We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist.
— William Whewell, (1794-1866), writing in 1840.

Descended from the apes? My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.
— Alleged to have been said by the wife of a canon of Worcester Cathedral.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910). Following the Equator.

My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can’t sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat…
— Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr Seuss, 19045 - 1991), The Lorax.

Take your chance on ozone. There isn’t any such thing anyway. Or, if there is, you can buy a Thermos bottle full for five cents, and put it in your cupboard.
— Stephen Leacock ‘How to live to be 200’ in Literary Lapses, 1910.

The poor world is almost six thousand years old …
— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95

Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
— II Chronicles 4:2.

In the data set 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, the mode is 1, the median is 2, and the mean is 3, so what is the average?
— Duncan Bain, ‘Being Mean’, Fruitgrowers’ Gazette, 1 April 1998, 1729.

This is certain, I never knew a man’s eye plucked out of his head, but he fell to vomiting upon it, and the stomach cast up all within it.
— Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79) The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland, 132.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot (1801 – 1859), Physics and Politics.

Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?
— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat.

Chemistry without catalysis, would be a sword without a handle, a light without brilliance, a bell without sound.
— Alwyn Mittasch (1869 – 1953), Journal of Chemical Education, 1948, 531-2.

… Lord Rayleigh claims that beginners in research also should be “graduates in the school of string and sealing wax”.
— Nature 154, 392–393 (1944)

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774), The Deserted Village.

1764: it was stated that a patient in Padua had been cured of rabies by drinking three pints of vinegar.
— Cases and Cures of the Hydrophobia, selected from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1807, 48.

And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow soold,
That hath been twies hoot and twies coold.
— Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345 – 1400), Canterbury Tales, ‘The Cook’s Prologue and Tale’.

I find not any science that doth fitly or properly pertain to the imagination.
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Of the Advancement of Learning, second book, XI, 3, 1605.

The answer is simple: you get into my private collection  of pithy comments, my commonplace file, which has been running for more than fifty years. The catch: it's private, but as I approach Advanced Middle Age (quite unwillingly). I am sharing some tools of trade, and so the file is now out as an ebook, Sign on the Dotted Lion, and when I get back from my travels, there will be a dead-tree version as well.

Where do you get it? If you are Australian, Amazon, of course, but for USians, try this link. I did it this way because mainstream publishers are leery of octogenarian authors. As we Ancients know, publishing is no longer a profession for gentlemen. Or ladies, and my concern is merely to reach a small bunch of like-minded folk, to load up some writerly types.

Here, you will learn what we knew about the atomic bomb in 1913 (yes, 1913), when H. G. Wells imagined it being dropped on Berlin in the 1950s. There are about 2000 gems here, so have a look at the free sample.