It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.
ROS: Why don’t you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! – is that all you have to offer?
GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear.
We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good’s a brick to a drowning man?
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Death is the ultimate negative.
It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Well, we’ll know better next time.
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
I’ve lost all capacity for disbelief. I’m not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.
Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!
When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he’s standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can’t deny that they’re there, he can’t for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.
There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we’ll know better next time.
Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.