Books

Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
- Ezra Loomis Pound, 1885 - 1972

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
- Gilbert Highet, 1906 - 1978

[A] book ... unlike a television program, moving picture or any other "modern means of communication" ... can wait for years, yet be available at any moment when it happens to be needed.
- Joseph Wood Krutch, 1893 - 1970

It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4 BC - AD 65

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
- Desiderius Erasmus

Books are the ever-burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.
- George William Curtis

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
- Abraham Lincoln

Everyone who know how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, multiple the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.
- Aldous Huxley

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
- Northrup Frye

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
- Sir Francis Bacon

Angels

To love for the sake of being loved is human, But to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
- Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine, 1790 - 1869

It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior that he became the tool of evil.
- Dag Hammarskjöld, 1905 - 1961

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 1819 - 1880

Make yourself familiar with the angels, and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.
- Francis de Sales, 1567 - 1622

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.
- George MacDonald, 1824 - 1905

Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.
- Alan Valentine

Computers

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
- Edsger Dijkstra

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
- Joseph Campbell

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
- Mitch Ratliffe

On the negative side, I've been getting charged for a ton of stuff I didn't order lately. On the positive side, I did win that 'Who's Got the Best Password' contest on AOL last week.
- Spike Donner

I can only imagine the deprivation and loneliness you will feel from a lack of human companionship when your 1000 free AOL hours run out.
- Nate B.

Morons. These people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless. They must think they're super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network. Unfortunately, the connection works both ways. Long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer.
- Mootar from bash.org

I went to a gentleman's cybercafe — and they offered me a 'laptop dance'.
- Anonymous

Crap... Someone knocked over my recycle bin... There's icons all over my desktop...
- billiam

You know you're a geek when... You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.
- Juuso Heimonen

We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0.
- Andy Pierson.

What does the Start button do — isn't the computer already running ?
- A Win95 user

'Intel Inside': The world's most widely used warning label.
- Jim Hopper

Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly... Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, 'user-friendly' on the cover.
- Bill Gates

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, president/founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year.
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

The Internet is the end of civilizations, cultures, interests and ethics.
- Official Iraqi government statement.

Some things Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there's Google.
- Anonymous

Storm

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
- Abraham Lincoln, 1809 - 1865

Courage is not the towering oak
That sees storms come and go;
It is the fragile blossom
That opens in the snow.
- Alice Mackenzie Swaim

Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace, and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storm.
- Charles Caleb Colton, 1780 - 1832

The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
- Epictetus

The only safe ship in a storm is leadership.
- Faye Wattleton

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
- Willa Silbert Cather, 1873 - 1947

T. S. Eliot

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

Radio is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
- All from T. S. Eliot, 1888 - 1965

About:
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born at St. Louis, Missouri on 26 Sep in 1888. After attending Smith Academy at Saint Louis he went on to Harvard, graduated, earned his Master's, and prepared for a PhD but failed to defend his thesis. He was continuing his education in Europe when WW I broke out. At that point it all gets rather over my head. He became one of the most important poets of the last century as well as one of the most important literary critics. It is from his criticism and personal correspondence that today's quotes are drawn.

Spelling

It's a damned poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
- Andrew Jackson, 1767 - 1845

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
- Burtram Mark Bacharach, 1898 - 1983

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
- Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867 - 1959

We need programs that will teach athletes how to spell “jump shot” rather than how to shoot it.
- Larry Hawkins

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.
- Mistinguett, 1875 - 1956

Nothing you can't spell will ever work.
- Will Rogers, 1879 - 1935

Reading

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
- Charles Scribner, Jr.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
- Elizabeth Hardwick

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
- George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Reading is a luxury in the same way that eating and breathing are.
- G. Armour Van Horn