People From London

"Biology cannot go far in its subject before being met by mind."

"And the pursuit whose quest is Nature's understanding, has this among its rewards, that as it progresses its truth is testable. Truth is a 'value'. The quest itself is therefore in a measure its own satisfaction. We receive the lesson that our advance to knowledge is of asymptotic type, even as continually approaching so continually without arrival. The satisfaction shall therefore be eternal."

"Natural knowledge has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its 'values', Truth."

"The 'motion' of an energy-system is its 'behaviour'. Various types of organization of system produce on that basis various types of behaviour. A grey rock, said Ruskin, is a good sitter. That is one type of behaviour. A darting dragon-fly is another type of behaviour. We call the one alive, the other not. But both are fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround. To make 'life' a distinction between them is at root to treat them both artificially."

"The gap between 'the State' and 'a machine' is not so wide."

"The scientific journey has no end. It has only halting places—points at which the traveller can look round and survey."

"The influence of mind on the doings of life makes mind an effective contribution to life. We can seize then how mind counts and has counted. That it has been evolved seems to assure us that it has counted. How it has counted would seem to be that the finite mind has influenced its individual's 'doing'. Lloyd Morgan, the biologist, urged that, 'the primary aim, object, and purpose of consciousness is control'. Dame Nature seems to have taken the like view."

"The brain is a mystery—it has been—and still will be. Not that we do not know many facts about it. The facts we know have indeed greatly multiplied in recent years, but they all fail to give us a key to the mystery of how it creates—if it does create—our thoughts and feelings; that is, said more concisely though less concretely, our mind."

"Natural science is a branch of knowledge by general consent not primarily based on the a priori. It […] observes and endeavours by observation to follow and trace the 'how' of what happens in Nature. It proceeds further to generalize about this 'how'. It tries to decipher something of it in the past and to forecast something of it in the future. Above all it expends its utmost pains on attempting to describe the 'how' fully and accurately by first-hand observation at this present."

"Today Nature looms larger than ever and includes more fully than ever ourselves. It is, if you will, a machine, but it is a partly mentalized machine, and in virtue of including ourselves it is a machine with human qualities of mind. It is a running stream of energy—mental and physical—and unlike man-made machines it is actuated by emotions, fears and hopes, dislikes and love. It bids fair to be master of this our planet—'it looks before and after'. To what or to whom does it owe this eminent and seemingly unique status? It answers unhesitatingly that it owes it to itself. But to the semi-divine assembly which looks on, that answer would be impertinent but for its saving ignorance. We may suppose that if they hear it the stars smile. Human thought is left wondering. What is it all for? Man is too small and too perishable to be the object of this whole. A counsel is 'let us endure and be quiet'—a counsel which is the easier to follow because it seems all that there is for us to do, at least at the present moment."

"[M]an's life of all lives is the most completely and fully bound to earth because life's experience, wholly earthly, is in man's case the most complete and full. […] Man is the most, not the least, earthly of all creatures."

"It is difficult to get a hearing from busy men for even a great new truth."

"In the great head-end which has been mostly darkness springs up myriads of twinkling stationary lights and myriads of trains of moving lights of many different directions. It is as though activity from one of those local places which continued restless in the darkened main-mass suddenly spread far and wide and invaded all. The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns. Now as the waking body rouses, subpatterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day."

"In the training and in the exercise of medicine a remoteness abides between the field of neurology and that of mental health, psychiatry. It is sometimes blamed to prejudice on the part of the one side or the other. It is both more grave and less grave than that. It has a reasonable basis. It is rooted in the energy-mind problem. Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help."

"A vast number, perhaps the numerical majority, of animal forms cannot be shown unequivocally to possess mind."

"[A]s followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space."

"It's frightening to think with modern medicine and all the technique available to them they can't really help you. In the old days, you know, you were better off because nowadays, they are all specialists. Everyone's becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone's going to be superb, at nothing."

"Oh – what's the bloody point?"

"All problems have to be solved eventually by ONESELF, and that's where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis, A MAN IS AN ISLAND"

"He was very difficult to work with. When he felt like it, it was just bliss. But he could be hideous."

"Living with someone always means a denial of self in SOME way and I suppose I have always known it was something I couldn't accomplish. So I've always stayed on the sidelines. Getting the pleasure vicariously. It's not wholly satisfactory, but then of course no lives are, and you know what I think about indiscriminate sex and promiscuous trade. I think it's the beginning of a long, long road to despair."

"I remember once saying that I'd like to go to university. My father told me: "I would rather see you dead at my feet than have you go to a university." I'm laughing about it now, but at the time I was terribly upset. I didn't even understand what going to university meant."

"It's really splendid, my dear. Are you going to bring it into town?"

"I think my parents had visions of me being found in the Thames with six illicit foetuses in my womb and needle marks up my arm."

"You get set on a path and, if you succeed, you get better parts, but of the same kind. If you don't take a lot of trouble, you get stuck like that."

"[On Norman Wisdom] One knew that he would lay his hands on anybody [...] You had to make sure you nipped about a bit. There's a way of doing it without reprimanding. He obviously had a terrific inferiority complex."

"I can remember what I ate. Coconut squares dipped in chocolate, wrapped in gold paper."

"I had to hide every morning, until Daddy had gone out to work. And then stay out late to try to avoid him in the evening. Because of these terrible rows. Mummy would come and try to get me to go back home in the middle of the day. After about a year the school said look, this cannot carry on. I had to leave."

"Home life was horrid. Daddy used to knock me about with his fists, and my mother would egg him on."

"We'd seen all the rushes, which we thought very funny, but the premiere audience reaction was cold and so were the reviews. However, the moment it was released it made audiences everywhere laugh like anything, and it showed that our original reaction had been right. What a relief!"

"[On Kenneth Williams] He was quite happy to steal the good lines I made up and use them before I could say them [...] He would do anything as long as he came out best. It was outrageous."

"If there is a Tchekov among my readers, I fervently hope that the effects of the Magnet wil be to turn him into a Bob Cherry."

"The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with Chums and the old B[oy’s] O[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two, probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter."

"The business of a boys' author is not to consider political issues, but to entertain the readers, make them as happy as possible."

"The donefulness is terrific."

"A somewhat short junior, with a broad, pleasant face and an enormous pair of spectacles"

"I say you fellows, I expect to see fair play."

"Foreigners are funny"

"All boys ought to be drownded at birth."

"The chief thing was to select a name totally different from those under which he had hitherto written: so that when he used the name, he would feel like a different person, and in consequence write from a somewhat different angle. I have been told - by men who do not write - that this is all fanciful. This only means that they don't understand."

"I'd never malign another performer, but the style is not good enough. They've done away with laugh pay-offs. We were given nine minutes or eight minutes. Now they wander wherever they like, they don't get to any jokes before they've been on for two minutes. We had to make an impact in ten seconds."

"We run, not only because we think it is doing us good, but … because it helps us to do other things better."

"I wanna tell you a story"

"My outlook is that life is like a self-service restaurant and you have to help yourself. Sometimes when you see what the other fella has got, you want some of it too."

"Whatever may have been our final judgment on the strange novel of M. Marcel Proust, 'Du Côté de chez Swann,' which appeared in the year before the war—and the book at least had this obviously in common with a great work of literature, that it lent itself to judgment on many different planes—the persistent element in all our changing opinions was that it marked the arrival of a new sensibility. We were being made aware in new ways, induced to perceive existence in new relations."

"For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license."

"Tenniel raised the political cartoon to a new level of dignity and importance."

"Tenniel, who had started as a child prodigy, nearly ended as one. When a boy, fencing with his father, he lost the sight of one eye. But the remaining one saw more than most."

"Mr. Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he has no more needed one than I should need a multiplication-table to work on a mathematical problem!"

"Tenniel is the man."