"Who can undo What time hath done? who can win back the wind? Beckon lost music from a broken lute? Renew the redness of a last year's rose? Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?"

"We are but as the instrument of heaven. Our work is not design, but destiny."

"For only by knowledge of that which is not Thyself shall thyself be learn'd."

"Far up the wave The clouds that lay piled in the golden heat Were turn'd into types of the ancient mountains In an ancient land."

"Since we parted, yester eve, I do love thee, love, believe, Twelve times dearer, twelve hours longer, One dream deeper, one night stronger, One sun surer,—thus much more Than I loved thee, love, before."

"The thing which must be, must be for the best."

"Art is Nature made by Man To Man the interpreter of God."

"Who would have believed it probable or possible, before these discoveries were made, that beneath the heap of earth and rubbish which marked the site of Nineveh, there would be found the history of the wars between Hezekiah and Sennacherib, written at the very time when they took place by Sennacherib himself, and confirming even in minute details the Biblical record?"

"I have always believed that successes would be the inevitable result if the two services, the army and the navy, had fair play, and if we sent the right man to fill the right place."

"Andrew Lang's marvelous Tales of Troy and Greece...fired my imagination as a child, in an unforgettable way."

"I loved the Andrew Lang books"

"The windy lights of Autumn flare; I watch the moonlit sails go by; I marvel how men toil and fare, The weary business that they play! Their voyaging is vanity, And fairy gold is all their gain, And all the winds of winter cry, “My Love returns no more again.”"

"Here’s a pot with a cot in a park In a park where the peach-blossoms blew, Where the lovers eloped in the dark, Lived, died and were changed into two Bright birds that eternally flew Through the boughs of the may, as they sang; ’T is a tale was undoubtedly true In the reign of the Emperor Hwang."

"They hear like ocean on a western beach The surge and thunder of the Odyssey."

"If indeed there be a god in heaven."

"Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining."

"Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination."

"There’s a joy without canker or cark, There’s a pleasure eternally new, ’T is to gloat on the glaze and the mark Of china that’s ancient and blue."

"What seems certain is that Pythagoras developed the idea of mathematical logic... He realized that numbers exist independently of the tangible world and therefore their study was untainted by inaccuracies of perception. This meant he could discover truths which were independent of opinion of prejudice and which were more absolute then any previous knowledge."

"Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste."

"… did you know that 60% of measurements and statistics start with a 1, 2 or 3? Distance to the sun, 150,000,000km, starts with a 1. Height of Everest, 29,000ft, starts with a 2. Density of barium, 3.59g/cm3, starts with a 3. You might think that I am (2008 Italian cherry production, 134,407 tonnes, starts with a 1), but if you scan the financial pages of this newspaper then you will see that most numbers do indeed start with a 1, 2 or 3. This eccentricity of the digits is dubbed , because it was made famous by , a physicist at the in New York. He, like the rest of us, had both previously assumed that the starting digit of numbers would be evenly spread among all the numbers from 1 to 9, so he was shocked by his own discovery."

"We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you."

"Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse."

"Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments."

"The one kind of society that the Church cannot adjust to is no society at all, i.e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television."

"A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism."

"The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five."

"It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the reviewer can't put it off indefinitely with sneers, although some neophytes might be tempted to try: "When in doubt, stick out your tongue" is a safe rule that never cost one any readers. But there's nothing strong about it, and it has nothing to do with the real business of criticism, which is to do justice to the best work of one's time, so that nothing gets lost."

"Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot."

"Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there."

"It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point."

"The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them."

"Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session."

"As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives."