The New Monday Quiz fires off a memorable quip

You probably expected an installment of the march through history today, but alas! Mrs.5000 and I are spending the weekend in a place so desolate, isolated, and primitive that it literally does not have internet access.  It does, however, have a 80s-era copy of the surprisingly conservative Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, from which I rather haphazardly threw together the following.  Then I went down the street to this little coffeeshop so I could post it online before returning to an arduous round of reading, playing games, and tinkering with little projects.

Quotations by Well-Known People

Who said it, or where was it written?  The list is at the end.

1. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

2. As long as war is regarded as Wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

3. By the time you swear you’re his,
   Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
   Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
   One of you is lying.

4. Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

5. He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

6. Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

7. Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult.

8. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

9. Romances paint at full length people’s wooings,
   But only give a bust of marriages:
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings
   There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss:
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife
   He would have written sonnets all his life?

10. She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved.

11. Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide
And haunt the places where their honour died.
See how the world its veterans rewards!
A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.

12. The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

13. To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.


W.H. Auden
Lord Byron
Ecclesiastes
George Elliot
T.S. Elliot
Edward Gibbon
The Book of Job
Samuel Johnson
Dorothy Parker
Alexander Pope
The Song of Solomon
Oscar Wilde
Virginia Woolf