Tom > Tom's Quotes

“Those who are thirsty for wisdom
Will ever move toward the source of the wisdom
That quenches their thirst.”
― Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose

“If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad'. Upon examination, this may be less interesting a concept than it appears at first: Such probability is ridiculously low. But let us carry the reasoning one step beyond. Now that we have found that hero among monkeys, would any reader invest his life's savings on a bet that the monkey would write the 'Odyssey' next?”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I guess it's like James Joyce when he was a kid, you know. He hung out with all the great writers of the day, and he was a little kid, like, with tennis shoes on, and they said 'Look at this lame!' They didn't use those words in those days. They said 'God, here comes this nut.' And he told them, 'I'm great!' And he sat with them, and he loved to be with them, and it ended up that he was great.”
― Art Pepper, Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper

“O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,
You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none -
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.”
― Lewis Carroll

“The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made.”
― Savielly Tartakower

“Some part of a mistake is always correct.”
― Savielly Tartakower

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
― Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape & Embers

“If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.”
― Warren Buffett

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”
― Richard Strauss

“Oh, Jeeves,' I said; 'about that check suit.'
Yes, sir?'
Is it really a frost?'
A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.'
But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.'
Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.'
He's supposed to be one of the best men in London.'
I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.”
― P. G. Wodehouse

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
― Robert J. Hanlon

“This benign property of his prose is not, one hopes, to be attributed to the reason noticed by the eccentric du Garbandier, who said 'the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest'.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man.

Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I subsequently became addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.”
― Flann O'Brien, Swim-two-birds (Romans, Essais, Poesie, Documents)

“He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example) Maximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated...”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

“I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and a modern representative, in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen, and bullies.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“I've been shot at and missed and shit at and hit. That's a saying out of my childhood and it's come true more than a few times along the way.”
― Hampton Hawes, Raise Up Off Me: A Portrait of Hampton Hawes

“Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Some people have big dreams in life which they never fulfill. Others don't have any dreams in life, and they don't fulfill those either.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“It ain't necessarily so that it ain't necessarily so.”
― Sun Ra

“I have many names; some call me Mr. Ra, others call me Mr. Re. You can call me Mr. Mystery.”
― Sun Ra

“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it's time to try the impossible.”
― Sun Ra

“We hold this myth to be potential
Not self-evident but equational
Another Dimension
Of another kind of Living Life”
― Sun Ra

“Brahma said: "Well, after hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred.”
― William Buck, Mahabharata