Favourite Quotes

Ai Weiwei

"Creativity is like a seed"

E.M. Forster (taken from Zadie Smith's occasional essays p15)

"A book which does not leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world isn't worth doing"

Bulgakov - The Master and Margerita

"Manuscripts don't burn"

George Eliot - Middlemarch p216

"Admiration is too strong for syntax"

Margery Kempe - The Booke of Margery Kempe p109

"And therefore, daughter, if you will be a partaker in our joy, you must be a partaker in our sorrow"

Edgar Allen Poe - Sonnet - To Science

"Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"

Confucius

"A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace."

John Tyndall - On the Scientific Use of the Imagination

"Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was a leap of the imagination”

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda - p164

"The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction”

William Shakespeare

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination"

Jeremy Bentham (quoted by Mill)

"Push-pin is as good as poetry"

John Stuart Mill

"Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom"

John Stuart Mill

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing ."

Virginia Woolf

"One cannot find peace by avoiding life"

Kazuo Ishiguro

"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading."