Source: Letter to Lord Stanhope (17 July 1870), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 5 (1920), p. 123-125.
Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 6-7
“That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.”
Source: The Prisoner of Heaven
“I would have remembered the good stuff.
Nobody ever remembers the good stuff.”
Source: How to Kill a Rock Star
A Hazy Shade of Winter
Song lyrics, Bookends (1968)
“Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent.”
December 7, 2007 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22221245/.
2007
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8
volume I; lecture 3, "The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences"; section 3-7, "How did it get that way?"; p. 3-10
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)
Context: A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
“In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.”
Quoted in: Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Evan Esar (ed.), 1949, p. 156.
