“[T]rying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

The Median Isn't the Message (1985)

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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“By the way, the Minnesota textbook (and most textbooks now) instead of calling men "homo sapiens," like we used to be called, they're now called "homo sapiens sapiens." Wow, what does that mean? Well, sapiens means "wise." So we're the wise, wise man. See, the Bible says, "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." And if you think your grandpa swung by his tail from a tree, you're a fool, plain and simple.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

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“I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.
Prologue, p. 13
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“Let’s keep in mind not just those beings who won the metaphysical lottery by being born as Homo sapiens, but also those who lie furthest outside our moral circle. They need us the most.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[Our treatment of animals is stalling human progress, February 19, 2018, Quartz, https://qz.com/1209936/our-treatment-of-animals-is-stalling-human-progress/]

“Keep in a dry place, keep away from children and strike gently away from the body.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Metro interview (10 October 2011) http://metro.co.uk/2011/10/10/alan-moore-my-love-for-my-early-comics-is-like-a-messy-divorce-179350/
Context: I did an interview where I was asked for the best advice I'd been given. I couldn't think of anything, so I read from the back of a packet of Swan Vestas matches by the phone: "Keep in a dry place, keep away from children and strike gently away from the body." They'd written it up without any sense of irony.

“In the heart of the sphere of everything that keeps changing, there one thing that never changes—life. Life is the one thing that stays with me until the very end. Today, people may like me. Tomorrow, they may not. But my life is still there. It is not subject to good and bad. Human beings are the thinkers—homo sapiens—the ones with the brains. We can think about things, and in our thoughts, everything keeps changing. In our moods, everything keeps changing. Yet, in our beings, there is the heart, and the heart does not change because it is consistent with only one thing. Our needs on the outside change all the time, but the heart's need never changes. It is consistently the same, and always will be.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

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1990s

“An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

De toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus singulière est peut-être encore la chasteté.
Remy de Gourmont, La Physique de l'Amour: Essai sur l'Instinct Sexuel (1903), ch. 18: La question des aberrations http://books.google.com/books?id=32ZJAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA233&dq=%22De+toutes+les+aberrations+sexuelles%22&lr=&ei=6TXvR9yOM4zGyATqjfX4Bw.
Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love (1922), the Ezra Pound translation of La Physique de l'Amour: Essai sur l'Instinct Sexuel
Misattributed
Variant: Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most curious is chastity.

“I definitely worry about that. I think about it all the time because that's the way Hollywood thinks. It's all about momentum and keeping your name out there, and college certainly takes you away from that. But, if I look at it in the longer term, it's so worthwhile.”

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“Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

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Trademarked closing lines in The Writer's Almanac http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
Source: Good Poems

“The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible.”

William H. Prescott (1796–1859) American historian and Hispanist

"Chateaubriand's English Literature" (1839), p. 245.
Biographical and Critical Miscellanies

“[T]rying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all.”

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

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