
Letter to Robert Wilberforce (Rome, 15 February 1848); in Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Vol. I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896), p. 513.
Letter to Robert Wilberforce (Rome, 15 February 1848); in Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Vol. I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896), p. 513.
“Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.”
“A Lie,” p. 65
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Stone and a Word”
"The Mathematician", in The Works of the Mind (1947) edited by R. B. Heywood, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Context: I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is … governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”