Quotes about browsing

A collection of quotes on the topic of browsing, use, books, book.

Quotes about browsing

Louise Penny photo
Wen Jiabao photo
Andrew Wiles photo
Ivar Jacobson photo
Aldo Leopold photo
Grady Booch photo
Alison Bechdel photo
Stig Dagerman photo
Tim Berners-Lee photo
Anu Garg photo

“Browsing the OED is the idea of a perfect day for me.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

2001-09-26
A Word a Day -- Say, 'Gasconade' -- Keeps Boredom at Bay
Susan G. Hauser
The Wall Street Journal

James Thurber photo

“Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips.”

"The Unicorn in the Garden", The New Yorker (31 October 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). This is a fable where a man sees a Unicorn in his garden, and his wife reports the matter to have him taken away, to the "booby-hatch". Online text with illustration by Thurber http://english.glendale.cc.ca.us/unicorn1.html
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time

Fali Sam Nariman photo
Chuck Berry photo
Brandon Boyd photo
John Hoole photo
Charles Lyell photo
Bill Mollison photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck photo

“We know that this animal [the giraffe], the tallest of mammals, dwells in the interior of Africa, in places where the soil, almost always arid and without herbage, obliges it to browse on trees and to strain itself continuously to reach them. This habit sustained for long, has had the result in all members of its race that the forelegs have grown longer than the hind legs and that its neck has become so stretched, that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, lifts its head to a height of six meters.”

On sait que cet animal, le plus grand des mammifères, habite l'intérieur de l'Afrique, et qu'il vit dans des lieux où la terre, presque toujours aride et sans herbage, l'oblige de brouter le feuillage des arbres, et de s'efforcer continuellement d'y atteindre. Il est résulté de cette habitude soutenue depuis longtemps, dans tous les individus de sa race, que ses jambes de devant sont devenues plus longues que celles de derrière, et que son col s'est tellement allongé, que la girafe, sans se dresser sur ses jambes de derrière, élève sa tête et atteint à six mètres de hauteur
Philosophie Zoologique, Vol. I (1809), pp. 256–257; translation taken from The Classics of Science: A Study of Twelve Enduring Scientific Works (1984) by Derek Gjertsen, p. 316.

Kenneth Goldsmith photo
Richard Stallman photo

“For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

OpenBSD mailing list (15 December 2007) http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
2000s
Context: For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.