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“A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.” — Walter Bagehot

Proverbs from around the world: “Opportunities come but do not linger.” — Nepalese “If you buy what you don’t need, you steal from yourself.” — Swedish “Happy nations have no history.” — Belgian “An old error has more friends than a new truth.” — Danish “Nothing is difficult if you’re used to it.” — Indonesian “The one being carried does not realize how far...

The Chief Defect of Henry King Was chewing little bits of String. At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside. Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, “There is no Cure for this Disease. “Henry will very soon be dead.” His Parents stood about his Bed Lamenting...

Writing in the Wall Street Journal about long sentences in literature, Laurie Winer offered her thoughts in a single sentence of 854 words: In order to credit William Faulkner — as the Guinness Book of World Records does — with the longest sentence in literature, one must include, when counting the words in Faulkner’s erratically punctuated, loosely defined ‘sentences,’ lengthy italicized passages that echo...

On hearing that Watership Down was a novel about rabbits written by a civil servant, Craig Brown wrote, “I would rather read a novel about civil servants written by a rabbit.”

I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept, Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept. There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon, Rigid and smiling, lay … Mrs. RAVOON! I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun And ’twas midday at least ere my journey was done; But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,...

“Lady Dillon told Sir F. Chantrey that English women were more buxom than Italian women. The delicate way she put it was, ‘you will find that Italian women can sit much closer to a wall than English.'” — George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002

A surprising detail from Duke Ellington’s childhood, from his 1973 autobiography Music Is My Mistress: There were many open lots around Washington then, and we used to play baseball at an old tennis court on Sixteenth Street. President Roosevelt would come by on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play. When he got ready to go, he would wave and we would...

An illusion by University of Texas engineer David Novick: All the spheres have the same light-brown base color (RGB 255,188,144). The intervening foreground stripes seem to impart different hues. See this Twitter thread for the same image with the foreground stripes removed.

Have the love and fear of God ever before thine eyes; God confirm your faith in Christ and that you may live accordingly, Je vous recommende a Dieu. If you meet with any pretty insects of any kind keep them in a box. — Sir Thomas Browne, letter to his son, 1661

“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire “It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey “Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs

After the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was constantly asked to describe his adventures on that day. Eventually he insisted that all his stories had been told, but during a visit to the Marchioness of Downshire, he said, “Well, I’ll tell you one that has not been printed.” In the middle of the battle of Waterloo he saw a man in plain...

If you’re driving on the highway and pass a car traveling in the opposite direction, the frequency of its engine noise seems to drop. In 1980, Liverpool Polytechnic mathematician J.M.H. Peters realized that this pitch drop might be used to estimate the speed of the passing vehicle. Pleasingly, he discovered that each semitone in the interval corresponds to 21 miles per hour (to within...

The classic, of course, is the story that tells how Mrs. Webster once accidentally walked into a room and found her husband kissing the maid. ‘Noah!’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m surprised.’ Noah, ever the verbalist, was nonplussed. ‘No, my dear,’ he corrected. ‘It is I who am surprised. You are astonished.’ — Evan Esar, Humorous English, 1961

In March 1985, Science Digest published four pangrams composed by its readers — each 26-letter sentence uses every letter in the English alphabet: Shiv cwm lynx, fjord qutb, zap keg. (Randall Kryn) “A powerful Islamic saint (qutb) who lives in a fjord is told first to knife a troublesome lynx that lives in a mountain hollow (cwm) and then to celebrate by awesomely attacking...

From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I: Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors...

From the Strand, May 1899: Our next photograph is a facsimile of an address on a letter that found its way from Spain to the G.P.O., St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Remarkable as it may seem, this specimen of handwriting was deciphered by ‘the blind man of St. Martin’s,’ and the letter safely reached its destination. It is addressed to the ‘Spanish Ambassador (or Embassy), London.’ (The...

A striking technology described in Strand, April 1899: The speck is a bundle of hay descending along a wire over a lake in Western Norway. The Norwegians, who live for weeks and months in the summer on the great heights on either side of their beautiful valleys, send down milk, cheese, hay, etc. to the farms below by suspending them on inclined wires fastened...

Every positive integer can be represented uniquely as the sum of one or more distinct Fibonacci numbers in such a way that the sum does not include any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Above, 51 = 34 + 13 + 3 + 1. Discovered in 1952 by Dutch mathematician Gerrit Lekkerkerker (and remarked 20 years later by Edouard Zeckendorf).

Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork. The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0). Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).

scribacious adj. fond of writing moiler n. a toiler; a drudge demiss adj. downcast; humble; abject guerdon n. a reward, recompense, or requital By the end of the 1960s, William Gaddis had secured an advance and an NEA grant that allowed him to work full-time on the novel J R. “Even then, however, Gaddis would be so in need of money that he would...

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WILL NOT, AND OTHERS MUST NOT, PICK THE FLOWERS. — Notice, Woodenbridge Hotel garden, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1919

Once a woman, speaking to me of love’s delight, said: It begins with a thrill like that of a hot bath, delicious; but we desire a deeper intensity, and there comes a feeling of melting as if all the knots were loosening, and this is followed by a tearing till soul and body are about to part. We know not whether it be pain...