“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
Home page Searching for lost quotations
UPDATED 1 May 2012
Posted 6 February 2009
Q3987 ‘Glory is fleeting but obscurity is
forever’ – always attributed to Napoleon – but when and how
did it enter circulation?
Q3989 Children’s rhyme: ‘The tower of toys for a
minute / Stood steady and firm and tall ... ’, ending, ‘No wonder
that Teddy refuses / To build up that tower again’ – more,
please? (There was a
Posted 18 February 2009
Q4014 Who said something to this effect:
‘Imprisonment is a long term process with an uncertain outcome whereas
hanging is sure and takes only a moment’?
Posted 21 July
2009
Q4042 Which British political figure used the
expression ‘the consistency of the grave’?
Q4045 What was the exact date of the Giles
cartoon in the Daily Express with the
caption: ‘There was only one man who entered Parliament with good
intentions – Guy Fawkes’?
Probably very late 1940s.
Q4057
A source for the expression, ‘Get back in your hole, it’s
rat week’?
Q4059
A source for the saying ‘Manners, pianos, tables and chairs, all
belong to the man upstairs’?
Posted 6 August 2009
Q4062 Origin and full text
of the parody of ‘Devon, Glorious Devon’ including: ‘In
Devon, glorious
Q4066 In The Green Hat,
Michael Arlen writes: ‘Mr H. G.
Wells says that there is no money to be made out of any book that cannot bring
a woman in within the first few thousand words.’ The source of this remark, please.
Posted 1 December 2009
Q4099 ‘Man knows not what the day bodes
but must abide what it brings’ – what is this?
Posted 1 January 2010
Q4105 In The Letters of Noël Coward, there is this in a c. 1956 letter
to Marlene Dietrich: ‘A very brilliant writer once said (Could it have
been me?), “Life is for the living” ... ’ Coward used the shorter version
‘Life is for [ ... ] living’ in the introduction to ‘A Bar on
the Piccola Marina’ in his 1959 Las Vegas
cabaret recording – which version he had already put in his play Design for Living (1933). But why is this near-proverb not more
widely recorded? Google Books has
the shorter by 1888.
Q4106 Early examples of something like
‘the world is made for those not blessed with self awareness’?
Posted 18 January 2010
Q4107 Is SMOBELMABEES
– or something like it – an acronym/mnemonic for remembering
– what? Fallen Angels?
Q4111 What is the poem about the story shown
on a willow pattern plate that ends something like ‘and patter paling
round the sun’?
Posted 26 January 2010
Q4112 Bertie Wooster
(in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves
stories) apparently invokes Captain Scott’s last messsage
at some point? Where?
Posted 10 March 2010
Q4117 Origin of ‘Which part of the word
“no” don’t you understand – the “n” or the
“o”?’ – a film perhaps?
Q4118 ‘How cowardice rushes in where
courage once ruled’ – or words to that effect. Source?
Q4119 In the film Sex’n’Drugs’n’Rock’n’Roll,
Ian Dury says to his son that the painter Delacroix
said, ‘Inspiration is about getting to one’s desk at 9
a.m.’ Did he really?
Q4127 In a 1986 book Wetland – Life in the Somerset Levels, an unattributed
quotation is: ‘The slimed, light bodies of the secret eels’. Where is this from?
Posted 22 April 2010
Q4178 Did John Buchan say something to the
effect that the epitome of adventure was ‘journeys made in haste by
night’?
Posted 28 July 2010
Q4204 Who called the Bible ‘a collection
of self-aggrandizing myths of a nomadic tribe of unruly Semites’?
Q4205 About which politicians (perhaps) was it
said that, ‘Beneath that bluff, unprepossessing exterior lies an equally
unprepossessing interior’?
Q4214 Text of ‘Prayer from a Sick
Room’, beginning ‘Think on me, Lord, and be very answerable to my
necessities’?
Q4215 Does this mean anything to anybody
‘Abercandi Day [spelling?] – it was the
day Napoleon seduced his coachman’?
Q4218 Origin of ‘Remember that night by
the compost heap; two weeds in the garden of love’?
Q4220 An origin for the saying, ‘Where
ignorance prevails, vulgarity generally asserts itself’ or ‘ ...
vulgarism predominates’ or ‘ ... vulgarity invariably inserts
itself’?
Posted 8 December
2010
Q4246 Was ‘Easy mistake to make’
somebody’s catchphrase?
Q4252 Why were Bohemian Concerts (popular
music recitals from, say, 1890-1930), so called?
Posted 17 January
2011
Q4263 What is
the Arabic origin of ‘Ye Benn Gudana [sons of Ghudaneh / Ghudineh] are neither
gold nor pure silver but ye are pottery’?
Posted 6 April 2011
Q4275 Louis Armstrong famously replied to
someone who asked, ‘What is jazz?’ – ‘If you have to
ask, you ain’t got it’ (or words to that
effect). Are there other (perhaps
earlier) examples of put-downs in which someone is told that if they have to
ask about a certain topic, it means they’ll never understand it?
Posted 5 July 2011
Q4286 Someone’s grandfather was fond of
saying, ‘There’s many a man, though poor, hard up’. Anyone else know this?
Posted 27 July
2011
Q4292 ‘Success isn’t always what
you know or who you know but sometimes what you know about who you know’
– has been attributed (after 1964) by Fletcher Knebel. Any other claimants?
Q4294 This exchange between a surgeon and a
nursing sister is reported from a
Q4295 A source for this saying by Dr Spooner
to Roy Harrod: ‘You mustn’t think you
aren’t the man you once used to think you were’?
Q4299 What is the origin of the phrase
‘sugar me pink!’?
Q4301 ‘It is better for a man to dream of
many beautiful women than to awake next to one ugly one’ – what is
this? A modern proverb?
Posted 26
September 2011
Q4304 How well-known is the expression
‘Where were we when the rope broke?’ said between two people who
have temporarily interrupted a job they are doing together? A date for its origin?
Q4310 David Skinner wants to know about the saying, ‘I’ve just washed my hair and I can’t do a thing with it!’ and thinks it must be from a TV commercial ‘from my youth.’ Well, I am sure that it must have been used somewhere in advertising copy at some time (possibly for Kreml Shampoo in the US) but it was being described as ‘an old saying’ as long ago as 1929 (in an American book, Secrets of Charm by Josephine Huddleston) and it appears in A Weaver of Dreams by Myrtle Reed (1911). Any ideas?
Q4311 ‘We are ordinary people yet in our
mother’s eyes, we tread the earth like princes’ – from an
episode of Rumpole of the Bailey, but an origin? Or uses of the final phrase on its own.
Q4312 Tony Craddock writes: ‘My late grandfather
who died in 1972 was fond of quoting “Fantasia Weeks is on the march” when
referring to the feminist movement. A self-educated working-class socialist he was fond of quoting Bernard Shaw,
Robert Burns and the like. I can’t find any reference to this
quote at all or to the lady in question and I can’t say if the spelling
is correct. There was a saying that “John Wilkes is on the march”
and Wilkes did write a poem on women. Is this a clue?
Posted 17 January 2012
Q4321 Who said, ‘The
greatest love story in Western Literature is the story of Martin Luther and
Jesus Christ, as told by Johann Sebastian Bach’?
Posted 27 February 2012
Q4342 ‘The secret of
happiness is to count your blessings while others are adding up their
troubles’ – William Penn?
A proper source, please.
Q4347
Are there any pre-20th
century appearances of Napoleon’s instruction to Josephine, ‘Home
in three days; don’t wash’.
Indeed, where did it originate?
Q4348 Origin of ‘I
thought we were the good guys’?
Q4350
Lord (‘power
tends to corrupt’)
Posted 1 May 2012
Q4369
What is the origin of ‘rien s’empêche
comme le papier vide’
which roughly translates as ‘nothing puts off [a writer] so much as a
blank sheet of paper’?
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