Glorious Insults as an Art Form - Quotations

GLORIOUS INSULTS

These glorious insults use words from an era prior to the English language becoming what it has become today :

• "He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr


• "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill


• "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow


• A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."


• "That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."


• "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).


• "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas


• "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain


• "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.." - Oscar Wilde


• "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one." -  George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill


• "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second .... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.


• "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop


• "He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright


• "I've just learned about his illness.  Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb


• "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson


• "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating


• "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyran


• "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West


• "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker


• "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain


• "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde


• "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts....... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)


• "He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder


• "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.  But I'm afraid this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

A Beetle in the Park but is it Art

Optical Illusions as an Art Form: Painful picture

The most striking examples of op art are kinetic illusions in which stationary patterns create the perception of motion.

In this reinterpretation of French op artist Isia Léviant’s famous Enigma by neuroscientist and engineer Jorge Otero-Millan of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the concentric green rings appear to fill with rapid illusory motion, as if millions of tiny and barely visible cars were driving hell-bent for leather around a track. Small, involuntary eye movements, called microsaccades, are responsible for this illusion.