Top 70 Mark Forsyth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.”

— Mark Forsyth

2. “If the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine as old as the fish, and the fish as young as the maid, and the maid as willing as the hostess, it would have been a very good meal.”

— Mark Forsyth

3. “A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.”

— Mark Forsyth

4. “Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.”

— Mark Forsyth

5. “Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don’t believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.”

— Mark Forsyth

6. “If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded.”

— Mark Forsyth

7. “Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches.”

— Mark Forsyth

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8. “The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can’t end a sentence with up, should be told to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it’s one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to.”

— Mark Forsyth

9. “Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.”

— Mark Forsyth

10. “A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet’s case, murder the old bat.”

— Mark Forsyth

11. “Oscar Wilde said that “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,” and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads.”

— Mark Forsyth

12. “It’s a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be thelyphthoric, a word that comes from the Greek thely meaning “woman” and phthoric meaning “corrupting,” thus the OED’s simple definition: “that corrupts or ruins women.”

— Mark Forsyth

13. “Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner.”

— Mark Forsyth

14. “They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.”

— Mark Forsyth

15. “There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts.”

— Mark Forsyth

16. “It’s sad to see Time’s toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.”

— Mark Forsyth

17. “The point of all this is not so that the copper in question can learn more about your motivations and beliefs. They lack such psychoanalytic curiosity. That’s why they’re traffic policemen. By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That’s also why they’re traffic policemen.”

— Mark Forsyth

18. “Who needs sense when you have alliteration?”

— Mark Forsyth

19. “The lawyer’s lucky phrase is ‘including but not limited to’, which gets you out of the utterly unnecessary trouble that the unnecessary trouble merism got you into in the first place.”

— Mark Forsyth

20. “If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn’t true.”

— Mark Forsyth

21. “Sausages may taste lovely, but it’s usually best not to ask what’s actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.”

— Mark Forsyth

22. “The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.”

— Mark Forsyth

23. “We usually think of beavers as sweet little creatures who build dams, but that’s not how a constipated Renaissance man would view them; a constipated Renaissance man would view them as his relief and his cure. You see, the beaver has two sacs in his groin that contain a noxious and utterly disgusting oil that acts as a very effective laxative. This very valuable liquid was known as castor oil. The.”

— Mark Forsyth

24. “So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.”

— Mark Forsyth

25. “The Bible is chock-a-block with such unnecessary but beautiful antitheses. God, whatever his other failings, is a great rhetorician.”

— Mark Forsyth

26. “Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was the sausage-maker who disposed of the body.”

— Mark Forsyth

27. “The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the camp followers, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour. Camp.”

— Mark Forsyth

28. “So just to recap, polyptoton is a favorite of Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon.”

— Mark Forsyth

29. “Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you’ll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

— Mark Forsyth

30. “Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately it’s usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty.”

— Mark Forsyth

31. “When the Ancient Persians had a big political decision to make they would debate the matter twice: once drunk, and once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted.”

— Mark Forsyth

32. “Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It’s the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.”

— Mark Forsyth

33. “You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.”

— Mark Forsyth

34. “The chief recommendation of Johnson’s is that he defines a cough as: “A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.” Dictionaries.”

— Mark Forsyth

35. “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.′ Matthew 19:24. This verse has always rather worried rich men who tend to ask themselves how much a really damned big needle would cost.”

— Mark Forsyth

36. “We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressvie to those who wouldn’t know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema if it hit them in the face.”

— Mark Forsyth

37. “The Three Musketeers had a cry of ‘All for one and one for all’. The symmetry makes it memorable but also reflects the reciprocity. It is that great human symmetry: the deal.”

— Mark Forsyth

38. “The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it.”

— Mark Forsyth

39. “Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.”

— Mark Forsyth

40. “That A Lot More became a mile, and then the inch was dropped because it doesn’t begin with an M, and we were left with ‘A miss is as good as a mile’, which, if you think about it, doesn’t really make sense any more. But who needs sense when you have alliteration?”

— Mark Forsyth

41. “If you’re too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you’re not saying, you must... I’m sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.”

— Mark Forsyth

42. “So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He’s like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.”

— Mark Forsyth

43. “The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.”

— Mark Forsyth

44. “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.”

— Mark Forsyth

45. “Thomas More observed in 1533 that “of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough.” Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.”

— Mark Forsyth

46. “When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them... These lists are almost universally awkward.”

— Mark Forsyth

47. “Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more.”

— Mark Forsyth

48. “Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn’t catch on.”

— Mark Forsyth

49. “Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.”

— Mark Forsyth

50. “Most people can improvise in unrhymed dactyls for hours. It’s just that you lose all your friends if you do.”

— Mark Forsyth