Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carol Shields

So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.

Carlos Castaneda

Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.

Agnes Martin

The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.

Alan Sugar

Love what you do and do what you love, otherwise you will become unhappy and self-defeating.

Alan Keyes

You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.

Alan Keyes

Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

Charlotte Bronte

Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.

Charlotte Bronte

I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Charlotte Bronte

I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

Agnes Repplier

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplier

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.

Alan Rudolph

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Charles de Gaulle

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

Charles Caleb Colton

A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

David Mitchell

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

David Graeber

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

David Suzuki

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

Cesare Pavese

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

Camilo Jose Cela

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

Elizabeth Bibesco

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

Henry Miller

Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene - nine-tenths of it!

Carter Burwell

I like business and personal life to be distinct.

Bill Bryson

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.

Aldous Huxley

Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.

George Henry Lewes

The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.

George Henry Lewes

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

Naguib Mahfouz

Without literature my life would be miserable.