Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Charles Dickens

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Charles Caleb Colton

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Dickens

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.

Charles Spurgeon

Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then hast thou reason to rejoice: but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying "I am saved" is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee.

Charles Spurgeon

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Charles Spurgeon

Come boldly, 'O believer, for despite the whisperings of Satan and the doubtings of thine own heart, thou art greatly beloved.

Alanis Morissette

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

Alan Moore

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day." The Joker - The Killing Joke

Al Roker

If I was having a bad day, eating was like self-medicating. But if you abuse food, you still have to use that substance that you abuse every day. You have to learn to use it responsibly.

Chris Cleave

The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.

Chris Bangle

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

Chesty Puller

Where the hell do you put the bayonet?

Cathy Freeman

When I'm in a bad mood, I don't listen.

Casey Affleck

I have a very bad relationship with mice.

Michael Steele

You know, conservatism is not a bad thing. It's not a pejorative.

Louis Gossett, Jr.

I didn't know anything about acting, I didn't know anything about theater, but I was just an exceptional student at high school. I wanted to play ball; I'm going after a basketball scholarship and be a doctor. I got injured and my marks began to drop.

Brian Keith

We started slowly, but then began to put things together. We were 3-9 to begin the year, but we have gone 9-4 the rest of the way.

John Timoney

We stopped the rescue operation around 11 o'clock (Thursday) night, ... As the tide came in, the structure began to move, and other parts began to collapse again. We made the decision to pull our divers out.

Helen Scannell

We started from scratch. Immediately people began dropping things off - and they were nice things. Our goods are gently used. We are not a junkyard or garbage drop.

Leslie Cockburn

When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.

M.I.A.

Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.

Natasha Trethewey

Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.

Natasha Tsakos

I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing 'Upwake.' 'Upwake' tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. I wanted 'Upwake' to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would.

Ma Jian

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

Jose Maria

The point is not extending deadlines but the honest will to disarm, which he (Saddam) so far has not showed.

David Walton

The first movie that made me cry was Dead Poets Society. That one gets me. O Captain! My Captain! That moment kills me.

Laura Hunter

We want to see a clear, specific deadline that gets us from here to a (final) decision.

Roger Toussaint

We have no progress to report. That's not good because we have precious little time before the deadline approaches.

Joe Mihalich

When you run that baseline when it's a dead ball, you give a team life.

Ann Rice

When you're watching TV and they're reporting 50 people dead in Mississippi and you haven't heard from your family, well, you think the worst.

Ryan MacMurchy

When we were winning, our practices were (about) grinding each other, getting on each other, yelling and hollering. It's been a little dead out there lately, not as competitive.

John Washington

We wrapped them and all, but due to the heat, well, I don't know. We just left a lot of dead people, I figure 40 to 50.

Terry Greene

What has impressed me the most is Wildfire has been winning when things aren't going his way. He's dead rail but he's been drawing all outside boxes.

Joe Volpe

We are producing more jobs than the labor market has workers for ... we're desperate for immigration,

Kathleen Blanco

When folks who are desperate are trying to get home, it just makes it more difficult for us to get to folks whose lives are in danger.

Nate Corddry

Coffee shops are everywhere, especially in Los Angeles, chock full of sad sacks desperate to make sure their screenplays make it into the right hands... or any hands, for that matter. The one thing that makes a coffee shop truly great, though, is charm.

Alberta Stima

We're getting desperate for help because some of our substitutes are not always available.

Kevin Lygo

We're fortunate in having Lost, Desperate Housewives and My Name Is Earl but it is fiercely more competitive out there than ever before. This May you'll see a feeding frenzy.

Jonathan Sacks

(Yahoo) is now so desperate over the fact that they are losing several experienced software engineers with years of experience in the mobile industry, that they are now taking the exact opposite legal position.

Tom Stafford

Let's not forget those folks that are in such desperate need,

Willie Mitchell

When you're a desperate team, you do whatever it takes.

Ashleigh Brilliant

I'm not yet desperate enough to do anything about the conditions that are making me desperate.

Sathya Baba

Love knows no fear and so love needs no falsehood to support it.

Kathleen Blanco

Such falsehoods and misleading statements, made under oath before Congress, are shocking,

Danish Proverb

It is better to suffer for truth than to prosper by falsehood

Robert Green Ingersoll

There are times when a falsehood well told bridges over quite a difficulty, but in the long run, you had better tell the truth, even if you swim the creek.

Charlton Heston

Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong.

Leslie Stephen

The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mystery magnifies danger as the fog the sun.

David Mitchell

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

Denise Levertov

An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.

Bertolt Brecht

It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk.

Chevy Chase

The fact was, Ford kept stumbling around. I didn't want him in the White House. I wanted Carter in, and I had a forum of 20 million people watching.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?

Bob Dylan

with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls ...

Blaise Pascal

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

Elia Kazan

I don't remember anything anybody said in any Jack Ford picture. Nothing happens except action.

Bryan Adams

Trying to manage diabetes is hard because if you don't, there are consequences you'll have to deal with later in life.

Mark Cuban

As I would learn later in life, money makes you extremely handsome.

Bill Nighy

It's probably healthier to find fame later in life.

Mark Nation

When he got to the school, they would not let him in and he was later told Christopher had been shot.

Lyle Thomas

We're going to sit down later this year and come up with a list of the (water line problems) we know about that we just haven't done anything on.

Kathy Miller

We're not anticipating problems, other than that we're getting them later than we expected.

Michael Long

Macquarie is stalling for time. There's always the opportunity to raise the offer later on.

Umberto Eco

There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.

Ernst Toller

Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves.

William Cowper

When this poor, lisping, stammering tongue/ Lies silent in the grave.

Michael Jackson

Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. The truth will win this marathon in court.

Helen Gahagan

In trying to make something new, half the undertaking lies in discovering whether it can be done. Once it has been established that it can, duplication is inevitable.

Cassandra Gash

I don't know where the responsibility lies, but I know I've done everything I can do.

Mark Twain

I am different from Washington. I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.

Bobby Locke

The real success in golf lies in turning three shots into two.

Fernando Rospigliosi

He can't be believed. He's a man who lies systematically.

David Garrick

Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel, and talkd like poor Poll.

Ed Garland

His oath should have been, 'I Tony Harwood swear to lie, I say you should reject Tony Harwood 100 percent. Throw him out. He ain't worth nothing.

Charles Dickens

In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and its going.

Charles Dickens

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.

Charles Caleb Colton

Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like me column that guided Israel in the deserts, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer; for it prevents those disorders which other remedies sometimes cure, but sometimes confirm.

Charles Caleb Colton

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

Charles Caleb Colton

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer.

Charles Dickens

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

Charles Dickens

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

Charles Spurgeon

Doubts about the fundamentals of the gospel exist in certain churches, I am told, to a large extent. My dear friends, where there is a warm-hearted church, you do not hear of them. I never saw a fly light on a red-hot plate.

Rod Smith

We want to tread lightly on the planet,

Andrew Taylor Still

I have no desire to be a cat, which walks so lightly that it never creates a disturbance.

Loryn Kasten

It is lightly snowing right now, and were supposed to get a little more snow out of this storm.

William Edwards

We don't take lightly missing those two particular targets.

Will Thomas

At first, people probably took us lightly because we're a mid-major. People don't respect us enough to take us seriously. We'd probably have to get back here year after year to get that respect.

Michael Hayes

This is not something they've undertaken lightly or frivolously.

Charles Caleb Colton

Our very best friends have a tincture of jealousy even in their friendship; and when they hear us praised by others, will ascribe it to sinister and interested motives if they can.

Charles Spurgeon

The gospel is not for you who can save yourselves, but for those who are lost.

Alan Greenspan

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

Chris Cornell

And I'm lost behind The words I'll never find And I'm left behind As seasons roll on by

Cale Yarborough

If he'd just crowded me down to the side of the asphalt, I'd have been OK. But when he ran me completely off the racetrack, I lost it.

David Castillo

When you've lost something, and you find it again, it has so much more meaning.

Kyle Petty

When you've lost a son, there's no price you can put on safety for the driver.

Lewis Carroll

‎You're not the same as you were before," he said. You were much more... muchier... you've lost your muchness.

Charley Reese

Credibility, like virginity, can only be lost once and never recovered.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

That is my being, the madness of an unaccustomed mood.

Arundhati Roy

Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

Anthony Trollope

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

William Shakespeare

Like madness is the glory of life.

Arthur Honegger

Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.

Bruce Sterling

One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.

Kristan Bromley

There is a touch of madness to it.

William Shakespeare

Though this be madness, yet there is method

Alejandro Jodorowsky

You can’t have a masterpiece without madness,

Catherynne M. Valente

I am the Walker and the Maze.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Theirs is an endless road, a hopeless maze, who seek for goods before they seek for God.

E. M. Forster

Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others.

James Billington

They're somewhat easier, because they're self-contained. They don't have the same maze of menus and screens you have to navigate with software.

Imre Lakatos

It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.

Lord Chesterfield

Firmness of purpose is one of the best instruments of success.

Charles Dickens

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

Charles Dickens

An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.

Charles Dickens

The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among men.

Charles Dickens

It is required of every man," the ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.

Charles Dickens

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Charles Dickens

Most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat.

Charles Caleb Colton

When we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things, their good opinion and our own improvement; for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not.

Charles Caleb Colton

No man can promise himself even fifty years of life, but any man may, if he please, live in the proportion of fifty years in forty-let him rise early, that he may have the day before him, and let him make the most of the day, by determining to expend it on two sorts of acquaintance only-those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something maybe learned.

Charles de Gaulle

It is better to have a bad method than to have none.

Diana Wynne Jones

She was remorseless, but she lacked method.

Lee H. Hamilton

You'll remember Dr. Rice said that several times: It was not a warning about the place and the method and the time - it was a general warning. And that points out the imperfection, if you would, of our intelligence.

Arthur Conan Doyle

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.

Thomas Gray

Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, he had not the method of making a fortune.

Thom Mayne

Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That's the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do.

Simone Signoret

There are two schools of thought: There are those actors who explain to you that they know exactly how they're going to do the part... And then there is the other method, which is to have no method at all. This is mine.

Beth Henley

Then I went off to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They had a really wonderful theatre department.

Charles Beichman

We don't know anything about planets around very young stars because the radial velocity method doesn't work with them,

Louis Stokes

Firstly, we have personnel records of persons we hired, persons we fired, reasons we fired them and so forth. These records have nothing to do with the assassination of the president and, therefore, ought to remain in the files.

Christine Gregoire

I couldn't do that as attorney general. Why? Because they are my clients. You can't say they're not doing what they ought to be doing when you are the attorney general.

Evel Knievel

Women are the root of all evil. I ought to know. I'm Evel.

Ben Nelson

If we cannot agree, then at least we ought to move on.

James F. Amos

You just look at the world, and you see things unraveling, and you say, 'I wonder what we ought to do?' Things are seldom crystal clear.

Walter Kirn

In a world that's smarter than it used to be and, in some ways, smarter than it ought to be, stupidity has a way of making us seem all the more human.

Val Guest

At those times I got into... I suppose you call it a rut. I used to do comedy, comedy, comedy and I suddenly thought I ought to break away from this somehow.

Source Unknown

On the first day of a revolution he is a treasure; on the second he ought to be shot.

Jane Austen

She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy.

Albert Young

When you saw us getting pushed back over things that were non-existent ... come on. I don't know what to say about that.

Ted Ligety

My parents never pushed me to ski race. It was my choice and something I really wanted to do. I would have rebelled if they had pushed me, and I wouldn't have had the same passion.

Gordon Richards

But that's not to say they're not here - they just got pushed over the sides,

Jake Eakin

I got up to try to stop him, and he just pushed me.

Ricky Ford

Sri Lanka pushed us all the way. We've been tested and bounced back stronger every time.

Stansfield Turner

I think he's being pushed out or made a scapegoat,

Malik Rose

We pushed it and got up the floor. Now we just have to get into something.

Alija Izetbegovic

pushed Dayton forward, while they were obstructing it.

Richard Remus

Correctional officers, you really can't tell them what they can't do. They like to stand their ground. They don't get pushed around. They get that confrontational attitude.

Archibald Cox

... true civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.

Vanessa Mae

But then I hit my 20s and only made two albums, and now I live in a ski resort as a ski bum basically.

Barton Gellman

True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

Richard Cobden

At all events, arbitration is more rational, just, and humane than the resort to the sword.

James Blankenship

We wanted to come out and win the second half. That is an old cliche, but sometimes you've got to resort to that. And that's where we were at halftime.

Jerry Jones

The development could be virtually anything, from a five- star resort to a vacation-club development.

Mark Goddard

The question I always get is, Why didn't you throw Dr. Smith off the Jupiter? I get that all the time.

R. Ingram

Mr. Smith was the first person in the door, so to speak,

Bill Donovan

Tubby Smith always went out of his way to be friendly. He had me in his office. He would talk to me while we waited. He always made me feel at home.

William Cowper

And the first smith was the first murderer's son.

Gideon Sam

I just want to say thanks very much Graeme Smith for that wonderful win.

Jonathan Toews

I never cook. My favorite place to eat is Smith & Wollensky in Chicago.

Baltasar Gracian

Superiority is always detested.

Charles Caleb Colton

Where thou perceivest knowledge, bend the ear of attention and respect; But yield not further to the teaching, than as thy mind is warranted by reasons. Better is an obstinant disputant, that yieldeth inch by inch, Than the shallow traitor to himself, who surrendereth to half an argument.

Charles Caleb Colton

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Charles Stanley

If you tell God no because He won't explain the reason He wants you to do something, you are actually hindering His blessing. But when you say yes to Him, all of heaven opens to pour out His goodness and reward your obedience. What matters more than material blessings are the things He is teaching us in our spirit.

Charles Spurgeon

I am content to live and die as the mere repeater of Scriptural teaching - as a person who has thought out nothing and invented nothing - but who concluded that he was to take the message from the lips of God to the best of his ability and simply to be a mouth for God to the people. - mourning much that anything of his own should come between - but never thinking that he was somehow to refine the message or to adapt it to the brilliance of this wonderful century and then to hand it out as being so much his own that he might take some share of the glory of it.

Charles Spurgeon

Rest assured that the most fervid revivalism will wear itself out in mere smoke, if it be not maintained by the fuel of teaching.... Sound teaching is the best protection for the heresies which ravage right and left among us.

Charles Spurgeon

If there is any verse that you would like left out of the Bible, that is the verse that ought to stick to you, like a blister, until you really attend to its teaching.

Alan Greenspan

If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.

Alan Bradley

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.

Alan Arkin

"What I've learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means "to pull from." Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves."

Robert Redford

I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young.

Aaron Swartz

Most people, it seems, stretch the truth to make themselves seem more impressive. I, it seems, stretch the truth to make myself look worse.

Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould

Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.

Stephen Covey

Everyone must be proactive and do all they can to help themselves to stay employed.

Rob Babcock

But those things usually work themselves out during training camp.

Friedrich Schiller

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Bill Cosby

We've got too many young girls, who don't know how to parent, turning themselves into parents.

Jorma Taccone

Something I always admire, especially in female comedians, is that they're willing to make themselves look terrible.

Ed Silliere

Speculators are tripping over themselves to get out.

Byron Katie

Whatever it takes for you to find your freedom, that's what you've lived.

Jared Leto

We want to play whatever you want to hear. We're here for you, Toledo.

Anderson Hernandez

Yeah, I think I have a chance. I'll do whatever they want me to. I'll be ready.

Pat White

We're going to play to win, that's all I can tell you. Whatever it takes.

Stephen Graham Jones

With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it's called.

Jim Hunter

We'd do whatever we could, and I don't think we'd be boneheaded about it. I'm not intimating that they're boneheaded, because I don't know the circumstances.

Jim Hunter

We'd do whatever we could, and I don't think we'd be boneheaded about it, ... I'm not intimating that they're boneheaded, because I don't know the circumstances.

Alexandra Adornetto

Xavier: They, whoever they are, shouldn't have control over our lives. I'm not about to lose you. I've been through that before, and I'll do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Mike Singletary

The No. 1 thing is you want to be able to win the game, and we're going to do whatever we have to do to win the game.