Famous Quotes & Sayings

Maajid Nawaz

I am a Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents. I have a Muslim son. I have been imprisoned and witnessed torture for my previous understanding of my religion.

Mohsin Hamid

Most Muslims do not 'choose' Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The persons born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Lyle Kessler

I was born in Philadelphia, and I've tried to escape that city all my life. I end up writing plays that force me back to Philadelphia, at least psychologically if not physically.

Marisa Miller

I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, and the whole lifestyle revolves around the beach. My parents met surfing, and the beach was a major part of our daily lives.

Nicolas Maduro

Venezuelans have a long history. So we are able to listen to each other, to talk to each other. From here were born the liberators of the region, and they said before and after that process we have a culture of political action. We are not in despair. That's the image broadcast to abroad.

Ai Weiwei

I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.

Charlie Bell

When he finished last season, he came on like gangbusters once we got to know him and once he got the feel of varsity football, ... He was showing us all summer what we've got, offensively and defensively, so there's no surprise to us. Josh is just born with talent and skill, but to his credit, he works extremely hard to maximize it.

Chantal Kreviazuk

Well, Winnepeg has everything to do with my music in the sense it was where I was born and raised, cultured and all that sort of thing. A lot of my experiences come from Winnepeg.

Charles Dickens

Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.

Charles Caleb Colton

An Irish man fights before he reasons, a Scotchman reasons before he fights, an Englishman is not particular as to the order of precedence, but will do either to accommodate his customers.

Charles Dickens

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Charles Dickens

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you

Charles Stross

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?"

Alan Greenspan

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

Alan Greenspan

...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

Alan Greenspan

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.

Alan Greenspan

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.

Alanis Morissette

When I was 11 years old and I was on a road trip with my family. I turned to my dad and said, "Do you believe in Adam and Eve?" And he said he didn't think so. I remember that felt like a slap in the face, because if my parents questioned Adam and Eve, then they potentially questioned everything within Catholicism. Eventually that idea led to my feeling liberated, but at that time it was very scary.

Alan Bennett

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

Al Jarreau

My dad graduated seminary there, and so did (sounds like) Mark Kimball's grandfather. They sang in a quartet together, my dad and Mark Kimball's grandfather.

Akon

I'm a polygamist. I can afford to have as many wives as I can afford to have. All Africans believe in it. My dad has four wives.

Nancy Long

We want them to have moms and dads and normal families.

Chick Corea

My dad was all about music. He was a musician, leading a band when I was born. His band was active all through the 40s. He'd started it in the late 20s and 30s. According to the scrapbook, his band was doing quite well around the Boston area. During the Depression they were on radio. It was a jazz-oriented band. He was a trumpet player, and he wrote and arranged for the band. He taught me how to play the piano and read music, and taught me what he knew of standard tunes and so forth. It was a fantastic way to come up in music.

Chief Joseph

I pressed my father's hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit land.

China Mieville

My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.

David Mixner

I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.

Al Roker

I've never been part of anything so great as those three kids.

Chief Joseph

My father... had sharper eyes than the rest of our people.

Dave Barry

The nicest Father's Day surprise of all for Dad would be if you handed him a box, and he unwrapped it, and there, inside, sitting on a bed of folded tissue, was the pair of his undershorts that somebody threw away six months ago (without asking Dad) because they had reached the stage where they were 3 percent undershorts and 97 percent holes. Dad misses those undershorts. They were his Faithful Undershorts Companion.

Dave Barry

Far too often, we fathers avoid the subject because it's so awkward. The subject I am referring to is: buying gifts for women. This is an area where many men do not have a clue. Exhibit A was my father, who was a very thoughtful man, but who once gave my mother, on their anniversary, the following token of his love, his commitment, and-yes-his passion for her: an electric blanket.

Bruce Williams

Never love anything that can't love you back.

Louis C. K.

Fathers have skills that they never use at home. You run a landscaping business and you can't dress and feed a four-year-old? Take it on!

Louis C. K.

When my kids were younger, I used to avoid them. I used to sit on the toilet 'til my legs fell asleep. You want to know why your father spends so long in the toilet? Because he's not sure he wants to be a father.

Louis C. K.

I found out that I'm a pretty bad father. I make a lot of mistakes and I don't know what I'm doing. But my kids love me. Go figure.

August Strindberg

That is the thankless position of the father in the family-the provider for all, and the enemy of all.

Gretchen Rubin

I've always loved 'Before and After' stories, in books, magazines, and TV shows. Whenever I read those words, I'm hooked. The thought of a transformation - any kind of transformation - thrills me. And that's the promise of habits.

David Justice

This was a team that really loved each other. It's rare that you find a team that really pulls for each other, that really loves each other.

Kathryn Lasky

I loved to read, and if I could've been a professional reader, that's probably what I would've wanted to be!

Robert Krulwich

When I was a teenager, I loved political conventions.

Hunter Birckhead

She said she loved us, and she meant it.

Loretta Neigeborn

She said she just loved it here and wanted to stay.

Justin Timberlake

She had a passion for what she did, ... She loved to work and she loved to make music.

Ronald Williams

She really loved her neighbors there. She made a lot of friends there.

Angela Ross

She never complained about it. She loved those kids.

Charles Dickens

Why then we should drop into poetry.

David McCullough

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

Camille Paglia

Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.

C. K. Williams

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The poet should size the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal

Eugenio Montale

The poet does not know and often will never know his true receiver.

Edward Hirsch

Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem and the reader.

Edward Hirsch

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

Edward Hirsch

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

Alan Watts

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

Alan Paton

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

Alan Moore

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

Alan Moore

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Alan Bennett

I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Alan Bennett

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Alan Ball

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Alan Alda

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

Alan Alda

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

Nigel Barker

My daughter's first sentence was, 'Dada no hair.' And I was, like, 'No Jasmine, Dada does have hair, Dada just shaves his head.'

David Hume

Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.

Jason Calacanis

I don't want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me... Just too much risk.

Jane Jacobs

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Jose Rizal

Orientals, and the Malays in particular, are a sensitive people: delicacy of sentiment is predominant with them.

Blaise Pascal

All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

Mark Johnson

She sent a laser in there. You look for breaks, you look for bounces, and we got one on that first goal.

Bill Cosby

Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence - one at a time.

Colleen Hoover

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.

Arthur Bryant

Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

Robert Klein

In some articles written about me, writers have said I'm a link between the old and the new, and I think, in a certain sense, that's legitimate.

Brian K. Vaughan

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

Alan Moore

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

Charlaine Harris

Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences - we're just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.

Sara Sheridan

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

Aminatta Forna

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

Claire Tomalin

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

John Dos Passos

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.