Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out...

Charles Caleb Colton

A beautiful woman, if poor, should use double circumspection; for her beauty will tempt others, her poverty herself.

Charles Caleb Colton

Wit in women is a jewel, which, unlike all others, borrows lustre from its setting, rather than bestows it; since nothing is so easy as to fancy a very beautiful woman extremely witty.

Charles Dickens

How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don't ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.

Charles Dickens

And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day.

Charles Dickens

... Natural affections and instincts, my dear sir, are the most beautiful of the Almighty's works, but like other beautiful works of His, they must be reared and fostered, or it is as natural that they should be wholly obscured, and that new feelings should usurp their place, as it is that the sweetest productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked with weeds and briers.

Charles Dickens

She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful.

Charles Dickens

... when he saw her sitting there all alone, so young, and good, and beautiful, and kind to him; and heard her thrilling voice, so natural and sweet, and such a golden link between him and all his life's love and happiness, rising out of the silence; he turned his face away, and hid his tears.

Charles Dickens

I don't remember forms or faces now, but I know the girl was beautiful. I know she was; for in the bright moonlight nights, when I start from my sleep, and all is quiet about me, I see, standing still and motionless in one corner of this cell, a slight and wasted figure with long black hair, which streaming down her back, stirs with no earthly wind, and eyes that fix their gaze on me, and never wink or close...

Al Alvarez

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

Juvenal

If you are capable of submitting to insult you ought to be insulted.

Tom Waits

Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.

Demetri Martin

The easiest time to add insult to injury is when you're signing somebody's cast.

Asghar Farhadi

I think it's insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.

Amy Poehler

If you can speak about what you care about to a person you disagree with without denigrating them or insulting them, then you may actually be heard.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Scientists are not movie stars or politicians who will feel insulted if they are not showered with accolades. Scientists are not interested in accolades.

Joe Sinagra

Perhaps the taxpayers should also take it as personally insulting when they are being sold out.

Oscar Wilde

Popularity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.

Charles Dickens

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Charles Dickens

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Charles Dickens

This is a world of action, and not moping and droning in.

Charles Dickens

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Charles Dickens

Do all the good you can and make as little fuss about it as possible.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

Charles Caleb Colton

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Charles Dickens

I don't remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off Dora, entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather diminutive altogether. So much the more precious, I thought.

Charles Dickens

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

Charles Dickens

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Charles Dickens

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.

Charles Dickens

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

Charles Dickens

You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

Charles Dickens

What lawsuits grow out of the graves of rich men, every day; sowing perjury, hatred, and lies among near kindred, where there should be nothing but love!

Charles Dickens

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.

Charles Dickens

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Charles Dickens

Try to do unto others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail than you should.

Charles Spurgeon

Dear friends, whenever you want to understand a text of Scripture, try to read the original

Charles Spurgeon

The great reason why we have so little good preaching is that we have so little piety. To be eloquent one must be in earnest; he must not only act as if he were in earnest, or try to be in earnest, but be in earnest.

Alan Watts

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

Alan Watts

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Alan Watts

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Alan Parsons

That Beatle euphoria has always been there, and it's hard to be in a room with a Beatle and try to be totally natural. You never shake that off.

Alan Moore

I try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.

Alan Arkin

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

Charles Caleb Colton

Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates and destroys.

Charles Caleb Colton

Modesty is the richest ornament of a woman ... the want of it is her greatest deformity.

Charles Caleb Colton

A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.

Charles Caleb Colton

The plainest man who pays attention to women, will sometimes succeed as well as the handsomest man who does not.

Charles Caleb Colton

Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.

Charles Caleb Colton

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

Charles Dickens

She's the sort of woman now,' said Mould, . . . 'one would almost feel disposed to bury for nothing: and do it neatly, too!

Alan Jay Lerner

You see what happens today. Women act like men and want to be treated like women.