Famous Quotes & Sayings

C. S. Lewis

When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

Charlie Chaplin

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury. [and therefore not appreciate it fully or be grateful for it every moment.]

Charles Dickens

I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you[for helping me]. I almost feel as if You ought to be grateful to ME, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. . . I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you, by giving you an opportunity of assisting me.

Charles Caleb Colton

Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.

Charles Caleb Colton

The benevolent have the advantage of the envious, even in this present life; for the envious man is tormented not only by all the ill that befalls himself, but by all the good that happens to another; whereas the benevolent man is the better prepared to bear his own calamities unruffled, from the complacency and serenity he has secured from contemplating the prosperity of all around him.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.

Charles Caleb Colton

Revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude

Charles Caleb Colton

An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game; because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude

Charles Caleb Colton

There are three kinds of praise, that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.

Alan Watts

Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.

Alan Watts

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Alan Watts

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then , my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Alan Watts

Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.

Alan Ball

I'm a Buddhist, so one of my biggest beliefs is, 'Everything changes, don't take it personally.'

Alan Ball

I believe forgiveness is possible for everybody, for everything, but I'm a Buddhist.

Chogyam Trungpa

Anything that is created must sooner or later die. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.

Chogyam Trungpa

What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others.

Chogyam Trungpa

The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of habits and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.

Carol Leifer

There are so many opportunities that I could've gotten before if I had just took a little more of a risk.

Carlos Fuentes

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Duncan Fletcher

We want to rest Freddie whenever we can. We saw this as an opportunity the other day.

Fran Dunphy

When your opportunity comes, it's not what you do right as much as it's what you don't do wrong.

Abba Eban

Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Aasif Mandvi

When my family decided to leave England I could not have been happier. I was sort of like - America seemed like the land of opportunity and, you know, it was Hollywood to me.

Alan Stern

Naming celestial objects is usually done by astronomers and professionals. Other people who are interested in space never get the opportunity to do that kind of thing.

Alan Rusbridger

There is this ferocious digital revolution coming along and we're in the teeth of that at the time of maximum economic disruption. There are huge opportunities there. I made the point in my supplementary statement that the Guardian is now a very considerable global player, but there are huge challenges in terms of making, of finding, the convincing business model, so I want to see Guardian journalism continue and thrive, although whether and to what extent that is in print or in digital is a sort of second order matter.

Alan Shepard

So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.