Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

There are some upon this earth of yours,' returned the Spirit, 'who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.

Charles Dickens

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

Charles Caleb Colton

Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.

Charles Caleb Colton

The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is a holy love and a holy rage, and our best virtues never glow so brightly as when our passions are excited in the cause. Sloth, if it has prevented many crimes, has also smothered many virtues; and the best of us are better when roused.

Charles Caleb Colton

By privileges, immunities, or prerogatives to give unlimited swing to the passions of individuals, and then to hope that they will restrain them, is about as reasonable as to expect that the tiger will spare the hart to browse upon the herbage.

Charles Caleb Colton

The breast of a good man is a little heaven commencing on earth; where the Deity sits enthroned with unrivaled influence, every subjugated passion, "like the wind and storm, fulfilling his word.

Charles Caleb Colton

So blinded are we by our passions, that we suffer more to be damned than to be saved.

Charles Dickens

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.

Charles Caleb Colton

Falsehood is never so successful as when she baits her hook with truth, and no opinions so fatally mislead us as those that are not wholly wrong, as no watches so effectively deceive the wearer as those that are sometimes right.

Charles Sturt

The increasing importance of Sydney must in some measure be attributed to the flourishing condition of the colony itself, to the industry of its farmers, to the successful enterprise of its merchants, and to particular local causes.

Charles Spurgeon

Complicity with error will take from the best of men the power to enter any successful protest against it.

Alan Moore

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

Alan Greenspan

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.

Alan Greenspan

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

Alan Bennett

The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.

Alan Ball

Not everything is going to be successful. To strive for that is really naive. You just do the best you can do.

Alan Alda

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

Charles Dickens

It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things.

Alan Watts

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Alan Watts

But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.

Alan Watts

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Alan Watts

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

Alan Bennett

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

Akio Morita

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

David Denby

Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.

David Puttnam

As intelligent and responsible filmmakers, working in a free society, we have a duty to ensure that our chosen medium is a force for good. Especially in this ever-more complex and difficult world.