Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Charles Caleb Colton

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

Charles Caleb Colton

The most notorious swindler has not assumed so many names as self-love, nor is so much ashamed of his own. She calls herself patriotism, when at the same time she is rejoicing at just as much calamity to her native country as will introduce herself into power, and expel her rivals.

Charles Dickens

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Charles Dickens

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

Elizabeth Olsen

I've never read a young adult novel, though. I'm sure I would love it, but I've never read one.

Aaron Swartz

The adults were completely wrong.

Art Spiegelman

Sometimes I don't feel like a functioning adult

David Foster Wallace

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

Bertrand Russell

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.

Joan Didion

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Erik Larson

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

John Irving

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

Hayao Miyazaki

The love of weaponry is often a manifestation of infantile traits in an adult.

Gary Johnson

Regardless of my legislation, spending has to be stopped.

Moses Mendelssohn

Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another.

Kinky Friedman

I'll sign anything except bad legislation.

Rufus King

The most numerous objects of legislation belong to the States. Those of the National Legislature [are] but few.

William O. Douglas

We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.