Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles de Gaulle

What do you take me for, an idiot?

Charles Caleb Colton

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

Charles Simmons

Euphonic and harmonious expressions, forcible and just expressions, profound and comprehensive expressions, and especially apt and witty expressions, each have their specific influence upon different minds, and their common influence upon all minds.... It is therefore high time our most valuable aphorisms and paragraphs were put in order for frequent perusal, and for handy reference, as the circumstances of life call up subjects.

Dave Barry

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A tautology is a thing which is tautological. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. If your kids look like you, it's hereditory. If they look like the neighbor, it's the environment. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

Dave Barry

What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrific-ally witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties.

Dave Barry

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

Dave Barry

I will vote for the first candidate who promises to use nuclear missiles against LinkedIn.

Dave Barry

Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.

Caroline Dhavernas

It's very witty and it's great to see teenage characters have control that way. And you can actually hear about sex and pot and it's okay, it's not completely bad and you can't say that to teenagers.

Charles Sumner

A nation cannot afford to do a mean thing.

Charles de Gaulle

No, I'm not talking about the Russians; I mean the Germans. In spite of everything, to have pushed so far!

Charles de Lint

Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.

Charles de Lint

I'm not as trusting as people think I am. Sure, I see the best in people, but that doesn't mean it's really there.

Charles de Lint

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.

Charles de Lint

There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all.

Charles Caleb Colton

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

Charles Caleb Colton

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.

Charles Caleb Colton

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.

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.

Dianne Wiest

Young people are more intelligent and sophisticated.

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.