Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand.

Charles Dickens

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat.

Charles Stross

I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.

Charles Stross

I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

Alanis Morissette

Over the last couple of years, I've really worked toward balancing my life out more, having a little bit more time with friends, family and my boyfriend. There was a period of time when they were way down the list. It was all about music and touring and if everything fell by the wayside, so be it.

Alan Moore

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

Alan Arkin

I played guitar. I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor. So I was in a couple of folk groups that managed to keep me in underwear and burritos.

Alan Ball

There are times when I am directing, and there are a couple of moments I didn't get the way I wanted, but I know I still have other angles to shoot and I have to be done by noon; I move on.

Al Michaels

I still believe Emmitt has enough left in the tank to be a productive back over the next couple of seasons.

Charles Dickens

Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you an't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.

Charles Dickens

To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.

Charles Stross

I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.

Alan Watts

The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever.

Alan Watts

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

Alan Moore

They say that life's a game, & then they take the board away.

Alan Green

You don't score 64 goals in 86 games at the highest level without being able to score goals.

Al Alvarez

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

Al Alvarez

Hold'em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Charles Caleb Colton

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it.

Charles Caleb Colton

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

Charles Caleb Colton

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

Charles Dickens

The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

Charles Dickens

So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!...

Charles Dickens

But, in this separation I associate you only with the good and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you have done far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

Charles Dickens

Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

Charles Simmons

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Charles Dickens

Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.

Charles Simmons

Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.

Alan Rickman

I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time.

Eric DiBiase

We've won nine of the last 11, so I like our chances.

Andrew Palmer

We want to show that we're no joke. People thought last year was a fluke. We can make improvements from last year. We're ready to see what's out there.

David Mitchell

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

David Sanborn

You're only as good as your last record.

Camille Paglia

The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.

Bryan Lee O'Malley

I need some kind of... like... last minute, poorly-set-up deus ex machina!!

David Guetta

Everything I make as a producer, I visualize it as a DJ first. And all those beats, I test them as a DJ.

David Deutsch

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

David Deutsch

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

Bryan Shelton

I would expect an extremely high percentage of the chickens would test positive. Our poultry industry clients wouldn't like that.

Arnold Bennett

The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.

Edwin Land

The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.

Bill Nye

Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

C. S. Lewis

The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

Agnes Macphail

We meet all life's greatest tests alone.

Charles Dickens

A boy's story is the best that is ever told.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.

Charles Caleb Colton

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.

Charles Dickens

Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.

Charles Caleb Colton

If we look backwards to antiquity it should be as those that are winning a race.

Charles Caleb Colton

In order to try whether a vessel be leaky, we first prove it with water before we trust it with wine.

Charles Caleb Colton

All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.

Charles Caleb Colton

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

Charles Dickens

Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop," returned madame; "but don't tell me.

Charles Dickens

Ride on! Ride on over all obstacles and win the race.

Charles Dickens

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.

Charles Stross

Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.

Charles Spurgeon

If I knew I had 25 years left to live, I would spend 20 of them in preparation.

Alanis Morissette

I'm a bit of an alchemist sorceress. I've collected probably 1500 oils from around the planet over the last ten years. I'm kind of obsessed with the sensuality of it.

Alan Watts

...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Alan Mulally

Although the quality of the vehicles is tremendously improving year after year but the underlying reasons that people are buying cars have really gotten focused. It's for high quality vehicles, reliable, fuel-efficient, and safe of course.

Alan Moore

I've known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that.

Alan Moore

It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one.

Alan Moore

It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.

Alan Hovhaness

I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.