Famous Quotes & Sayings

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 Caleb Colton

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

Alan Watts

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Alan Perlis

Optimization hinders evolution.

Alan Perlis

Any noun can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Alan Perlis

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Alan Perlis

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

Bruce Barber

We want them to go back to doing what they used to do, which is migrate. The reason they migrate is for food. When they don't migrate, their offspring don't learn to migrate.

Wissam Nasr

We want to stop profiling. The more that people learn about Islam, the more tolerant they become.

Al Jourgensen

Everything shapes you to be the person you are today. Sometimes hard lessons pay off dividends.

Chris Colfer

No matter what you do, you can never please everyone. And that was the hardest lesson to learn. In fact, I'm still learning it.

Cael Sanderson

Unless you continually work, evolve, and innovate, you'll learn a quick and painful lesson from someone who has.

Eartha Kitt

I used to teach dance lessons.

Bear Grylls

The lesson is, the rewards in life don't always go to the biggest, or the bravest, or the smartest. The rewards go to the dogged; and when your going though hell, to the person who just keeps going.

Denis Waitley

Success is a process that continues, not a status that you reach. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

Eliza Haywood

To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.

Charlie Munger

A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business

Charlie Munger

The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.

Alan Ball

I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.

Al Oerter

Competition in its best form is a test of self. It has nothing to do with medals. The winner is the person who gets the most out of themselves.

Al Seckel

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

Chogyam Trungpa

The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that in this world, as it is, we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others. That is our true richness.

Chip Conley

What one thing can you start counting today that will actually be meaningful in your life?

Dave Chappelle

You've got to say 'yes' to your destiny. Life's happening right now, look around you. There goes some life. Come on, Mamma, live!

David Guterson

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Dave Barry

I always assumed that at some point I would have to quit making jokes, get a real job and do something meaningful and productive that would actually benefit society. Fortunately this never happened.

David Suchet

I can't try to convert anybody. It's not in me to do that. But my faith has given me such an appreciation of people and meaningful relationships, and a world view which I didn't have before. And although I will fail every day, it gives me something to aspire to.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

Charles Dickens

A multitude of people and yet solitude.

Charles Dickens

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.

Charles Dickens

Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.

Charles Dickens

Mrs. Boffin and me, ma'am, are plain people, and we don't want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there's always a straight way to everything.

Charles Dickens

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.

Charles Dickens

Some people are nobody's enemies but their own

Charles Soule

Superman/Wonder Woman, people expected, I guess, a lot of romance, or maybe something that wasnt emotionally deep. Who knows?

Alan Watts

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

Alan Paton

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

Alan Moore

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

Alan Moore

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Alan Bennett

I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Alan Bennett

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Alan Ball

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Alan Alda

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

Alan Alda

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

Charles Spurgeon

Thankfulness makes much of little.

David Mitchell

I remain thankful to God for all his mercies.

Chris Linsley

We're so thankful that we've been able to have what's a speedy recovery.

Brian Tracy

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

Nathan Kress

I'm thankful to say that I already have my dream job. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Ben Saunders

What's the nastiest injury I've sustained? Just a frostbitten toe... but thankfully it's still intact.

Aldous Huxley

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Babette March

I came to New York with $500 and I had to live on that, but thankfully I was taken up by photographers quickly.

Albert Schweitzer

Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.