Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face.

Charles Dickens

"My comfort is," said Susan, looking back at Mr. Dombey, "that I have told a piece of truth this day which ought to have been told long before and can't be told too often or too plain..."

Charles Dickens

"You are a boy," said Mr. Dombey, suddenly and almost fiercely; "and what you think of, or affect to think of, is of little consequence. You have done well, Sir. Don't undo it."

Charles Caleb Colton

Living authors, therefore, are usually, bad companions. If they have not gained character, they seek to do so by methods often ridiculous, always disgusting; and if they have established a character, they are silent for fear of losing by their tongue what they have acquired by their pen--for many authors converse much more foolishly than Goldsmith, who have never written half so well.

Charles Caleb Colton

When certain persons abuse us, let us ask ourselves what description of characters it is that they admire; we shall often find this a very consolatory question.

Charles Caleb Colton

We should not be too niggardly in our praise, for men will do more to support a character than to raise one.

Charles Caleb Colton

Very great personages are not likely to form very just estimates either of others or of themselves; their knowledge of themselves is obscured by the flattery of others; their knowledge of others is equally clouded by circumstances peculiar to themselves. For in the presence of the great, the modest are sure to suffer from too much diffidence, and the confident from too much display.

Charles Caleb Colton

Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.

Charles Caleb Colton

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.

Charles Dickens

There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him, in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing.

Charles Dickens

Father Time is not always a hard parent and though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

Charles Dickens

There is nothing--no, nothing--innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.

Charles Dickens

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Charles Dickens

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.

Charles Caleb Colton

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Charles Caleb Colton

Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as a hostage; often as a captive and more often as a child; but knowledge has become of age, and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend.

Charles Caleb Colton

Gaming is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality.

Charles Caleb Colton

Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.

Charles Dickens

He did each single thing as if he did nothing else.

Charles Stanley

Each of us will eventually give away all our earthly possessions. How we choose to do so, however, is a reflection of our commitment to the kingdom of God.

Al Sharpton

It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.

Tim Sanders

We want them to have that local commitment to the community, and that's a big part of our request for proposals. We're not looking for Wells Fargo out of San Francisco.

Frank Hadden

We want to try and pinch some of their ball. Nathan has a long term commitment to playing for Scotland.

Chris Alexander

I'm totally in favour of meeting our Paris commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But I don't think we should do that by making ourselves uncompetitive.

Chinua Achebe

There is something about important stories that is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language. So it's really a balance between your commitment, whether it's political or economic or whatever, and your craft as an artist.

David Mixner

Treating HIV/AIDS is a lifelong commitment that demands strict adherence to drug protocols, consistent care, and a trusting relationship with health care providers.

David Miliband

What's now urgently needed [to stop environmental disaster] is the international political commitment to take action to avoid dangerous climate change.

Charles Dickens

My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.

Charles Dickens

I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.

Charles Caleb Colton

The smiling daughter of the storm.

Charles Dickens

It was a dagger in the haughty father's heart, an arrow in his brain, to see how the flesh and blood he could not disown clung to this obscure stranger, and he sitting by. Not that he cared to whom his daughter turned, or from whom turned away. The swift sharp agony struck through him, as he thought of what his son might do.

Charles Stuart Calverley

The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these.

Alan Moore

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.

Alan Jay Lerner

For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter.

Alan Jackson

After 17' is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.

Alan Bradley

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.

Alan Parsons

I had the honor of speaking with Asimov. The album ended up being something not directly related to Asimov, but related instead to the concept of the power of robotics.

David McCullough

To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

William Shakespeare

If I lose my honor, I lose myself: better I were not yours Than yours so branchless.

William Shakespeare

The due of honor in no point omit.

William Shakespeare

If is a custom, More honor'd in the breach than the observance.

Billy Joel

I have been both praised and criticized. The criticism stung, but the praise sometimes bothered me even more. To have received such praise and honors has always been puzzling to me.

Bill Johnson

A culture of honor is celebrating who a person is without stumbling over who they're not.

David Weber

Henke sensed her terrifying aptitude for destruction as never before. Henke had feared for her sanity; now she knew the truth was almost worse than that. Honor wasn't insane - she simply didn't care. She'd lost not only her sense of balance but any desire to regain it.

Nicholas Negroponte

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

Jordan Spieth

Whenever the heat's on, my whole life, I've just kind of learned to focus a little more.

Michael Brown

We've been able to put those things we've learned in the past in place and save many more structures,

Dave Nutting

We're a young team and I think we learned a valuable lesson. And we'll know what it takes to win in the playoffs next year. I couldn't be prouder of the guys.

Melissa Leo

Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living.

Courtney Beasley

We're just going to get better. We learned a lot as a team, and I know I learned a lot as a player. Now, we have to take what we've learned and get better.

Tracy Morgan

If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that curiosity might kill cats, but it doesn't kill people.

King Bach

I just use all the skills that I learned in film school, and I just incorporate them into my sketches. People don't realize that, with a story, there has to be a beginning, middle and end. There has to be a problem and a resolution. Just because it's six seconds doesn't mean it's not a story.

Junior Seau

From my old neighborhood, I learned nothing was guaranteed, not even life itself. You better get it today, because tomorrow is not promised.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by reputation, approved by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.

Charles Dickens

We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.

Charles Dickens

I could not help wondering in my own mind....how it came to pass that our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes - and whether our butcher contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world; but I kept my reflections to myself.

Alan Pardew

It (Arsenal) is an English club but not an English success. It's probably a greater reflection of youngsters from France and elsewhere in Europe.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light.

Byron Katie

When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.

Cesare Pavese

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Jane Austen

Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.

Charles Caleb Colton

A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.

Charles Stanley

God takes full responsibility for the life wholly devoted to Him.

Alan Rickman

Talent is an accident of genes - and a responsibility.

Alan Moore

The roots of the word 'anarchy' are 'an archos,' 'no leaders,' which is not really about the kind of chaos that most people imagine when the word 'anarchy' is mentioned. I think that anarchy is, to the contrary, about taking personal responsibility for yourself.

Al Pacino

Responsibilities are relative. My responsibility is to a character in a script, to a part I'm playing.

Al Madrigal

My primary responsibility is to be funny,

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Each department and institution has its own authorities and responsibilities, and they act on that basis. It is wrong to even compare such actions to what is done in Guantanamo or elsewhere by the Americans. They do not stand on a high moral platform to preach to others.

Akio Morita

If we face recession, we should not lay off employees; the company should sacrifice a profit. It's management's risk and management's responsibility. Employees are not guilty; why should they suffer?

Chris Colfer

I don't personally feel a responsibility to be a role model, but as the actor, I do.

Lloyd Cutler

And we made decisions on each of those matters which were ultimately upheld by the courts.

Helen Thomas

I've never covered the president in any way other than that he is ultimately responsible.

Bhagat Singh

A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.

Nick Clooney

The kind of Iraq that emerges from all of this is ultimately out of our hands.

David Twohy

There's so much diversity of opinion out there, so ultimately you have to listen to it, put it aside, and make what you want to make.

Wendy Tellone

As superintendent, I am ultimately responsible. I feel responsible.

Rob Lundgren

Some words ultimately will be bleeped. There aren't that many.

Lee Kreindler

It's a pretty big deal. How it will ultimately play out, I don't know.

Charles Dickens

A word in earnest is as good as a speech.

Charles Dickens

Anything that makes a noise is satisfactory to a crowd.

Charles Dickens

Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.

Charles Dickens

Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock.

Chris Cornell

The words you say never live up to the words in your head.

Louise Erdrich

It was enough just to sit there without words.

David Hume

The simplest and most obvious cause which can there be assigned for any phenomena, is probably the true one.

Edward Everett Hale

I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

Carlos Castaneda

Do you know at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity if you so desire?

Alan Watts

Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.

Alan Clark

Give a civil servant a good case and he'll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.

Alan Bennett

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

Alan Ayckbourn

A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

Al Kaline

You've got to get good habits of working hard so that when that play comes up during the regular season that you're able to complete it and do it the right way.

Akio Morita

Japanese people tend to be much better adjusted to the notion of work, any kind of work, as honorable.

Chloe Sevigny

I do a dance-based cardio workout infused with circuit training, and emphasizing strength and alignment.

Dave Chappelle

If I put forth a legitimate effort, then I feel like, if that doesn't work out, that's all I can do.

Dave Chappelle

I always take a relationship to the next level. If that works out, I take it to the next level after that, until I finally reach that level when it becomes absolutely necessary for me to leave.