Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carol Shields

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted...

Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Castaneda

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Carlos Castaneda

I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.

Carlos Castaneda

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Carlos Castaneda

One ,must have something to die for in order to have something to live for

Carlos Castaneda

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

C. S. Lewis

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

Agnes de Mille

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

C. S. Lewis

My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.

Aaron Swartz

What is "this drive"? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.

Charlotte Bronte

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones.

Charlie Chaplin

What a sad business is being funny!

Charles Dickens

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

Charles Dickens

Some women's faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy; and some, in their sadness, a history.

Charles Caleb Colton

Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.

Charles Caleb Colton

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.

Suzy Menkes

There is something sad about clothes laid in a tomb of trunks.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Charles W. Chesnutt

There's time enough, but none to spare.

Charles de Lint

In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.

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.

Agnes de Mille

I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.

Charles Dickens

At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.

Charles Dickens

The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets.

Charles Spurgeon

No one served God by doing things tomorrow.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

If we make provision for sinning tomorrow, we will be sinning tomorrow.

Charlize Theron

You just don't know if you'll be around tomorrow. You just don't.

Charles Lamb

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

Charles Lamb

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.

Charles Lamb

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.