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 Caleb Colton

Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.

Charles Dickens

The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.

Charles Dickens

He says-him as was here just now-'When Tom shut up the house, mate, to go to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if somebody was a-going to sleep in every bed. And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you'd see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a heaving and a heaving like seas. And a heaving and a heaving with what?' he says. 'Why, with the rats under 'em.'

Charles Dickens

'Mind and matter,' said the lady in the wig, 'glide swift into the vortex if immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.'

Charles Stross

--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

Charles Spurgeon

Easy roads make sleepy travellers.

Charles Spurgeon

The fact is, brethren, we must have conversion work here. We cannot go on as some churches do without converts. We cannot, we will not, we must not, we dare not. Souls must be converted here, and if there be not many born to Christ, may the Lord grant to me that I may sleep in the tomb and be heard no more. Better indeed for us to die than to live, if souls be not saved.

Alan Watts

What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

Alan Watts

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

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.

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.

David Puttnam

As intelligent and responsible filmmakers, working in a free society, we have a duty to ensure that our chosen medium is a force for good. Especially in this ever-more complex and difficult world.