Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alanis Morissette

When I was 11 years old and I was on a road trip with my family. I turned to my dad and said, "Do you believe in Adam and Eve?" And he said he didn't think so. I remember that felt like a slap in the face, because if my parents questioned Adam and Eve, then they potentially questioned everything within Catholicism. Eventually that idea led to my feeling liberated, but at that time it was very scary.

Alan Bennett

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

Al Jarreau

My dad graduated seminary there, and so did (sounds like) Mark Kimball's grandfather. They sang in a quartet together, my dad and Mark Kimball's grandfather.

Akon

I'm a polygamist. I can afford to have as many wives as I can afford to have. All Africans believe in it. My dad has four wives.

Nancy Long

We want them to have moms and dads and normal families.

Chick Corea

My dad was all about music. He was a musician, leading a band when I was born. His band was active all through the 40s. He'd started it in the late 20s and 30s. According to the scrapbook, his band was doing quite well around the Boston area. During the Depression they were on radio. It was a jazz-oriented band. He was a trumpet player, and he wrote and arranged for the band. He taught me how to play the piano and read music, and taught me what he knew of standard tunes and so forth. It was a fantastic way to come up in music.

Chief Joseph

I pressed my father's hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit land.

China Mieville

My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.

David Mixner

I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.

Alan Watts

We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - An infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide

Alan Greenspan

It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making

Al Pacino

Our life is looking forward or looking back, that's it. Where is the moment?

John Bolton

We want to thank the secretary-general for his personal and very prompt decision to waive privileges and immunities, ... This is now a serious law enforcement matter and we will have no further comment.

Javier Solana

We want to take a decision that is part of a solution, not part of a problem, and therefore it has to be well explained and understood by everybody.

Mark Shapiro

We want to set the roster as early as we can. This year, the decisions are so few.

Chris Cleave

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

Chris Colfer

Once the world has made a decision, there is little anyone can do to change its mind.

David Allen

There's a lot of reasons why deadline-driven may actually - it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just all it does is it speeds up and makes you a little proactive about decision making.

Charles Dickens

I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.

Charles Dickens

All knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost, in self defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature.

Charles Dickens

He would make a lovely corpse.

Charles Dickens

It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their passions.

Charles Dickens

Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

Charles Dickens

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Charles Dickens

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

Charles Caleb Colton

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.

Charles Caleb Colton

I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.

Charles Dickens

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.

Charles Dickens

Now, what I want is, Facts. . . . Facts alone are wanted in life.

Alan Perlis

Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

Alain Prost

I have no problem with the people who work hard to get success. But I think people are very jealous about success. I work very hard and they don't appreciate that.

Al Pacino

Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.

Akshay Kumar

I'm glad that I'm being acclaimed as an actor. Today, when my hard work has paid off I can chill out about it.

David McCullough

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

David McCullough

When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.

David Krumholtz

Hail, Caesar! is about, in my opinion - I love that movie - but I think it's about the idea that as glamorous as the business is, and for as much hoopla that surrounds moviemaking, ultimately it's just a job. If you focus on it, you can do it really well, and it takes a lot of hard work.

Charles Caleb Colton

Expect not praise without envy until you are dead.

Charles Dickens

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

Charles Simmons

Good Humor is the best shield against the darts of satirical raillery

Alan Watts

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Alan Moore

Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.

David Sedaris

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

Dave Barry

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Dave Barry

English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

Dave Barry

The basic Roman ruin design is a pile of rocks with a little plaque saying "Roman Ruins" and a group of tourists frowning at it and wishing they were back at the hotel bar..

Lykke Li

Where I've been hasn't influenced my music. It's more what I listen to. You can find music everywhere, so moving hasn't really influenced my music, more me as a person.

Nobu Matsuhisa

I used to watch my mother cooking when I was a child; she influenced me a lot.

Brendan Fletcher

'Amores Perros' and 'Once Were Warriors' had a tremendous visceral quality that really influenced me.

David Steinberg

In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.

Michael P. Anderson

There are just hundreds of people that have inspired and influenced me in a number of different ways. First of all, you can't forget your parents and all they've done to help you to get here.

Liv Warfield

Being with Prince and the New Power Generation, I was very influenced by those sounds, and now I'm more than ready to show that side of me with confidence.

David Buckner

Nothing indicates that any member of the jury was influenced by anything going on outside.

Billy Sherwood

I was so influenced by Yes then that things started to sound very much like Yes.

Jonathan Lethem

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

John Millington Synge

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.

Oscar Wilde

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Andrea Corr

She used to play every weekend in pubs with Daddy, and she'd written all these Irish songs out in a book. They're songs we've loved over the years, and because our parents played them in their band, they're very special to us.

Brendan Behan

One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.

William Allingham

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

Oscar Wilde

One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

Oliver Goldsmith

Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould

It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly.

Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.

Charles Dickens

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Charles Dickens

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Charles Dickens

This is a world of action, and not moping and droning in.

Charles Dickens

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Charles Dickens

Do all the good you can and make as little fuss about it as possible.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

Charles Caleb Colton

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Alan Alda

I've never tried to manipulate my image.

C. Northcote Parkinson

The smaller the function, the greater the management.

Brian Trehearne

The poetry was the man, the man was the poetry.

Benjamin Netanyahu

I'm not naturally manipulative.

David Hume

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

Arne Glimcher

I've been told I'm a good midcareer manager.

Edward Everett

Ever the characteristic manners of cowardice.

Ed Koch

Whenever I leave Manhattan, I get the bends!

Edward Kennedy

Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.

Veronica Corpuz

We're going to try and work through this to make sure no more productions will be canceled or postponed.

I. Stone

What we're really trying to do is to make sure when they get to kindergarten, they are better prepared, because for many of them, there is nothing until they get to kindergarten.

Jamie Shea

When we are sure what happened, we will tell you what happened.

Rich Rodriguez

What makes it tough is they're better for sure than they were two years ago,

Ralph Neas

We're going to make sure that Americans understand what is at stake.

Ed Paulk

We're just making sure there is nothing we are missing. It's just being proactive.

James Wilcox

We want to make sure we're on the same page,

Steve Cox

We want to make sure we get them in preseason.

Ralph Murphy

We want to make sure they (companies) have a place to come.

Charles Spurgeon

Do not begin to teach others until the Lord has taught you.

Alan Watts

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

Alan Paton

Life has not taught me to expect nothing, but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God.

Dave Barry

I was a middle-of-the-road Democrat more than anything else. I know I voted for Carter. Watergate taught me how bad the Republicans were.

Bryan Stevenson

My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone.

Charles Koch

To be happy you have to fulfill your nature. That's what Aristotle taught so many centuries ago, that the road to happiness isn't to go drink more or consume more. The road to happiness is to fully develop your abilities, and then apply them to do good.

Audre Lorde

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I, who thought to sink, was caught up into love, and taught the whole of life in a new rhythm.

Cass McCombs

When I was young, I used to go to Baha'i camp, and they taught me a lot about the equality of religions.

Charles Caleb Colton

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

Charles Simmons

Euphonic and harmonious expressions, forcible and just expressions, profound and comprehensive expressions, and especially apt and witty expressions, each have their specific influence upon different minds, and their common influence upon all minds.... It is therefore high time our most valuable aphorisms and paragraphs were put in order for frequent perusal, and for handy reference, as the circumstances of life call up subjects.

Charles Spurgeon

The friend of God must not spend a day without God, and he must undertake no work apart from his God.

Chinua Achebe

You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.

Dave Barry

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A tautology is a thing which is tautological. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. If your kids look like you, it's hereditory. If they look like the neighbor, it's the environment. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

Dave Barry

What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrific-ally witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties.

Dave Barry

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

Dave Barry

I will vote for the first candidate who promises to use nuclear missiles against LinkedIn.

Dave Barry

Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.