Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Charles Dickens

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Charles Caleb Colton

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Dickens

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.

Charles Spurgeon

Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then hast thou reason to rejoice: but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying "I am saved" is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee.

Charles Spurgeon

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Charles Spurgeon

Come boldly, 'O believer, for despite the whisperings of Satan and the doubtings of thine own heart, thou art greatly beloved.

Alanis Morissette

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

Alan Moore

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day." The Joker - The Killing Joke

Al Roker

If I was having a bad day, eating was like self-medicating. But if you abuse food, you still have to use that substance that you abuse every day. You have to learn to use it responsibly.

Chris Cleave

The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.

Chris Bangle

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

Chesty Puller

Where the hell do you put the bayonet?

Cathy Freeman

When I'm in a bad mood, I don't listen.

Casey Affleck

I have a very bad relationship with mice.

Michael Steele

You know, conservatism is not a bad thing. It's not a pejorative.

Charles Caleb Colton

A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

Alan Bennett

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

David Mitchell

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

David Graeber

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

David Suzuki

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

Cesare Pavese

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

Camille Paglia

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The higher you go, the fewer women there are.

Dave Chappelle

The higher up I went, the less happy I was.

Louis Gossett, Jr.

I was president of the schools in junior high and high school, got a scholarship to New York University, played a little basketball, and was a celebrity.

Shinzo Abe

The other side has not responded to any of our requests regarding the abduction issue, so it is highly regrettable.

James Browning

The potential profits are so high there's a win-at-any-cost mentality.

Mark Thompson

The perception is that it's too high end, too futuristic, but I think we will see prices and use models to support it.

John Connaughton

The people who pay the highest income tax are also the most mobile. They simply leave North Carolina.

John Remington

We are always trying to look for unique ideas, and we wanted something new for New York. We thought that hey, it's an island, let's do something on the water...New Yorkers have pretty high expectations.

Marty Natalegawa

We've always been on a high state of alert. The perpetrators of the previous bombings are still very much at large and the risk is still very much with us,

William Shakespeare

What is more miserable than discontent?

Russ Moore

We're going to McDonald's. We had a miserable day.

Billy Collins

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

Brendan Behan

There is no human situation so miserable that it cannot be made worse by the presence of a policeman.

Ben Okri

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable.

Edward Abbey

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.

Robert Holden

Many people are out without shelter. It was miserable to start with but with this things are only going to get worse.

Gene Stephenson

We set a miserable tone from the start.

Jane Austen

But to appear happy when I am so miserable — Oh! who can require it?

David Sedaris

If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?

Roman Gutierrez

We still saw some of our inexperience today. That will be the case, but there were still some steps of improvement.

Bo Burnham

I saw a giraffe with a short neck That was sad Or a deer

Audrey Meadows

Fans always ask, What did the bedroom look like? All they ever saw was Alice or Ralph going in and out.

Arnold Bennett

Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.

Deborah Harkness

You do angry. I just saw it. And you left at least one hole in my carpet to prove it.

Dennis Hopper

I wanted to be an actor. I decided when I was very young, when I first saw movies, that I wanted to be an actor.

Bill Murray

If you walk up to some random person on the street, grab them by the shoulder, and say 'Did you just see what I saw?!', you'll find that no-one wants to talk to you.

Carol Leifer

There were very few women comics when I started out doing stand-up. But I always saw that as a great advantage.

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 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.

Charles Caleb Colton

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.

James Arness

What made us different from other westerns was the fact that 'Gunsmoke' wasn't just action and a lot of shooting; they were character-study shows.

Bruce Campbell

Westerns pop up every so often, everybody does a western and then they all die.

Will Hobbs

I do have two wonderful awards from the Western Writers of America, one for 'Beardance' and the other for 'Far North.' The award is called the Spur, and the plaques really do have spurs on them!

Frank Mauro

Western New York is probably characterized more by stagnancy than anything else.

Eckhart Tolle

Especially for those of us living in the Western culture, death to a large extent is still a taboo subject. It's considered something dreadful that shouldn't be happening. It's usually denied. The fact of death is not faced. What we don't realize in Western culture is that death has a redemptive dimension.

Edward Norton

Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not.

Clint Eastwood

I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it.

Clint Eastwood

Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have messed with? That's me.

Mel Brooks

I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality.

Cy Coleman

We're doing a workshop over the first two weeks of December, I believe, with Graciella Daniele directing it.

Ira Glass

Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I can't even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.

Walead Beshty

My works look to how images are produced, but specially based upon how the material reacts.

Val McDermid

Walking by water frees your creativity. I don't know how it works - there's something about it that's liberating.

Jim Hodges

My latest works are these things with light bulbs.

Frank Thomas

If I'm in a cast, I can't do it. We'll see how it works out, but I'll be around.

Kevin Hassett

I think it's the only way it works politically,

Christopher Walken

As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.