Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Charles Caleb Colton

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

Charles Caleb Colton

The most notorious swindler has not assumed so many names as self-love, nor is so much ashamed of his own. She calls herself patriotism, when at the same time she is rejoicing at just as much calamity to her native country as will introduce herself into power, and expel her rivals.

Charles Dickens

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Charles Dickens

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

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.

Bill Johnson

Fear is a thief. It robbed Peter of a perfectly good walk on water, & kept the other eleven in the boat.

JoAnn Carrin

We're confused. We don't understand the judge's reaction. We're perfectly prepared to prosecute this case.

David Schwimmer

To be perfectly honest, I feel I have a duty to use my celebrity status in a positive way.

Theophilus London

I want to wear something that's not perfectly matching; there has to be something unorthodox about it. I want to create this mystery.

Elsa Peretti

I hate that impeccable, perfectly perfect look, all matched and prearranged.

Aldous Huxley

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

John Drinkwater

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

Katherine Schwarzenegger

I don't do my hair very perfectly because I think it looks sexier when you don't have everything perfectly structured out.

Annie Lennox

I've thought about what is an alternative word to feminism. There isn't one. It's a perfectly good word. And it can't be changed.

Sun Yuxi

The United States must take a more cooperative and pragmatic attitude, it must take responsibility, and it must apologize.

Kevin Barry

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

Gloria Swanson

I am a very pragmatic person.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

One gets wrapped up in reacting to one's own reputation, which can be a kind of trap.

Zig Ziglar

Do you respond to life or are you merely reacting to it?

Alan Arkin

My favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning.

Bryan Ferry

As you get older, you get a bit more serious.

Bryan Clay

Repercussions are serious and they will take you places.

Cathy Freeman

Between 1991 and 1997 I had really serious asthma.

William Shakespeare

In persons grafted in a serious trust, Negligence is a crime.

Benedict Cumberbatch

I understand from those who adore him, he [Julian Assange] has a great sense of humor which rarely gets an airing because he's dealing with such serious issues.

Arthur Rimbaud

No one's serious at seventeen.

Dee Dee Ramone

Visuals are as artistic as sounds, so being serious about both isn't a contradiction to me.

Bill Nye

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change.

Charles Dickens

Stranger, pause and ask thyself the question, Canst thou do likewise? If not, with a blush retire.

Alan Arkin

Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost anyplace I've ever experienced. It's made more difficult by the fact that it's constantly changing. You never know what class you belong to unless you're one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

Benedict Cumberbatch

I really discovered [Dr.Strange] through hearing about this film and first meeting Scott [Derrickson] and getting into it and just opening up and saying, "Okay, this is, like all comics, very much of its era," and my first question was, 'How do you make this film? Why do you make this film now?' and the answers were so enticing that I was like, "I'm in."

Benedict Cumberbatch

I'm aware of [Doctor Strange] place within the comic pantheon of it all, the Marvelverse, but I don't email saying, "When are we doing next film?" I'm excited to see.

C. S. Lewis

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin.

Agnes Varda

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.

Charlotte Bronte

There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.

Charles Dudley Warner

Politics makes strange bedfellows.