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.

Louis Navellier

One of the things that launched the strength in biotech is when the pharmaceutical industry itself got a little slow.

Louis Sachar

With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.

Jeff Justice

The outcome itself shows it was an unreasonable risk.

Stephen Graham Jones

Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.

Matt Rosoff

What's left under MSN -- MSNBC? Microsoft just divested itself of that, too.

Pete Smith

The plan itself is still being drafted. We're working with HUD on rules and regulations.

Robert Redford

There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn't need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.

Enya

The music sold itself before anybody knew who I was.

Jim Crace

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

Charles Dickens

I don't remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off Dora, entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather diminutive altogether. So much the more precious, I thought.

Charles Dickens

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

Charles Dickens

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Charles Dickens

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.

Charles Dickens

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

Charles Dickens

You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

Charles Dickens

What lawsuits grow out of the graves of rich men, every day; sowing perjury, hatred, and lies among near kindred, where there should be nothing but love!

Charles Dickens

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.

Charles Dickens

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Chick Hearn

You can't please everybody all the time, but you can please a majority.

Luc Ferrari

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Bertolt Brecht

With drooping shoulders The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose.

Robert Johnston

We have no plans for any major shakeup at this point,

Tim Wilson

We were at a crossroads, whether we were going to have to doze it in or do some major repairs.

Lisa Bonet

The Cosby years were a major part of my life, but it is the past; I don't really concentrate on it.

Robert A. Heinlein

Was there ever a time when the majority was right? Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A

Frank Villante

With the major resource stocks, the fundamentals still look very attractive.

Nykesha Sales

Yeah, I played the majority of the year, but that's just like training. You train all year round anyway, so it's the same thing.

Alan Ball

I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.

Al Oerter

Competition in its best form is a test of self. It has nothing to do with medals. The winner is the person who gets the most out of themselves.

Al Seckel

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

Chogyam Trungpa

The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that in this world, as it is, we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others. That is our true richness.

Chip Conley

What one thing can you start counting today that will actually be meaningful in your life?

Dave Chappelle

You've got to say 'yes' to your destiny. Life's happening right now, look around you. There goes some life. Come on, Mamma, live!

David Guterson

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Dave Barry

I always assumed that at some point I would have to quit making jokes, get a real job and do something meaningful and productive that would actually benefit society. Fortunately this never happened.

David Suchet

I can't try to convert anybody. It's not in me to do that. But my faith has given me such an appreciation of people and meaningful relationships, and a world view which I didn't have before. And although I will fail every day, it gives me something to aspire to.

Louis C. K.

Look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority.

Carol Leifer

I recently became vegan because I felt that as a Jewish lesbian, I wasn't part of a small enough minority. So now I'm a Jewish lesbian vegan.

Bob McDonnell

There is no question that the minority party always makes a sport of going after the governor.

Cal Ripken, Jr.

I had trouble with my temper all the way through the minor leagues.

Adam Smith

The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.

Robert Rose

Occasionally we have problems, but usually it is a minor incident, nothing like this,

David Hillery

There are plenty of opportunities for minorities on campus, you've just got to take them.

Cristina Saralegui

How proud I am to be compared to Oprah. I really admire her. She's a minority woman and she's done all this by herself... I'm very happy to be Oprah with salsa and not Donahue in drag.

Tony McCoy

Racing may be a minority sport, but I wouldn't swap it for all the money in the world.

Alanis Morissette

I started making music because I could.

Alanis Morissette

I am what I am Are you what you are or What?

Alanis Morissette

Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.

Alanis Morissette

Music helps you find the truths you must bring into the rest of your life.

Al Jarreau

You have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the Blues.

Al Jarreau

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

Chris Colfer

I grew up doing musical theater.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I'm constantly discovering things. Like Bobby Bland. Right now I suppose I'm into the Eighties, which turned out to be a great musical period.

Chico Hamilton

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

Charles Dickens

Novelties please less than they impress.

David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Mitchell

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Edmond de Goncourt

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

David Hume

Such is the nature of novelty that where anything pleases it becomes doubly agreeable if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing on that very account.

Audrey Tautou

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

Carol Shields

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Alan Ball

Obviously death is a theme I'm fascinated by.

John Kearns

Many things done tonight come from the theme of renewal.

Deepak Chopra

The basic theme of the kapha metabolic type is relaxed.

Meg Browne

Just like a pendulum, ... the current-account theme is back in the market.

Eve Arnold

Themes recur again and again in my work.

Moby

I did a cover of the James Bond theme, and I felt like such a fraud, because the original is so good.

Michael Heizer

This theme of bigness — all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

Mason Cooley

The theme of my autobiography could only be repetition.

John O'Hara

They say great themes make great novels

Warren Zevon

I remember certain lines and whose they are.

Abu Bakr

When you seek advice, do not withhold any facts from the person whose advice you seek.