Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.

Charles Caleb Colton

We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.

Charles Caleb Colton

The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age.

Charles Dickens

In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.

Charles Stross

I've reached an age at which I'd rather pay more for something that "just works" than roll up my sleeves, reach for a spanner, and make it work. Time is money, and the older we get the less of it we've got left.

Charles Spurgeon

Pleasure, so called, is the murderer of serious thought. This is the age of excessive amusement. Everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle!

Alan Rickman

I knew with Snape I was working as a double agent, as it turns out, and a very good one at that.

Alan Jackson

Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age, because there wasn't any live music around my town and no one in my family played instruments.

Alan Alda

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

Louis Sachar

I'm an avid bridge player. I usually go to the local bridge club three or four times a week. I've always been a game-player, and I think bridge is one of the greatest games ever invented. It's too bad that not many young people play it any more.

Madhur Bhandarkar

I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.

Brent Spiner

I'm an avid biography reader.

Apolo Ohno

I was an avid swimmer and was state champ at age 12.

Craig Ray

Mississippi has worked hard to entice avid golf-and-gaming travelers to visit our great state, because we knew if we got them here once, they would come back. The sales increases demonstrate the rising trend of visitors to Mississippi and we hope increasingly more visitors will judge our offerings for themselves.

Esai Morales

I think the legacy left behind by 'Battlestar' speaks for itself. I thought that these avid fans, most of whom were skeptical at first... to turn them into a fan of 'Caprica' as well is a daunting task, a big challenge.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

Nick Love

There is no hiding the fact I'm an avid Millwall fan.

Lindsey McKeon

My husband loves the '90s; he's an avid '90s movie watcher, and it drives me insane. Nothing real came out of the '90s! The bad bathing suits that came up too high on women's hips came out in the '90s!

Louis Gossett, Jr.

I didn't know anything about acting, I didn't know anything about theater, but I was just an exceptional student at high school. I wanted to play ball; I'm going after a basketball scholarship and be a doctor. I got injured and my marks began to drop.

Brian Keith

We started slowly, but then began to put things together. We were 3-9 to begin the year, but we have gone 9-4 the rest of the way.

John Timoney

We stopped the rescue operation around 11 o'clock (Thursday) night, ... As the tide came in, the structure began to move, and other parts began to collapse again. We made the decision to pull our divers out.

Helen Scannell

We started from scratch. Immediately people began dropping things off - and they were nice things. Our goods are gently used. We are not a junkyard or garbage drop.

Leslie Cockburn

When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.

M.I.A.

Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.

Natasha Trethewey

Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.

Natasha Tsakos

I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing 'Upwake.' 'Upwake' tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. I wanted 'Upwake' to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would.

Ma Jian

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.

Alan Greenspan

American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.

Alan Greenspan

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.

Jamie Shea

We want them to have the benefit of summer months to help to rebuild their homes and lives. But obviously, we want them not to go back until there is a secure presence, to ensure that the refugee return can be done in an organized way.

James Hood

We want to stay in the port; we feel we have been a good tenant. We provide an economic benefit, a net positive revenue flow, which goes to the general revenue of the state.

Andrew Golden

We want to spend as much of the endowment as possible, subject to two constraints ? preserving purchasing power into perpetuity and assuring that the spending stream is relatively stable. Your great-grandchildren need to get the same economic benefit that you're getting now.

Pat Keliher

We want to see the biggest public benefit come out of this, but we have to take it at step at a time.

Louis Navellier

I want attractive stocks that will benefit from persistent institutional buying pressure.

Kevin Logan

The only reason we wouldn't be able to make it (to the benefit concert) is if Pete got listed and we needed to leave. As soon as they list him then we need to get him down immediately.

Kass James

The performance is part of a larger picture. Getting up and performing poetry in front of big crowds is another way for these kids to view their lives from a different perspective, and we want the kids in our program 20 years from now to be reading the books some of these kids have written.

Norman MacCaig

There are books up there I haven't read for many years but I wouldn't put them out. I never know when I might want to read them again.

Peter Kent

There are books on HTML, JavaScript, Java, ActiveX, and all sorts of other geeky subjects. But not only don't you need to understand these things in order to set up a Web site; you can read a dozen such books, and you still won't know everything you need to do.

Adam Rothberg

We're in favor of any program that can give our books more exposure.

James Browning

We started off in the Oak Hill Flea Market, about 1988, selling just about everything, but after a short period of time we found that books sold best. After a while we just got too big for the flea market and since my wife and I always loved books and reading, the natural progression was for us to open a bookstore.

Heinrich Heine

Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.

Nina Jacobson

I am happy to keep working on books because I'm always reading, and I'm always trying to fall in love.

Nicolas Roeg

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'

Nikki Grimes

I spent many hours ensconced in the local library, reading - nay, devouring - book after book after book. Books were my soul's delight.

Maajid Nawaz

I am a Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents. I have a Muslim son. I have been imprisoned and witnessed torture for my previous understanding of my religion.

Mohsin Hamid

Most Muslims do not 'choose' Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The persons born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Lyle Kessler

I was born in Philadelphia, and I've tried to escape that city all my life. I end up writing plays that force me back to Philadelphia, at least psychologically if not physically.

Marisa Miller

I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, and the whole lifestyle revolves around the beach. My parents met surfing, and the beach was a major part of our daily lives.

Nicolas Maduro

Venezuelans have a long history. So we are able to listen to each other, to talk to each other. From here were born the liberators of the region, and they said before and after that process we have a culture of political action. We are not in despair. That's the image broadcast to abroad.

Ai Weiwei

I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.

Charlie Bell

When he finished last season, he came on like gangbusters once we got to know him and once he got the feel of varsity football, ... He was showing us all summer what we've got, offensively and defensively, so there's no surprise to us. Josh is just born with talent and skill, but to his credit, he works extremely hard to maximize it.

Chantal Kreviazuk

Well, Winnepeg has everything to do with my music in the sense it was where I was born and raised, cultured and all that sort of thing. A lot of my experiences come from Winnepeg.

Salam Fayyad

We want the new cabinet to succeed. But this requires an understanding on many issues, especially the nature of the Palestinian political system and the role of the president of the Palestinian Authority, who is also the chairman of the executive committee of the PLO.

Bertie Ahern

It is quite unacceptable that a member of Dáil Éireann and in particular a Cabinet Minister and Taoiseach, should be supported in his personal lifestyle by gifts made to him personally.

Jim Henson

Let us use this log cabin as a means of looking back.

Fidel Ramos

The process of not giving it to the Cabinet for review means that that whole thing was pre-cooked.

Kevin Szcodronski

The process is the same, but the time elements are different than we have for cabin rental.

Tom Lehrer

The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.

Brian Mulroney

Every cabinet minister gets a mission statement from the Prime Minister.

Brian Selznick

Maybe we're all cabinets of wonders.

Brian Selznick

Maybe we are all cabinets of wonders.

Charles Dickens

There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him, in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing.

Charles Dickens

Father Time is not always a hard parent and though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

Charles Dickens

There is nothing--no, nothing--innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.

Charles Dickens

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Charles Dickens

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.

Charles Caleb Colton

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Charles Caleb Colton

Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as a hostage; often as a captive and more often as a child; but knowledge has become of age, and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend.

Charles Caleb Colton

Gaming is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality.

Charles Caleb Colton

Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.

David Crockett

The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man

Bob Ayers

Some nation states prohibit the police from collecting information on their own citizens. But they don't prohibit their own intelligence organizations from collecting information on their own citizens.

Lorrin Lee

Most people tend to focus on getting a dream home and car. I prefer to focus on lifelong friendships and collecting memorable experiences.

James Jeffords

We heard that the degree of environmental damage is considered catastrophic, ... We also heard that the EPA is still in the very early stages of collecting the soil and water samples that are needed to determine whether it is safe for residents to return to the area.

David Redden

We hear about the ones that are selling but in fact there are many others that are also collecting and they generally do it very quietly.

Louis Freeh

Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.

Lauren Stamile

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

Oliver Ellsworth

The power of collecting money from the people is not to be rejected because it has sometimes been oppressive. Public credit is as necessary for the prosperity of a nation as private credit is for the support and wealth of a family.

Olivier Theyskens

My first collection was made from sheets that my grandmother, who lived in Normandy, had been collecting for a long time. There are a lot of flea markets in that part of France, and she knew what I liked.

Charles Dickens

A very little key will open a very heavy door.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

Charles Caleb Colton

He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.

Charles Caleb Colton

The acquirements of science maybe termed the armor of the mind.

Charles Caleb Colton

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

Charles Stanley

An unschooled man who knows how to meditate upon the Lord has learned far more than the man with the highest education who does not know how to meditate.

Alan Watts

Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life.

Alan Watts

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

Al Sharpton

The United States government has the obligation to educate all young people in this country.

Steve Jocz

We were trying to joke around as much as possible. Well, as much as you could in that . . . eventually it got really not funny.

Jim Kelley

We're making progress, but we'd still like to see the population get lower. The problem we've been fighting is that they've had two straight years of good reproduction. So it's kind of like taking two steps forward and one back. But we think if we stay with the program we have in place, we'll eventually get there.

Sherry Cooper

We remain of the view that next week's rate hike will not be the Fed's last work this cycle. Indeed, they will likely eventually unwind all of last fall's crisis-induced easing.

Jack Crumbliss

We're going to get better. We're eventually going to get over the hump.

Zig Ziglar

When we do more than we are paid to do, eventually we will be paid morefor what we do.

Linda Stephenson

What a lot of people don't realize is these tests are given in preparation for the 10th-grade GQE. That's the one with the highest stakes for individual students. They have to eventually pass that to graduate.

Jim Carlin

With the legs that extend on it, he has an 18-foot reach, and it also can go six-feet down, so we started skimming the water, skimming the ground, then eventually we're down to four to five feet.

Keke Palmer

There's not always going to be something out there for you, especially not a positive role, so once you get up there and start being well known, you can't just think projects will come to you. You have to start doing your own projects because if you don't, you'll miss out, and eventually your fame will be over.

Donald Rumsfeld

Throughout human history there have been those who seek power through fear and mass murder, ... But eventually all of them - every one - has fallen.

Sam Perlozzo

When you talked about the Orioles, you talked about Elrod. Elrod Hendricks was one of the finest men I have ever met.

Bertolt Brecht

The finest plans are always ruined by the littleness of those who ought to carry them out, for emperor himself can actually be nothing.

Bertolt Brecht

The finest plans have always been spoiled by the littleness of them that should carry them out. Even emperors can't do it all by themselves.

Gordon B. Hinckley

Some of our finest work comes through service to others.

Steve Young

We had some of the finest musicians in Nashville contributing to this album.

Johnny Grant

We have lost one of the finest gentlemen this industry ever knew,

Louise Nurding

The gold iridescent 'Naked' outfit is perhaps not my finest moment.

John Burnside

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

Eileen collins

The people that I have worked with have just been superb, just the finest professionals, people who truly love the space program.

David Knopfler

I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

Dieter Kosslick

We don't have any formal motto this year.

Michael McDermott

We feel that his due-process rights were violated. He was never given a formal hearing, he was never given a right to refute anything.

Karen Henderson

There are people who think this is a more formal place, for holidays.

David Hamm

Somebody could be in police work for umpteen years and doesn't have the formal side of the training, yet is very qualified to hold the job. This would be a way of tying the two together in a way that is fair.

John Paquette

We're acknowledging that a mistake was made on the play. We don't have a formal statement on it.

Reint Dykema

Solidarity members joined in at midnight. There are no formal offers at this point.

Nimrat Kaur

I love to sing. I never had any formal training. My mother is a singer, and I picked up listening to her.

Bill Nye

You're dressed in a tuxedo, you wear a bow tie. A bow tie with a tuxedo is more formal than a straight tie with a tuxedo.

Alan Jackson

I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn't have when I was young.

David Giuntoli

Honestly, I grew up with Disney.

David Guterson

I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.

Luke Bracey

'Point Break' is a movie that I and all of my friends grew up loving, watching all the time, quoting, living and being.

Lucas Till

We all grew up with Chevy Chase and Bill Murray.

Nnedi Okorafor

I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl.

Elizabeth Moon

I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

I grew up overnight on that day, Dec. 27, 2007.

Lennon Parham

'Felicity' was my 'Gilmore Girls' because I grew up in a small town.

Stephanie Hall

We're so excited. This is the first real new money for libraries from the province in a long time.

Jim Steinberg

This will pretty much put the libraries back together.

Peg Burington

What we're doing is dispelling that stereotype as libraries being this place where it's very quiet and you have to tip-toe around.

Richard K. Morgan

I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.

Martina Kominiarek

We also benefited in the past year at all of our libraries from donations.

Donald Brownlee

The most interesting thing about comets is they are libraries with the stored records of our formation.

David Quammen

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

Anton Chekhov

Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.

Deng Xiaoping

Be reasonable with the students and make sure they see the logic in what we're doing.

Aristotle

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

Ed Parker

An ounce of logic can be worth more than a ton of tradition that has become obsolete through the weathering of time.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Human beings lose their logic in their vindictiveness.

Samuel Butler

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Samuel Butler

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Alexander the Great

My logisticians are a humorless lot ... they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.

Chris Colfer

I don't necessarily consider myself a virgin, probably because I have such a penetrating personality

Chris Christie

As we all grow and we get older, there are always little changes about our personality that happen.

David D. Burns

Forgiving yourself, not guilt, increases personal accountability.

David Sanborn

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

Carolina Herrera

In anything you do, it's important to have your own personality there.

Carolina Herrera

A wedding dress is both an intimate and personal for a woman - it must reflect the personality and style of the bride.

Camille Paglia

Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.

Catherine Tate

When I realised I had a facility for humour, I latched on to it, and it gave me confidence and I built my personality around it. So I subconsciously made myself become the funny one so that would be my label rather than the ginger one or the red-faced one.

Bill Johnson

Religion idolizes concepts and avoids personal experience.

Lee Siegel

The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval.

Kathryn Stockett

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

Barbara W. Tuchman

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

Christina Baker Kline

I think a lot of readers are looking for a book they can talk about.

Binyavanga Wainaina

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.

Tobias Wolff

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

Nancy Kress

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Khaled Hosseini

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

Sarah MacLean

There is a whole generation of romance readers and writers who suffer from what I like to think of as 'Thorn Birds' Fever.

Dennis DesRosiers

We do not know if St. Thomas is on the list. Probably not. But who knows?

Vince Carter

I'm going to make Tim Thomas come here. So it doesn't matter. Only kidding.

Liza Lapira

Winter makes me want to rage. You know how there's road rage? I feel like in New York or upstate New York, you're just like, 'Dammit,' because you're so cold.