Famous Quotes & Sayings

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 Stross

Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.

Charles Spurgeon

If I knew I had 25 years left to live, I would spend 20 of them in preparation.

Alanis Morissette

I'm a bit of an alchemist sorceress. I've collected probably 1500 oils from around the planet over the last ten years. I'm kind of obsessed with the sensuality of it.

Alan Watts

...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Alan Mulally

Although the quality of the vehicles is tremendously improving year after year but the underlying reasons that people are buying cars have really gotten focused. It's for high quality vehicles, reliable, fuel-efficient, and safe of course.

Alan Moore

I've known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that.

Alan Moore

It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one.

Alan Moore

It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.

Alan Hovhaness

I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.

Charles Caleb Colton

To diminish envy, let us consider not what others possess, but what they enjoy; mere riches may be the gift of lucky accident or blind chance, but happiness must be the result of prudent preference and rational design; the highest happiness then can have no other foundation than the deepest wisdom; and the happiest fool is only as happy as he knows how to be.

Charles Caleb Colton

The praise of the envious is far less creditable than their censure; they praise only that which they can surpass, but that which surpasses them they censure.

Charles Caleb Colton

If sensuality be our only happiness we ought to envy the brutes, for instinct is a surer, shorter, safer guide to such happiness than reason.

Charles Caleb Colton

Emulation looks out for merits, that she may exalt herself by a victory; envy spies out blemishes that she may lower another by defeat.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Envy is the religion of the mediocre

Edward Gibbon

Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.

Elizabeth Montagu

it is more to my personal happiness and advantage to indulge the love and admiration of excellence, than to cherish a secret envy of it.

Edmund Waller

Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails.

Bertrand Russell

A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.