Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Noel Riley Fitch

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

Joseph Campbell

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

Will Rogers

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

A. S. Byatt

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Denis O'Hare

I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

David A. Adler

My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

Dan Wakefield

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

Brad Grey

Mental illnesses involve biological brain disorders, no matter what Tom Cruise says,

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.

Charles Stanley

If God has positioned us in a certain place, we must leave all the details to Him.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

John Ryding

The plunge in durable goods orders in January is entirely due to volatility in transportation. The underlying details of this report are much stronger than the headline.

Edward Gibbon

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.

Mike Goodman

What we're seeing right now is most likely stage one, with other details to come in the near future.

Penny Junor

What makes life most difficult is the media intrusion, ... I think the public has gotten more and more greedy for the intimate details of their lives. These people are exposed to scrutiny 24 hours a day. We feel we have a right to know. We feel it's in the public interest. Even pop stars get more privacy. We just want to know every last detail. They are living in a goldfish bowl. And it never goes away.

Diane Ackerman

I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.

David Procopio

There are many details about this person and how she died that may be known only to her killer and little by little by us.

Alexandra Stoddard

The correct word is like any small detail - it enhances life.

Alan Watts

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Alan Rickman

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.

Al Oerter

As long as I can concentrate and remain somewhat calm, I can normally do very well.

Al Ries

Good things happen when you narrow your focus

Akon

Any album that you pick up of mine, you know it's an Akon album. The guests are very limited, and you get to really feel the experience. You get the Akon experience when you get the albums. I always want to make sure that stays the way it is. I don't want to flood the album to where you lose focus on why you bought it.

Chris Christie

The message [of Donald Trump] is that that type of thing happening. Let's focus on what happened.What happened was the murder, the murder of this person pushing a stroller, it's unacceptable in an American city to continue to have this level of violence and the level of violence in Chicago is unacceptable.

Chris Albrecht

The expensive ones are for Starz. No. We decided, as part of our Encore strategy, to broaden and strengthen and help focus the Encore plexus by adding original programming.

Chin-Ning Chu

Whenever your mind is totally absorbed in whatever activities you are performing, your mind will remain calm and content.

David Rusenko

To gain paying customers you'll need to focus on attracting the right followers, and not just on attracting the most. Communicate often with useful information to increase your value, and focus on pitching your product in a genuine way. Make sure you have a professional web presence, and with any luck, you should start noticing your efforts pay off.

Charles Dickens

She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.

Charles Soule

Ive always loved the idea of mythologies linked to or underlying everyday life, like the kami gods of Shintoism, where every rock, tree and stream has its own little god associated with it.

Charles Stross

The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.

Charles Stanley

People don't like the idea of consequences. They want to be able to live their life freely and do what they want to do without any consequences. And we know that's just not the way life is.

Charles Spurgeon

Abhor all idea of being saved by good works, but O, be as full of good works as if you were to be saved by them!

Alan Watts

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

Alan Watts

The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.

Alan Watts

To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

Alan Watts

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

Charles Dickens

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Charles Dickens

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Charles Dickens

This is a world of action, and not moping and droning in.

Charles Dickens

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Charles Dickens

Do all the good you can and make as little fuss about it as possible.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

Charles Caleb Colton

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Jill Soloway

I'm a naturally open person - some might say radically open.

Jonathan Ive

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

Carlos Mesa

We must create a state that responds to the citizens' needs, and we need citizens who feel committed to their state because that state serves the citizens.

Eric Lindros

I think so. We'll see how it responds (to Monday's practice), but right now I think so.

James Salter

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.

Nina Hoss

In Germany, actors tend to be more laid-back and take orders from the director: 'Tell me what you want.' I'm more into collaboration. So are Americans.

Andy Serkis

When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.

Nobu Matsuhisa

When I'm dining out privately, I tend to avoid fine-dining venues; I like things to feel casual.

Laurie Helgoe

I am very troubled by the tendency to define introverts by what they lack. Introversion is a preference, not a fallback plan.

Timothy Noah

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

Mark Noll

When I'm thinking like a historian, I tend to be a little depressed. But when I'm thinking like a Christian, I tend to be optimistic.

Bryan Cogman

I tend to work in coffee shops. I need to get out of the house, and, well, I need the coffee.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

All actors tend to be the same messed-up people.