Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Charles Dickens

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Charles Caleb Colton

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Dickens

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.

Charles Spurgeon

Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then hast thou reason to rejoice: but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying "I am saved" is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee.

Charles Spurgeon

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Charles Spurgeon

Come boldly, 'O believer, for despite the whisperings of Satan and the doubtings of thine own heart, thou art greatly beloved.

Alanis Morissette

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

Charles Caleb Colton

That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.

Alan Ball

It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do that you've forgotten about.

Alan Ball

It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

Alan Ball

Never underestimate the power of denial.

Alan Ball

Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst.

Alan Ball

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

Akhenaton

When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms, the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven, and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.

Chita Rivera

Beauty is not everything!

Dave Barry

By today's beauty standards, of course, Marilyn Monroe was an oil tanker.

Louise Leakey

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, 'I wonder where we're headed.'

Gary Owens

The potential of getting hit from behind is always there. And at night, it becomes so much more difficult to judge the situation.

Rig Veda

The person blessed with a pure mind is noble and he inevitably becomes great and liberates himself from the darkness of ignorance.

E. O. Wilson

Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law- abiding,

Sean McAlinden

Where there's not sales growth in the market at all everything is market share, everything is price and it becomes particularly vicious. There's no rising tides to lift any boats in this market.

Debbie Ford

When you treat yourself with the kindness and high regard that you would give to one of your spiritual heroes, your body becomes the epicenter of quiet joy rather than a battlefield for the ego.

Reed Kroloff

When you think that the population of metropolitan New Orleans before Katrina was 485,000 and it's now 150,000, so two-thirds of the city is gone. The question of how to rebuild becomes very difficult.

Nick Park

Success brings with it pressure to conform. I always thought that success would lead to freedom, but the opposite is true: more people get involved, and committees make decisions, and it becomes a fight to stay free.

Richard Geist

Whenever you get a traumatic event happening in society, you tend to see certain reactions to it, such as irritability, depression, confused thinking and sleep problems, ... In that context, rational decision-making becomes very difficult. People tend to begin to let their thought processes be guided by their anxieties.

Charles Spurgeon

Birds sing on a bare bough; O, believer, canst not thou?

Alan Watts

For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.

David Suzuki

Birds are, especially canaries, are super sensitive to hydrogen sulfide and sour gas.

David Nabarro

We are watching very closely to see how the disease associated with bird flu, when it hits humans, is evolving.

Carl Sagan

Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off.

Siti Supari

We are awaiting for further results. We will continue to investigate whether she had been in contact with anything that related to bird flu,

Chad Olson

There are some challenges we deal with, primarily people management more than bird management.

Kurt Vonnegut

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

Kurt Vonnegut

I wish we had all been born birds instead.

Charles Dickens

It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.

Charles Dickens

I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am - what shall I say I am today?

Charles Dickens

"Then what can you want to do now?" said the old lady,gaining courage. "I wants to make your flesh creep," replied the boy.

Charles Dickens

The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy, walk and be healthy. "The best of all ways to lengthen our days" is not, as Mr. Thomas Moore has it, "to steal a few hours from night, my love;" but, with leave be it spoken, to walk steadily and with a purpose. The wandering man knows of certain ancients, far gone in years, who have staved off infirmities and dissolution by earnest walking,-hale fellows close upon eighty and ninety, but brisk as boys.

Alanis Morissette

So many boys, so little time...

Alan Rickman

There's, like, marks next to an actor's name or something, and boy does that go up and down! Somewhere in there, which always causes my mate Miss Ruby Wax great hilarity, I was offered a biopic of Frank Sinatra. Even I knew that was a bad idea! They'll throw anything at you at certain times. So, you know, to thine own self be true.

Alan Bennett

We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale....Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, "And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?

Alan Alda

I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.

Al Sharpton

I've never seen an effective boycott that didn't work.

Dave Ramsey

You have the clean canvas of a whole week before you. Paint well.

Linda Lavin

Once you have the pattern of life of this person, the choreography, so to speak, you have the canvas that you present eight times a week, not without feeling underneath it, but it's not as churning as the discovery process was.

Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imaginations.

Geoff Johns

The ocean is 90% unexplored. It's a great canvas to paint Aquaman stories across, just like Green Lantern has space. It's more organic, which makes it different and interesting. It's alien, but it's terrestrial.

Damien Hirst

You'd never look at a Rembrandt and say, 'That's just wood and canvas and paint - how much?!' It's all about how many people want it. It works on a pair of jeans as well - they're just material and stitching, and as soon as you walk out of the shop, they're worth nothing.

Elie Wiesel

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

Tom Yawkey

Some men like to go in for polo, for example, and spend thousands of dollars on ponies. Some go nuts for paintings, and give half a million for a hunk of canvas in a fancy frame. But my passion is baseball.

Kurt Koeppen

Nick performed on a canvas in the sky.

Anne Stevenson

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Charles Dickens

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Charles Dickens

The flowers that sleep by night, opened their gentle eyes and turned them to the day. The light, creation's mind, was everywhere, and all things owned its power.

Charles Caleb Colton

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

Charles Dickens

I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

Charles Spurgeon

The more a church flourishes, the more, I believe, do hypocrites get in, just as you see many a noxious creeping thing come and get in a garden after a shower of rain. The very things that make glad the flowers bring out these noxious things. And so hypocrites get in and steal much of the church's sap away.

Charles Spurgeon

Give because you love to give - as the flower pours forth its perfume.

Charles Spurgeon

No Scripture is exhausted by a single explanation. The flowers of God's garden bloom not only double, but sevenfold; they are continually pouring forth fresh fragrance.

Charles Spurgeon

True humility is a flower which will adorn any garden.

Alan Watts

You will begin to realize that if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

Alan Watts

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Alan Perlis

Optimization hinders evolution.

Alan Perlis

Any noun can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Alan Perlis

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Alan Perlis

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

Bruce Barber

We want them to go back to doing what they used to do, which is migrate. The reason they migrate is for food. When they don't migrate, their offspring don't learn to migrate.

Wissam Nasr

We want to stop profiling. The more that people learn about Islam, the more tolerant they become.

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.

Charles Dickens

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.

Charles Caleb Colton

We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.

Charles Dickens

If Natur has gifted a man with powers of argeyment, a man has a right to make the best of 'em, and has not a right to stand on false delicacy, and deny that he is so gifted; for that is a turning of his back on Natur, a flouting of her, a slighting of her precious caskets, and a proving of one's self to be a swine that isn't worth her scattering pearls before.

Charles Dickens

When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.

Charles Dickens

The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.

Charles Dickens

A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.

Charles Dickens

It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.

Charles Dickens

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.

Charles Dickens

Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears.

Dan Hopkins

With the kind of support he sees around the state, he thinks it would be something important to enact.

Jack Nance

Lynch is an ordinary, smalltown guy and he just sees strange things in people.

Genesis Rodriguez

I'm bicultural, and everyone sees me as a Latina, but in my head I see myself as both Latina and American.

Anthony Hemingway

When someone sees in you what you've been feeling all along, that's an awesome thing.

Greg Rusedski

(John) McEnroe sees him in the top 20, I see him getting into the top 50 and then the top 20.

Jeff Gundy

We'll know more after he sees the doctor. He's had it for a long time. It has to do with his toenail and having his toenail removed.

Bob Harris

Well, I think everyone kind of sees us as the sheriff, you know.

Jeff Lindsay

The law, as an institution, avoids justice, subverts it, just as often as it sees it done.

Nate Burleson

It was tough for him. When Superman sees Kryptonite for the first time, it's shocking.

Al Oerter

I don't compete with other discus throwers. I compete with my own history.

Brian Bannister

When you throw strikes, they are going to get hits.

Carl Erskine

I've had pretty good success with Stan (Musial) by throwing him my best pitch and backing up third.

Keegan Bradley

When I throw a softball, there's no time to think about the motion of my arm. I just look at the first baseman's glove and react.

Russian Proverb

What the young one begs for, the grown-up throws away

Andre Johnson

We know we're not out there trying to throw games. If we were really trying to lose, how did we win this one?

Tara Garrett

She (Ronk) is doing the job. She's throwing hard.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.

George Johnson

There are vehicles tossed hither and yon just like throwing pick-up sticks,

Charles Caleb Colton

It is with disease of the mind, as with those of the body; we are half dead before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do.

Alan Moore

As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.

Chinua Achebe

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

David Shuster

There are a lot of folks at Fox News who bring a certain level of sophistication to their understanding of politics.

David Sedaris

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

David Sedaris

I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

David Koechner

What helps you as an actor when it comes to roles is that deeper understanding of so many different fractions of humanity. Because oftentimes, even in comedy, there is conflict.

Carl Sagan

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy

Carl Sagan

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.

Charles Caleb Colton

All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.

Alan Jay Lerner

I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things I've never done before.

Chris Carmack

In terms of hardline right-wing people on television, there's some people that make me cringe when I change the channel.

China Mieville

The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

Caitlin Kittredge

Crows don’t take from you,” Dean said. “They give your soul wings.

Carlos Santana

The guitar is your first wings. It's assigned and designed to unfold your vision and imagination.

James Patterson

you...are...a...frige...with...wings...we...are...freaking...ballet...dancers!

William Shakespeare

The bird that hath been limed in a bush, with trembling wings misdoubteth every bush.

Kurt Vonnegut

Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.

David Mitchell

Music’s a wood you walk through.

John Muir

Come to the woods, for here is rest.

Baroness Orczy

Sink me! Your taylors have betrayed you! T'wood serve you better to send THEM to Madam Guillotine

Dennis Miller

The American education system couldn't be more badly directed or poorly funded if the Secretary of Education were Ed Wood.

Cheryl Strayed

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

Bernard of Clairvaux

What I know of the divine science and holy scripture, I learnt in the woods and fields.

Doug Anderson

We really don't want to get into the wood business.

Aleksandar Hemon

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

Charles Churchill

The oak, when living, monarch of the wood; The English oak, which, dead, commands the flood.