Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Charles Dickens

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Charles Dickens

Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.

Charles Dickens

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.

Charles Caleb Colton

All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, by by rising above them.

Charles Caleb Colton

Men spend their lives in anticipations,—in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.

Charles Caleb Colton

The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.

Charles Caleb Colton

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.

Charles Caleb Colton

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

Charles Caleb Colton

Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

Charles Caleb Colton

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Many books owe their success to the good memories of their authors and the bad memories of their readers.

Charles Caleb Colton

All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, "equal to their business, but not above it;" a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention.

Charles Dickens

Lord, keep my memory green.

Charles Dickens

I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint bottle; it was not ecstasy but it was comfort.

Charles Stross

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Charles Stross

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Charles Caleb Colton

The upright, if he suffer calumny to move him, fears the tongue of man more than the eye of God.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in defense of their idolatry--the power of their idol. It is true that, like other idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, nor understand; but, unlike other idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those who had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite.

Charles Spurgeon

True belief and true repentance are twins: it would be idle to attempt to say which is born first. All the spokes of a wheel move at once when the wheel moves, and so all the graces commence action when regeneration is wrought by the Holy Ghost. Repentance, however, there must be.

Alanis Morissette

The whole idea of emotions being something we can't escape as humans, but that deep suffering that comes from resisting them, we can move out of that just by not resisting anymore. But it takes a really brave warrior soul to sit there in these emotions that admittedly don't feel good in the body.

Alanis Morissette

What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.

Alan Watts

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Alan Watts

For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation.

Alan Mulally

An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right? An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air.

Alan Rickman

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.