Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Charles Caleb Colton

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

Charles Caleb Colton

The most notorious swindler has not assumed so many names as self-love, nor is so much ashamed of his own. She calls herself patriotism, when at the same time she is rejoicing at just as much calamity to her native country as will introduce herself into power, and expel her rivals.

Charles Dickens

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Charles Dickens

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens

Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

Charles Caleb Colton

If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

Charles Simmons

Live only for today, and you ruin tomorrow.

Alan Watts

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Alan Watts

Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.

Al Stewart

Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day.

Chogyam Trungpa

Humans are the only animals that try to dwell in the future. You don't have to purely live in the present situation without a plan, but the future plans you make can only be based on the aspects of the future that manifest within the present situation.

China Mieville

You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.

David Miliband

...the science is getting worse faster than the politics is getting better

David Rakoff

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

David McCullough

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

C. Wright Mills

History is the shank of the social sciences.

Cesare Pavese

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Cary Grant

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

E. Hicks

When you think about it, history is made to be broken. That's the way we look at it.

Kurt Vonnegut

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Kurt Vonnegut

History! Read it and weep!

Edward Gibbon

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Charles Dickens

There are some upon this earth of yours,' returned the Spirit, 'who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.

Charles Dickens

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

Charles Caleb Colton

Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.

Charles Caleb Colton

The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is a holy love and a holy rage, and our best virtues never glow so brightly as when our passions are excited in the cause. Sloth, if it has prevented many crimes, has also smothered many virtues; and the best of us are better when roused.

Charles Caleb Colton

By privileges, immunities, or prerogatives to give unlimited swing to the passions of individuals, and then to hope that they will restrain them, is about as reasonable as to expect that the tiger will spare the hart to browse upon the herbage.

Charles Caleb Colton

The breast of a good man is a little heaven commencing on earth; where the Deity sits enthroned with unrivaled influence, every subjugated passion, "like the wind and storm, fulfilling his word.

Charles Caleb Colton

So blinded are we by our passions, that we suffer more to be damned than to be saved.

Charles Dickens

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.

Adrianne Palicki

I like a grizzly look as long as it's maintained. Facial hair requires maintenance; you can't just grow it out and be done with it.

Susumu Tonegawa

The brain is hugely complicated, and because it is so complicated, it requires multidisciplinary research.

Martin O'Malley

To create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments.

Jorge Paulo Lemann

I always say, 'To have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!'

Darrell Bryan

If it requires a passport, we think they'll look for other options.

Ricky Ponting

It's nice to put your hand up and do the big things the team requires of you.

Joyce Banda

I shall always be proud of what I've done, regardless of what you journalists or anybody can say.

George Whitefield

At the day of judgment we shall all meet again.

Granth Sahib

O Nanak, without the True Name, all this paraphernalia shall disappear.

Granth Sahib

O Nanak, through the Guru's Teachings, you shall be saved, contemplating the True Name.

William Shakespeare

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Garfield Ewings

We have it all to do but are not out of contention. We shall keep going right to the end.

Kofi Annan

We shall see, ... They want to end this.

L.A. Reid

I am a record executive and I shall be right there in your face with my records.

William Kidd

If you will take her, you may take her, but if you go from aboard, you shall never come aboard again.

Charles Dickens

A boy's story is the best that is ever told.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.

Charles Caleb Colton

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.

Denis Waitley

You must be worthy of the best, but not more worthy than the rest.

Mark Edwards

We're doing what we can. We think it's a worthy cause.

Joseph Kahn

potentially interesting, if true, but not something really worthy of a story in itself.

Alice Hoffman

You are only worthy of what you prove yourself to be.

Angelo Sorce

We're really working to make this a show worthy of the audience's time.

Bible Bible

And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

Horace

Nor let a god come in, unless the difficulty be worthy of such an intervention. [Lat., Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus.]

Pierre Charron

To owe an obligation to a worthy friend is a happiness, and can be no disparagement.

Philip Pullman

A murderer was a worthy companion.

Ludivine Sagnier

'Swimming Pool' was a very important moment for me because the character was written for me.

Lisa Cholodenko

I've done episodic television and some other things that have been written by other people.

Eric Schmidt

The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.

Victoria Justice

I will say that a lot of songs that I've written are from my own personal experiences which are special to me.

Wole Soyinka

I've always written plays for the purpose of getting something out of my system.

F. Sionil Jose

I regret that I have not written more, shouted louder, and acted out my beliefs.

Errol Morris

I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.

Ferran Adria

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

Lyle Lovett

I've just always written songs in a style that appeal to me personally.