Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carol Shields

So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.

Alan Keyes

You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.

Alan Keyes

Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

Charlotte Bronte

I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

Charles Trevelyan

If the Irish once find out that there are any circumstances in which they can get free government grants, we shall have a system of mendicancy [begging] such as the world never knew”. After a million had starved to death he stated “The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

Charles Trevelyan

The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

Charles Dudley Warner

I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.

Charles Dickens

Old Mr. Rarx was not a pleasant man to look at, nor yet to talk to, or to be with, for no one could help seeing that he was a sordid and selfish character, and that he had warped further and further out of the straight with time.

Charles Dickens

Notwithstanding his very liberal laudation of himself, however, the Major was selfish. It may be doubted whether there ever was a more entirely selfish person at heart; or at stomach is perhaps a better expression, seeing that he was more decidedly endowed with that latter organ than with the former.

Charles Dickens

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

Charles Dickens

I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them-none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.

Djuna Barnes

Only the impossible lasts forever.

David Mitchell

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

Carl Sagan

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity

Bryce Dallas Howard

The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if.

Jane Smiley

'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

Charles Baudelaire

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

William Shakespeare

A great cause of the night is lack of the sun.

Chinua Achebe

When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?

Chinua Achebe

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

Chinua Achebe

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

Elie Wiesel

God made (human beings) because he loves stories.

Elie Wiesel

If the victims are my problem, the killers are yours.

Elie Wiesel

One can do without solutions. Only the questions matter. We may share them or turn away from them.

Brad Bird

Look, it's a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It's meant to be a great time at the theater, but it's also designed to work on more than one level

Arthur C. Clarke

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

Arjun Rampal

I like my films to have a certain amount of realism - something that's thought provoking and intelligently written. More than the amount on the pay cheque, I look for a level of respectability as an actor.