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 Dickens

It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand.

Charles Dickens

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat.

Charles Stross

I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.

Charles Stross

I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

Alanis Morissette

Over the last couple of years, I've really worked toward balancing my life out more, having a little bit more time with friends, family and my boyfriend. There was a period of time when they were way down the list. It was all about music and touring and if everything fell by the wayside, so be it.

Alan Moore

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

Alan Arkin

I played guitar. I've always considered myself an actor, but I wasn't making a living as an actor. So I was in a couple of folk groups that managed to keep me in underwear and burritos.

Alan Ball

There are times when I am directing, and there are a couple of moments I didn't get the way I wanted, but I know I still have other angles to shoot and I have to be done by noon; I move on.

Al Michaels

I still believe Emmitt has enough left in the tank to be a productive back over the next couple of seasons.

Charles Caleb Colton

The wealth is ultimately just a relative thing. As a person with little money and little more needs to rich guys money but really wishes

Alan Parsons

I try to find a way that the other guy hasn't thought of using a sound or a sample.

Al Sharpton

Bill Clinton strikes me as the kind of guy who goes wherever the polls lead him, rather than leading the polls.

Akshay Kumar

I'm an athletic actor. I'm known for my action; I'm a guy who does my own stunts on screen.

Chris Bauer

I'm the kind of guy who would say, "Yeah, I'll do that!," and then, when it came down to it, I would be absolutely petrified. Those days have passed me by, but I would do it. If it meant that I was in a scene naked with a woman, or anybody romantic, I'd be into it.

Chip Kelly

Tommy's [Gamble] an East Coast guy, so he kind of talks fast and in quick statements and phrases, so I understood him and he understood me, and we just hit it off.

Dave Franco

I'm trying to avoid any more asshole roles, at least for a little bit. The main criteria for me when choosing a project is a good director. I just want to work with these guys that I admire because I do want to direct my own films one day, and I want to pick their brains to see what their process is like, and see what I can take from that.

Dave Franco

I'm a small shifty kind of guy.

Dave Chappelle

I'm happier in the way a guy gets happier when he starts to mature. It doesn't make things easier, but I'm so much better at handling them.

Charles Caleb Colton

The victims of ennui paralyze all the grosser feelings by excess, and torpify all the finer by disuse and inactivity. Disgusted with this world, and indifferent about another, they at last lay violent hands upon themselves, and assume no small credit for the sang froid with which they meet death. But, alas! such beings can scarcely be said to die, for they have never truly lived.

Charles Caleb Colton

Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.

Charles Dickens

If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!

Charles Dickens

Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.

Charles Stross

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

Charles Spurgeon

I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses [of the Bible] all day than rinse my hand in several chapters.

Charles Spurgeon

Faith has a saving connection with Christ. Christ is on the shore, so to speak, holding the rope, and as we lay hold of it with the hand of our confidence, He pulls us to shore; but all good works having no connection with Christ are drifted along down the gulf of fell despair.

Charles Spurgeon

There’s no shame about any honest calling; don’t be afraid of soiling your hands, there’s plenty of soap to be had.

Alan Watts

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords

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.

Charles Caleb Colton

Despotism can no more exist in a nation until the liberty of the press be destroyed than the night can happen before the sun is set.

Charles Dickens

People like us don't go out at night cause people like them see us for what we are

Charles Dickens

The doctor seemed especially troubled by the fact of the robbery having been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact business at noon, and to make an appointment, by the twopenny post, a day or two previous.

Charles Dickens

"I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man.

Charles Dickens

Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among the dead.

Charles Dickens

[I]t seemed as if the streets were absorbed by the sky, and the night were all in the air.

Charles Spurgeon

He who boasts of being perfect is perfect in folly. I never saw a perfect man. Every rose has its thorns, and every day its night. Even the sun shows spots, and the skies are darkened with clouds; and faults of some kind nestle in every bosom.

Charles Spurgeon

When we reach the hilltops of heaven, and look back upon all the way whereby the Lord our God hath led us, how shall we praise Him who, before the eternal throne, undid the mischief which Satan was doing upon earth. How shall we thank Him because He never held His peace, but day and night pointed to the wounds upon His hands, and carried our names upon His breastplate!

Alan Jay Lerner

I could have danced all night!

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

Charles Dickens

A multitude of people and yet solitude.

Charles Dickens

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.

Charles Dickens

Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.

Charles Dickens

Mrs. Boffin and me, ma'am, are plain people, and we don't want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there's always a straight way to everything.

Charles Dickens

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.

Charles Dickens

Some people are nobody's enemies but their own

Charles Soule

Superman/Wonder Woman, people expected, I guess, a lot of romance, or maybe something that wasnt emotionally deep. Who knows?

Charles Dickens

There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent, and sincere earnestness.

John Hull

We started giving presentations at practitioner conferences in 1986, and since then all of our derivatives research has been stimulated by contact with practitioners.

Charles M. Schulz

How can we lose when we're so sincere?

Lindsay Lohan

I've always been interested in singing, and I've always been singing and dancing since I was little.

Jonathan Todd

What they have done is insufficient. It's now two years since the decision.

John Felmy

We're in uncharted territory. We haven't experienced something like this since the 1980's.

Isla Fisher

You know, I didn't get to go to university because I've been acting since I was a kid.

Kristy McNichol

I say to my mother all the time, 'You're the child.' And she says, 'Yeah, you're the mother.' I've been that way with her since I was 11.

Thomas Steinbeck

Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.

Damaso Marte

I think I slept on it wrong. It's not that bad.

Billy Wagner

I slept the whole day and didn't budge.

Michael Bonnette

He's probably sleeping. He hasn't slept for two days, he told me.

Ed Roth

I?m sorry, I haven?t slept in two days.

Al Leiter

I like starting. It's pretty cool.

Bryan Ferry

It must be really hard to be starting out in music now.

Kurt Vonnegut

We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.

Billy Dee Williams

Originally I planned on starting a teapot collection. I really like them.

August Wilson

I ain't never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over. It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

Eden Sher

I really can't watch myself. I just get too in my head about it and start overthinking everything.

Cedric Benson

It never really was difficult for me not starting because I understood the circumstances.

Charisma Carpenter

When I was first starting out, and I was less established, I was really concerned about being typecast.

Rob Jordan

We're starting to get a little more notice.

Louis C. K.

Life isn't something you possess. It's something you take part in, and you witness.

Edward Hoagland

A writer's work is to witness things.

Kathleen Blanco

We have witnessed the most extraordinary devastation. The magnitude of the situation is unbelievable. It's just heartbreaking.

Deon Santisteven

We did not actually get to witness the reunion.

Elie Wiesel

When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.

John Pomfret

I think you're a witness and a recorder.

Philip Brooks

Witnesses say he pretty much plowed into them, that he just tapped the brakes,

Cheryl Conway

Unfortunately, there were no witnesses and there's very little evidence.

Joan Didion

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.