Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carol Shields

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted...

Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Castaneda

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Carlos Castaneda

I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.

Carlos Castaneda

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Carlos Castaneda

One ,must have something to die for in order to have something to live for

Carlos Castaneda

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

C. S. Lewis

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

Agnes de Mille

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Carlos Castaneda

Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet.

C. S. Lewis

The Calormens have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue --and things like that-- but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.

Agnes Repplier

To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.

Alan Kay

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

Charlotte Bronte

My God, whose son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest, thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise, and in Him is my trust, and though stripped and crushed by thee, -though naked, desolate, void of resource- I do not despair:where the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray: Jehovah, in His own time, will aid.

Charlotte Bronte

Wise people say it is folly to think anybody perfect; and as to likes and dislikes, we should be friendly to all, and worship none

Charles de Gaulle

Nothing more enhances authority than silence. It is the crowning virtue of the strong, the refuge of the weak, the modesty of the proud, the pride of the humble, the prudence of the wise, and the sense of fools. To speak is to . . . dissipate one's strength; whereas what action demands is concentration. Silence is a necessary preliminary to the ordering of one's thoughts.

Charles de Lint

Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.

Charles Dickens

He was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset

Carlos Castaneda

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask, mandatorily: 'Does this path have a heart?'

C. S. Lewis

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. . . look to Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Dieter Zetsche

We have no shortage of capacity and we are not planning to take any of it out. Our ambition is to make our plants efficient wherever they are.

Abba Eban

It [idolatry] nourishes mans ambition to domineer over his fellow man. Idolatry, therefore, is the source of all social and moral evil in the world.

Charles Caleb Colton

Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness.

Charles Caleb Colton

The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale.

Charles Caleb Colton

All who have been great and good without Christianity would have been much greater and better with it. If there be, amongst the sons of men, a single exception to this maxim, the divine Socrates may be allowed to put in the strongest claim. It was his high ambition to deserve, by deeds, not by creeds, an unrevealed heaven, and by works, not by faith, to enter an unpromised land.

Jon Runyan

When I decided to run for Congress, I saw it as an opportunity to serve the South Jersey community that had become my home after signing to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. I didn't choose public service out of political ambition or a desire for power, and never once thought of making a career of it.

Tom Cotton

Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection, since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.