Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Charles Dickens

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Charles Caleb Colton

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Dickens

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.

Charles Spurgeon

Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then hast thou reason to rejoice: but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying "I am saved" is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee.

Charles Spurgeon

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Charles Spurgeon

Come boldly, 'O believer, for despite the whisperings of Satan and the doubtings of thine own heart, thou art greatly beloved.

Alanis Morissette

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

Charles Caleb Colton

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.

Charles Caleb Colton

Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.

Charles Caleb Colton

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Charles Caleb Colton

Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

Charles Dickens

Eccentricities of genius.

Camille Paglia

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Camille Paglia

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

William Shakespeare

There is none but he Whose being I do fear; and under him My genius is rebuked, as it is said Mark Antony's was by Caesar.

Bob Packwood

Historically, the Republicans have been geniuses at throwing away advantages.

Charles Dickens

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Charles Dickens

The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.

Charles Dickens

it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.

Charles Dickens

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Charles Dickens

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

Charles Dickens

But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof.

Charles Dickens

I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart

Charles Dickens

He knew enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart.

Charles Dickens

Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!

Charles Dickens

At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.

Charles Dickens

The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets.

David Brenner

I want my tombstone to read: If this is a joke, I don't get it.

Earl Weaver

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

Eliza Coupe

I cannot feel my legs from the waist down any longer. But who cares? I look good and that's all that matters. And when I die of hypothermia for wearing formal shorts in winter, tell them to put that on my tombstone.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

Agnes de Mille

I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.

Charles Lamb

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

Charles Lamb

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.

Gail Porter

I'm always weeping at something or other.

Rebecca West

one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.