Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

Charles Dickens

The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm.

Charles Dickens

A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from, or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable or more cruel.

Charles Caleb Colton

Calumny crosses oceans, scales mountains and traverses deserts, with greater ease than the Scythian Abaris, and like him, rides upon a poisoned arrow.

Charles Caleb Colton

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.

Charles Caleb Colton

Some men of a secluded and studious life, have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts, and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon, that far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that world of waters.

Charles Caleb Colton

Nobility is a river that sets with a constant and undeviating current, directly into the great Pacific Ocean of Time; but, unlike all other rivers, it is more grand at its source, than at its termination.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.

Charles Stross

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Charles Dickens

There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands.

Alan Watts

So we down-to-earth, gutsy, tough, realistic, and practical types have just been squandering billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of energy, nerve-work, and materials in whizzing off to the moon to discover, as astronomers knew before, that it was just a dreary slag heap. This is the true, original and scientifically etymological meaning of being lunatics. Crying for the moon.

Alan Watts

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

Alan Hovhaness

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

Alan Bean

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

Alan Bean

I can remember walking on the moon.

Alan Bean

The moon is very rugged.

Alan Bean

It's hard not to be excited when you're going to find a way to land on the moon.

Alan Bean

We knew it was going to be difficult to get to the moon. We didn't know how difficult.

Charles Dickens

Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.

Alan Watts

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

Chinua Achebe

When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.

Chinua Achebe

The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.

Casey Affleck

My family would be supportive if I said I wanted to be a Martian, wear only banana skins, make love to ashtrays, and eat tree bark.

William Shakespeare

Tongues I'll hang on every tree That shall civil sayings show. . . .

David Hockney

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

Edwin Louis Cole

Our Lord never condemned the fig tree because it brought forth so much fruit that some fell to the ground and spoiled. He only cursed it when it was barren.

Bill O'Reilly

As the tree is bent, so it will grow.