Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Edward Merriam

[T]he influence of the German school is most obvious in relation to the contract theory of the origin of the state and the idea of the function of the state. The theory that the state originates in an agreement between men was assailed by the German thinkers and the historical, organic, evolutionary idea substituted for it.

Alan Watts

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

Alan Paton

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

Alan Moore

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

Alan Moore

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Alan Bennett

I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Alan Bennett

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Alan Ball

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Alan Alda

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

Charles de Lint

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.

Charles de Lint

I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories.

Charles de Lint

Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there's more to everything than that, whether it's a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.

Charles Caleb Colton

All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

Charles Dickens

And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O 'tis love, 'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round!

Charles Dickens

Heaven above was blue, and earth beneath was green; the river glistened like a path of diamonds in the sun; the birds poured forth their songs from the shady trees; the lark soared high above the waving corn; and the deep buzz of insects filled the air.

Charles Stuart Calverley

I can not sing the old songs now! It is not that I deem them low, 'Tis that I can't remember how They go.

Charles Stanley

When you become an instrument in God's hands as He transfers someone from the realm of darkness into the kingdom of His Son, you make a difference in the person's eternal destiny. Not only that, but Satan also receives a devastating blow.

Charles Stanley

Thank the Lord for using each person as a tool in your life to deepen your insight into His grace and conforming you to the image of His Son.

Charles de Gaulle

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.

Charles de Lint

Let me give you some advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you.

Charles Dickens

She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.

Charles Soule

Ive always loved the idea of mythologies linked to or underlying everyday life, like the kami gods of Shintoism, where every rock, tree and stream has its own little god associated with it.

Charles Stross

The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.

Charles Stanley

People don't like the idea of consequences. They want to be able to live their life freely and do what they want to do without any consequences. And we know that's just not the way life is.

Charles Spurgeon

Abhor all idea of being saved by good works, but O, be as full of good works as if you were to be saved by them!

Alan Watts

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

Alan Watts

The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.