Famous Quotes & Sayings

Terry Jones

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

Georgia Witkin

To try for a perfect holiday is really an exercise in mental cruelty because there really is no such thing as perfect, so what you've got to do is make it your holiday.

Thomas Hardy

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

Thomas Buxton

One of the ill effects of cruelty is that it makes the bystanders cruel

Felix Frankfurter

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling

Bruce Lahn

If we look at multiple genes, the ethnic variations such as the ones we found are likely to be counterbalanced by other differences. Just because these genes are still evolving, doesn't necessarily mean they make you any smarter. We've evolved genes for selfishness, violence, cruelty ??- all of which are in place because they may make survival easier.

Alan Furst

I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.

Malala Yousafzai

If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.

Jennifer Campbell

The maliciousness, the intentional, deliberate cruelty that we see is incredibly frightening.

Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Jonathan Coe

Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.

Samuel Richardson

Those who will bear much, shall have much to bear.

Samuel Richardson

A man may keep a woman, but not his estate.

Samuel Richardson

A husband's mother and his wife had generally better be visitors than inmates.

Samuel Richardson

Vast is the field of Science. The more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.

Anthony Burgess

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

Wilkie Collins

Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.

Wilfrid Sheed

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.

Charles Dickens

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.

Charles Caleb Colton

We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.

Charles Dickens

If Natur has gifted a man with powers of argeyment, a man has a right to make the best of 'em, and has not a right to stand on false delicacy, and deny that he is so gifted; for that is a turning of his back on Natur, a flouting of her, a slighting of her precious caskets, and a proving of one's self to be a swine that isn't worth her scattering pearls before.

Charles Dickens

When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.

Charles Dickens

The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.

Charles Dickens

A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.

Charles Dickens

It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.

Charles Dickens

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.

Charles Dickens

Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears.