Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking.

Charles Dickens

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Charles Caleb Colton

When in reading we meet with any maxim that may be of use, we should take it for our own, and make an immediate application of it, as we would of the advice of a friend whom we have purposely consulted.

Charles Caleb Colton

We should choose our books as we would our companions, for their sterling and intrinsic merit.

Charles Caleb Colton

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

Charles Caleb Colton

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Charles Caleb Colton

With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose, for good books are as scarce as good companions, and in both instances, all that we can learn from baad ones is, that some much time has been worse than thrown away.

Charles Caleb Colton

He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Charles Caleb Colton

A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

Alan Bennett

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

David Mitchell

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

David Graeber

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

David Suzuki

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

Cesare Pavese

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

Camille Paglia

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

Charles Caleb Colton

Sir Richard Steele has observed, that there is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.

Charles Stanley

Relationship is the difference between grace and law.

Alan Watts

Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.

Alan Watts

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.

Alan Moore

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

Alan Moore

You can’t buy that kind of empowerment. To just know that as far as you are aware, you have not got a price; that there is not an amount of money large enough to make you compromise even a tiny bit of principle that, as it turned out, would make no practical difference anyway. I’d advise everyone to do it, otherwise you’re going to end up mastered by money and that’s not a thing you want ruling your life.

Alan Ball

The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don't have the leisure of time in television.

Al Neuharth

The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective.

Chris Christie

This is a difference between being a governor and being in a legislature. Because when something doesn't work in New Jersey, they look at me, say: "Why didn't it get done? Why didn't you do it?" You have to be responsible and accountable.

Sanjay Kumar

There are companies that are cutting their costs by over 50% by offshoring.

Joanne Harris

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

Margaret Cavendish

As for my brothers, of whom I had three, I know not how they were bred.

Jonathan Brown

Whenever the occasion arose, he rose to the occasion.

Alan Sugar

I'm an Englishman. What more can I say?

Dinah Sheridan

While making Genevieve, I learned there could be a lot more to a film than just acting in it.

Edmund White

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.

Gerald Schatten

What's invaluable about Bernie is that he has gotten a number of us eggheads together and has translated what is scientific gobbledygook into English so that our neighbors and friends can understand it,

Joe Cocker

Unfortunately I was in New York when 9/11 happened.

Charles Stross

I don't do flash fiction.

China Mieville

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

China Mieville

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

China Mieville

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

David Morrell

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.

David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Kurt Vonnegut

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

Edith Wharton

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

Charles Caleb Colton

If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

Charles Simmons

Live only for today, and you ruin tomorrow.

Alan Watts

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Alan Watts

Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.

Al Stewart

Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day.

Chogyam Trungpa

Humans are the only animals that try to dwell in the future. You don't have to purely live in the present situation without a plan, but the future plans you make can only be based on the aspects of the future that manifest within the present situation.

China Mieville

You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.

David Miliband

...the science is getting worse faster than the politics is getting better

David Rakoff

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

Charles Dickens

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

Charles Dickens

Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason

Charles Caleb Colton

Of two evils, it is perhaps less injurious to society, that good doctrine should be accompanied by a bad life, than that a good life should lend its support to a bad doctrine.

Charles Dickens

A good thing can't be cruel.

Charles Simmons

Promptitude is not only a duty, but is also a part of good manners; it is favorable to fortune, reputation, influence, and usefulness; a little attention and energy will form the habit, so as to make it easy and delightful.

Alan Moore

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

Alan Alda

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.

Akira Kurosawa

A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.

Brian Nicola

We want them all to go on, and realistically they all have a shot. They all want to be state-placers and they're all looking to be pretty tough. I just want them all to have a good time.

William Cowper

When this poor, lisping, stammering tongue/ Lies silent in the grave.

Michael Jackson

Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. The truth will win this marathon in court.

Helen Gahagan

In trying to make something new, half the undertaking lies in discovering whether it can be done. Once it has been established that it can, duplication is inevitable.

Cassandra Gash

I don't know where the responsibility lies, but I know I've done everything I can do.

Mark Twain

I am different from Washington. I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.

Bobby Locke

The real success in golf lies in turning three shots into two.

Fernando Rospigliosi

He can't be believed. He's a man who lies systematically.

David Garrick

Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel, and talkd like poor Poll.

Ed Garland

His oath should have been, 'I Tony Harwood swear to lie, I say you should reject Tony Harwood 100 percent. Throw him out. He ain't worth nothing.

Tawni O'Dell

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.

Ellen Potter

I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.

Anne Fadiman

The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.

Ian Mcewan

Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.

Aberjhani

Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one's mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.

Siri Hustvedt

It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!

Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Andrea Hirata

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

Paul Theroux

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.

Katy Perry

I want to sell out arenas and sell millions of records.

F. Stone

Let's just say it would be in the millions of dollars,

Thulasiraj Ravilla

A simple, well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions, and something even simpler, a pair of glasses, can make millions more see.

Susan Ertz

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Mike Burkett

So many millions of people don't feel like their vote has any meaning. There is no reason why younger people can't be a unified force.

Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Not only will this make you treat each moment more preciously, but you will be more patient with yourself and with others, recognizing that there are millions of moments on the path to any worthwhile achievement.

Warren Ellis

If it's accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it's as mainstream as it gets.

Nandan Nilekani

I'm in politics to make the lives of millions of Indians better.

Simon Cowell

I'm not sure who has the right to say that you have better taste than somebody else, because essentially what you're doing is calling millions of people morons.

Daniel Dennett

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

Ami Ayalon

It's for the Palestinians to decide who will lead them.

Stephen Jay Gould

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Stephen Jay Gould

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

Joyce Smith

This is the first time I've ever seen a pale one.

Chris Mohr

One of the good things about the Paleo diet is that it automatically cleans a lot of crap out of your diet.

Golda Meir

There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.

Golda Meir

There is no such thing as a Palestinian.

Evan Rachel Wood

I was always pale. And I'm glad that I can be open about my paleness now.

Alan Mollohan

I have never, not once, violated my public trust.

S. Hughes

Where there is muck to be raked, it must be raked,and the public must know of it, that it may mete out justice....

David Duchovny

If my work was good enough, I would never have to do publicity.

Carl Andre

Americans understand better than the Europeans and the English that any publicity is good.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

I know where there is more wisdom than is found in Napoleon, Voltaire, or all the ministers present and to come - in public opinion.

Robert Reich

When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else.

Robert Reich

Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do.

Sharon Stone

My personal style and public style are very different. When I go out, I play dress up.

Brendan Behan

There's no bad publicity except an obituary.

Charles Dickens

Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment.

Charles Dickens

I have nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess that no one can ever believe this narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.

Charles Stross

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

Charles Stanley

I hear people all the time say, well I read through the Bible last year. Well, so what? I'm all for reading through the Bible. But how much of that got on the inside, or did they just cover three more chapters today? I would never discredit reading the Scriptures, but it is important to meditate on it.

Charles Spurgeon

It is a reading age, a preaching age, a working age, but it is not a praying age.

Charles Spurgeon

To believe a thing is to see the cool crystal water sparkling in the cup. But to meditate on it is to drink of it. Reading gathers the clusters; contemplation squeezes forth their generous juice.

Charles Spurgeon

Give yourself to reading.’... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.

Alan Bennett

...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

Alan Bennett

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Charles Caleb Colton

Charles Fox said that restorations were the most bloody of all revolutions; and he might have added that reformations are the best mode of preventing the necessity of either.

Charles Stanley

When we learn from experience, the scars of sin can lead us to restoration and a renewed intimacy with God.

Boris Diaw

We still want to win and see which team we've got to play (in the post-season). We got a little tired because we didn't play with Steve and Raja, and they usually play a lot. Sometimes we get to rest up because Steve is doing all the work.

Doug Flynn

We're in inning 2 of the new ballgame. So get in and let it go the rest of the innings.

Jim Tracy

We're not going to say we're not going to see him for the rest of the year, ... We're going to take it day-by-day.

Daymond John

Make sure you're doing something that you love, that you're willing to do for the rest of your life. If you're doing it for money, that's the only thing you won't make.

Audre Lorde

I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.

Edgar Cayce

Death is only passing through God's other door.

Edgar Cayce

Let's learn to live! Then there is no death, save the transition, when desired. Many live who have never died as yet.

Charles Spurgeon

Do not begin to teach others until the Lord has taught you.

Alan Watts

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

Alan Paton

Life has not taught me to expect nothing, but she has taught me not to expect success to be the inevitable result of my endeavors. She taught me to seek sustenance from the endeavor itself, but to leave the result to God.

Dave Barry

I was a middle-of-the-road Democrat more than anything else. I know I voted for Carter. Watergate taught me how bad the Republicans were.

Bryan Stevenson

My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone.

Charles Koch

To be happy you have to fulfill your nature. That's what Aristotle taught so many centuries ago, that the road to happiness isn't to go drink more or consume more. The road to happiness is to fully develop your abilities, and then apply them to do good.

Audre Lorde

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I, who thought to sink, was caught up into love, and taught the whole of life in a new rhythm.

Cass McCombs

When I was young, I used to go to Baha'i camp, and they taught me a lot about the equality of religions.

Alain Prost

In 1980 I finished three or four times in seventh place.

Chris Copeland

The three-ball is an easy shot if you're uncontested, but when they know you can shoot, it's a lot harder to get off.

Chiang Kai-shek

There are three essential factors in all human activity: spirit, materials, and action.

Byron Katie

I can find only three kinds of business in the Universe: mine, yours, and God's.

Bryan Robson

When you beat Arsenal, they are a good three points.

Bill Wright

The other three have really made strides. They're consistently getting better.

Steve Alford

We've already got three up on the board.

William Shakespeare

Preferred three hours quicker over one moment late.

Charles L. Allen

Before repeating something bad about another person, ask yourself these three questions: Is it true? Is it necessary for me to tell it? Is it kind to tell it?

Charles Dickens

My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope, in life beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind.

Charles Spurgeon

A high character might be produced, I suppose, by continued prosperity, but it has very seldom been the case. Adversity, however it may appear to be our foe, is our true friend; and, after a little acquaintance with it, we receive it as a precious thing - the prophecy of a coming joy. It should be no ambition of ours to traverse a path without a thorn or stone.

Alan Clark

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

David Mitchell

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

Byron Katie

The WORK 1.Is it true? 2.Can you absolutely know that it's true? 3.How do you react when you think that thought? 4.Who would you be without the thought?

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

You know who your true friends are when things go wrong for you, but the opposite is also true. When things go well, the people who really love you are happy.

Charlie Bewley

I've scammed so many people throughout my whole life who never learned my true identity until I started acting.

Billy Joel

Well I never had a place that I could call my very own/That's all right, my love, 'cause you're my home.

Audrey Hepburn

True friends are families which you can select.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I can say that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies, relieved from all gloomy apprehensions of the future, satisfied that as my labors and capacities were limited to this sphere of action, I was responsible for nothing beyond my horizon, as I could neither understand nor change the condition of the unknown world. Giving ourselves, then, no trouble about the future, let us make the most of the present, and fill up our lives with earnest work here.

John Gibbons

There a lot of unknowns on this team.

Gotye

I guess Surrealism has a draw for me because it's an unknown world. It's a world of subconscious. Some things you can't really get your hands on very easily. Things that are kind of nebulous and they feel like they're not completely formed. You have to feel your way through that.

Jon Burnham

The big unknown in this is the geopolitical situation,

H. P. Lovecraft

Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.

John Lennon

I am going into an unknown future, but I'm still all here, and still while there's life, there's hope.

Patricia Marx

I do not find the concept of consorting with unknown persons appealing.

John Boyne

It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you've ever known before.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it.

Charles Dickens

When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained -not shown- yet always ready.

Charles Stanley

When we surrender to His timing, He does mighty things in and for us, according to His will and His timing. God acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.

Charles Stanley

Our willingness to wait reveals the value we place on the object we're waiting for.

Charles Spurgeon

Those who do not hope cannot wait; but if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

Alan Alda

If you don't listen deeply, the connection won't take place.... [You have to be] willing to be changed by the person you're listening to, where you're not just waiting for a pause so you can say your thing, but you're actually letting them have an effect on you if they can.

Al Pacino

An actor basically likes to be asked to do something, no matter what position he's in. It feels more natural. Sitting and waiting is more gratifying.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

We can afford to follow Him to failure. Faith dares to fail. The resurrection and the judgment will demonstrate before all worlds who won and who lost. We can wait.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

It is dangerous to be so busy that you have no time to wait on God.