Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Hazlitt

Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.

William Hazlitt

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

William Hazlitt

We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.

William Devane

And I have to credit David Jacobs with the opportunities he gave me. He was totally into sharing the creation of characters. David put together a show that told the story of people over many years' time and that was greatly enjoyable. Though nowadays that is frowned upon.

William Devane

I'm trying to find a character that's my age and I can sustain week after week. I'd like to do a series.

William Davis

Reputation is what you have when you come to a new community; character is what you have when you go away.

William E. Gladstone

I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.

Wendell Phillips

Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: Men succeed less by their talents than their character. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character.

Wendell Berry

The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

Walter Murch

By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it - and what other things you don't hear - you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character,

Walter Mosley

I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.

Walter Mosley

... We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

W. Somerset Maugham

It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.

Will Smith

The quality of your life was determined by the quality of your service. I'm attracted to characters who have a higher calling, who want to serve in ways where you get beyond the comfortable service and you get into the space of the sacrificial. And I really am attracted to characters who just want to do things that brighten the world. That probably is the central aspect of my personality.

Will Smith

Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in 'The Fugitive.' That's how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.

Will Smith

I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my 'Will Smith' thing and get paid.

Warren Ellis

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

Vladimir Kramnik

I am convinced, the way one plays chess always reflects the player's personality. If something defines his character, then it will also define his way of playing.

Vivienne Westwood

My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.

Vincent Van Gogh

I painted two pictures of myself lately, one of which has rather the true character ... I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love.... photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed.

Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.

Will Poulter

I love the process of auditioning and having the chance to play a million different characters in one week - it's great.

Will Patton

I can't play anything until I find something that connects to my life, something I can carry as my secret map or code for the character.

Will Packer

You want people to go see it by the hoards. And for there to be talk of the possibility of continuing the journey and the ride, if you will, with these characters that we spent so much time honing, and executing this film on all levels, is super exciting.

Will Oldham

I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.

Walter Annenberg

I didn't want to be greedy. It's a mark of bad character and I always believed that pigs go the slaughterhouse.

Walter Annenberg

The test of character is having the ability to meet challenges.

Walter Benjamin

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ... The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...

Virginia Woolf

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Virginia Woolf

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

Virginia Woolf

On or about December 1910, human character changed.

William Bennett

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

William Bennett

People of good character are not all going to come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues. Good people-people of character and moral literacy-can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.