Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Johnson

Distance either of time or place is sufficient to reconcile weak minds to wonderful relations.

Samuel Johnson

By those who look close to the ground dirt will be seen. I hope I see things from a greater distance.

Samuel Johnson

Affectation naturally counterfeits those excellences which are placed at the greatest distance from possibility of attainment, because, knowing our own defects, we eagerly endeavor to supply them with artificial excellence.

Washington Irving

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

William Irwin Thompson

Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.

William Carey

William Carey chides his countrymen for deciding it would be impossible for the Gospel to travel over great distances and to penetrate varied cultures when they are willing to face the same trials for the sake of commerce.

William C. Bryant

A melancholy sound is in the air, A deep sigh in the distance, a shrill wail Around my dwelling. 'Tis the Wind of night.

Walter Isaacson

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

Yitzhak Shamir

We have said that Israel has had a very bad history with the United Nations, and whoever cares for himself in Israel distances himself from that Organization.

Yitzhak Rabin

You have got to sit down and talk to people. You can't understand people from a distance.

Winifred Holtby

What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.

Wislawa Szymborska

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

William Trevor

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

W. Eugene Smith

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.

Zora Neale Hurston

Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

Zora Neale Hurston

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

Zora Neale Hurston

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

Yvon Chouinard

I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.

Zach Braff

I've been doing som jogging at home recently and every time I try the distance I end up beating his time with like three or four seconds.

William Hazlitt

Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.

Wendell Berry

The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

Willa Cather

The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

Will Smith

Here I stand before you - brown. Color of the mountains Colossal as the earth Wrapped so deliciously within my own joy and misery Feathers of my wings paralyzed by the distance of my mind Here I stand before you, the color of the night Frozen by the potential of me.

Vincent Van Gogh

At one time, the earth was supposed to be flat. Well, so it is, even today, from Paris to Asnieres. But that fact doesn't prevent science from proving that the earth as a whole is spherical. No one nowadays denies it. Well...we are still at the stage of believing that life itself is flat, the distance from birth to death. Yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know.

Vincent Van Gogh

What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

Walter Benjamin

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

Virginia Woolf

All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part.

Werner Heisenberg

Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object.

Samuel Richardson

All that hoops are good for is to clean dirty shoes and keep fellows at a distance.

Sally Ride

When you can feel that close to something you're used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.

Joseph Epstein

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

Konrad Lorenz

The distance at which all shooting weapons take effect screens the killer against the stimulus sensation which would otherwise activate his killing inhibitions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the finger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man.

Ralph Fiennes

...the world is a giant community now. This excuse of distance, time, doesn't work...We're all so connected. We can't spend every second of our lives worrying about another family miles away but we somehow have to factor it in where we can.