Famous Quotes & Sayings

Luis Walter Alvarez

[My father] advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that he did.

John Boyle O'Reilly

The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood.

Vex not thou the poet's mind With thy shallow wit: Vex not thou the poet's mind; For thou canst not fathom it

Orson Scott Card

My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.

Orson Scott Card

I've learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it's occupied by someone with a good heart.

Orson Scott Card

But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.

Robin McKinley

I said: "He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much." "But he is a Beast," said Father helplessly. I saw that he was weakening, and wishing only to comfort him I said, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?

John Scott

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

Sophocles

What greater ornament to a son than a father's glory, or to a father than a son's honorable conduct?

Sophocles

What fate can be worse than to know we have no one but ourselves to blame for our misfortunes!

Sophocles

Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.

Sophocles

Give me a life wherever there is an opportunity to live, and better life than was my father's.

Steve Tisch

My father was a guy who, because of the businesses he was in - the hotel business, the hospitality business - he didn't differentiate between the waiter serving you dinner, from the maitre d from the guy who owns a restaurant. Everybody was the same to him. He didn't look at who you were. He didn't look at your wallet.

Steve Spurrier

He was the unloving father that I never had, but I still craved his acceptance.

Stephen King

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

Stephen King

I do not kill with my gun; He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.

Ray Romano

If my father had hugged me even once, I'd be an accountant right now.

Ray Kurzweil

The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

Ray Lewis

One of the things I've always said is that if you're given the ability to coach kids, then you're really given the ability to be a father or parent of some sort.

Ray Conniff

I tell my friends about my conversations with my father - conversations with an artist.

Rashida Jones

I have a father who came from nothing and conquered the world. The last thing I'm going to do is sit here and spend his money and try to look pretty. That's not interesting to me at all.

Thomas Jefferson

In our own native land, in defense of the freedom that is our birthright and which we ever enjoyed till the late violation of it. For the protection of our property, acquired solely by the honest industry of our fore-fathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.

Thomas Jefferson

Having labored faithfully in establishing the right of self-government, we see in the rising generation, into whose hands it is passing, that purity of principle and energy of character which will protect and preserve it through their day, and deliver it over to their sons as they receive it from their fathers.

Thomas Jefferson

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

Thomas Jefferson

This doctrine ['that the condition of man cannot be ameliorated, that what has been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves where we are we must tread with awful reverence in the footsteps of our fathers']is the genuine fruit of the alliance between Church and State, the tenants of which finding themselves but too well in their present condition, oppose all advances which might unmask their usurpations and monopolies of honors, wealth and power, and fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold.

Thomas Jefferson

Take more pleasure in giving what is best to another than in having it for yourself, and then all the world will love you.

Tanith Lee

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

Tanith Lee

I was born in North London in 1947. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing.

Tana French

My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.

Tamara Ecclestone

My father started with nothing and is a self-made man. No matter what I do with my life, I can never match his accomplishments.

Tamara Mellon

I always knew I wanted to make my own way; I never wanted to be dependent on my father.

Tacitus

They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses , with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes , was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia .

Rosamund Pike

In the original computer game of Doom, you not only have to kill things. You have to pulverise them.