Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leonard Slatkin

I knew I could never match my father as a violinist, and there were already four generations of outstanding cellists in the family.

Leonardo da Vinci

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.

Oscar Wilde

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Patrick Rothfuss

With his eyes and those hands there won't be a woman safe in all the world when he starts hunting after the ladies.' 'Courting, dear,' my father corrected gently. 'Semantics,' she shrugged.

Park Geun-hye

I know more than anyone the divergent views about my father. I want to be judged on my own merits.

Oswald Chambers

Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.

Lillian Hellman

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Letitia Baldrige

if the right man does not come along, there are many fates far worse. One is to have the wrong man come along.

Leon Panetta

My father said I was perfectly suited for Washington because I've always worked around nuts.

Learned Hand

Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in the direction of public affairs.

Laurence Housman

Father eternal, ruler of creation, Spirit of life, which moved ere form was made Through the thick darkness covering every nation Light to man's blindness, O be Thou our aid.

Jodi Picoult

Does fate ever play by the rules?

Jodi Picoult

From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

Jodi Picoult

Whether or not belive in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault - that if you'd tried better, worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance? I know poeple who'll hear about the people who died, and will say that it was God's will. I know people who'll say it was bad luck. And then there's my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at hte wrong time. Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn't you?

Jodi Picoult

My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

Jodi Picoult

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires.

John Grisham

My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession.

John Greenleaf Whittier

The slave will be free. Democracy in America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the top-stone of that temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will he be who can say, with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her welfare, I, too, have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs."

John Greenleaf Whittier

The laws of changeless justice bind oppressor and oppressed; and, close as sin and suffering joined we march to fate abreast.

John Greenleaf Whittier

But let the good old corn adorn The hills our fathers trod; Still let us, for his golden corn, Send up our thanks to God!

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Fates are just: they give us but our own; Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our foolish ways! Re-clothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives thy service find, In deeper reverence praise

John Green

Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting.

John Green

Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?

Patti Smith

My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.

Patti Smith

Fate is like a secret friend that helps push you on into life.

Pat Robertson

My father was a lawyer.

P. L. Travers

Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.

P. D. James

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

P. D. James

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

P. J. O'Rourke

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.

Ozzy Osbourne

Do you know what causes low voter turnout in America? It's the result of having the fate of our nation at stake. This began with the bitter presidential election of 1828, which pitted the education, cultivation, and puritan constraint of John Quincy Adams against the yahoo populism of Andrew Jackson, thereby deciding permanently whether America would become a shining city upon a hill or an overlighted strip mall along a highway.

Ozzy Osbourne

My father always said I would do something big one day.'I've got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,' he'd tell me, after he'd had a few beers.'You're either going to do something very special, or you're going to go to prison.' And he was right, my old man. I was in prison before my eighteenth birthday.