Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it.

Henry David Thoreau

The principal, the only, thing a man makes, is his condition of fate. Though commonly he does not know it, nor put up a sign to this effect, "My own destiny made and mended here." (Not yours.) He is a master workman in the business. He works twenty-four hours a day at it, and gets it done. Whatever else he neglects or botches, no man was ever known to neglect this work. A great many pretend to make shoes chiefly, and would scout the idea that they make the hard times which they experience.

Henry David Thoreau

Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, seewhat isbefore you, and walkon intofuturity.

Henry David Thoreau

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

Henry David Thoreau

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.

Henry David Thoreau

Concord's little arch does not span all our fate, nor is what transpires under it law for the universe.

Henry David Thoreau

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

Henry David Thoreau

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

It's true; once you are a father, there's no turning back. Your heart strings as well as your purse strings are never again the same.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.

Jerry Falwell

My father was an agnostic.

Jeremy Bentham

The turn of a sentence has decided the fate of many a friendship, and, for aught that we know, the fate of many a kingdom.

Jennifer Egan

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.

Jeff Sessions

[My father] was interested. He read the newspapers and read Time and U.S. News and World Report and people in stores would come along, you know, and they would talk politics.

Jeff Sessions

My father never ran for office or supported anybody for office, and was not engaged in that at all. But I think people throughout the area were just in a constant state of tension - I mean, adults.

Jeff Greenfield

Victory has 1,000 fathers; defeat has 1,000 kibitzers.

Jean Shepherd

The hand of fate had dipped into the ragbag of humanity.

Jean Shepherd

Some men are Baptists, others Catholics. My father was an Oldsmobile man.

Jean de La Fontaine

He is very foolish who aims at satisfying all the world and his father.

Jerry Seinfeld

You can tell what was the best year of your father's life, because they seem to freeze that clothing style and ride it out.

Jenson Button

My father did everything for me. He was awesome.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

Jim Elliot

Father, let me be weak that I might loose my clutch on everything temporal. My life, my reputation, my possessions, Lord, let me loose the tension of the grasping hand. Even, Father, would I lose the love of fondling. How often I have released a grasp only to retain what I prized by 'harmless' longing, the fondling touch. Rather, open my hand to received the nail of Calvary, as Christ's was opened- that I, releasing all, might be released, unleashed from all that binds me now. He thought Heaven, yea, equality with God, not a thing to be clutched at. So let me release my grasp.

Jim Elliot

Father, take my life, yea, my blood if Thou wilt, and consume it with Thine enveloping fire. I would not save it, for it is not mine to save. Have it Lord, have it all. Pour out my life as an oblation for the world. Blood is only of value as it flows before Thine altar

Jim Elliot

Father, make of me a crisis man. Bring those I contact to decision. Let me not be a milepost on a single road; make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me.

Jim Gaffigan

I was raised in a family where my father was the first one to go to college.

Jim Gaffigan

Whenever one of my children says, 'Goodnight, Daddy,' I always think to myself, 'You don't mean that.

Jim Gaffigan

There should be a children's song: 'If you're happy and you know it, keep it to yourself and let your dad sleep'.

Jim Gaffigan

I usually don't have a burger, a brat, and a steak but it is 4th of July. And I need the energy if I'm gonna start blowin crap up. It's what the founding fathers would want.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.