Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Butler Yeats

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Work is as much a necessity to man as eating and sleeping. Even those who do nothing that can be called work still imagine they are doing something. The world has not a man who is an idler in his own eyes.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Life, in all ranks and situations, is an outward occupation, an actual and active work.

Walter Willett

With breast cancer, nothing is straightforward. It makes sense for most people to make their dietary decisions based on what it does for heart disease. That's where the data are most strong.

Walter Winchell

Remember that nobody will ever get ahead of you as long as he is kicking you in the seat of the pants.

Walter Winchell

Money sometimes makes fools of important persons, but it may also make important persons of fools.

Walter Winchell

An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.

Walter Russell

The great lesson to learn of life is the need of giving out from the abundance of one's self in order to be ever abundant within one's self.

Walter Scott

For love is heaven and heaven is love.

Walter Scott

The will to do, the soul to dare.

Walter Scott

If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.

Walter Scott

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.

Walter Hagen

You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.

Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Walter Isaacson

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

Walter Isaacson

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Walter Isaacson

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy).

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social philosophy and science. In his own field - though, of course, on a proportionately lesser scale - Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky, who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it with brilliant psychological analysis.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

To the feudal aristocracy and the aristocracy of the spirit, nobility derives from diametrically opposite sources. The glory of the feudal aristocrat is in being a link in the longest possible chain of ancestors. The glory of the aristocrat of the spirit is in having no ancestors - or having as few as possible. If an artist is his own ancestor, if he has only descendents, he enters history as a genius; if he has few ancestors, or is related to them distantly, he enters history as a talent.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Every artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and image, and no one else's. This is why it is difficult to fit the artist into a world that has already been created, a seven-day, fixed and solidified world: he will inevitably slip out of the set of laws and paragraphs, he will be a heretic.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.