Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean-Luc Godard

Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.

Jean-Luc Godard

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Jean Piaget

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Jean Piaget

True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.

Jerry Pournelle

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

Jerry Pournelle

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.

Jerry Pournelle

As a means of subsidizing lawyers the present nuclear regulation system is well designed - but is there not perhaps a cheaper way of rewarding legal diligence? It would probably be cheaper to give each law school graduate a guaranteed salary of $50,000 a year on the condition that he (or she) not practice law.

Jerry Spinelli

The flash would prove that proton decay really happens. The flash would mean that the matter of the proton - the solid stuff - had turned into the energy of the flash (E-mc2). Totally. Nothing left behind. No ash. No smoke. No smell. Nada. One moment it's there, the next moment - pffft - gone. What would it mean? Only this: Nothing lasts. Nothing. Because everything that exists is made of protons.

Jerry Saltz

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

Jerry Saltz

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

Jerry Seinfeld

Anyone who would laugh at a recital is probably some sort of lunatic anyway. I mean, only a sick, twisted mind could be that rude and ignorant.

Jerry Seinfeld

I mean, she's giving and caring and genuinely concerned about the welfare of others. I can't be with someone like that.

Jerry Seinfeld

Surveys show that the #1 fear of Americans is public speaking. #2 is death. That means that at a funeral, the average American would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.

Jerome K. Jerome

If a man stopped me in the street and demanded of me my watch, I should refuse to give it to him. If he threatened to take it by force, I feel I should, though not a fighting man, do my best to protect it. If, on the other hand, he should assert his intention of trying to obtain it by means of an action in any court of law, I should take it out of my pocket and hand it to him, and think I had got off cheaply.

Jeremiah Wright

I think one of the things the church service means is hope.

Jeffrey Goldberg

If you have to have 25 French paratroopers to guard a single synagogue, it means that life is not healthy in France for Jews

Jeffrey Gitomer

Next time someone tells you 'never,' remember that means 'not for at least one hour.'

Jeffrey Kluger

It's far too much to say that effective hoping is the only - or even the biggest - part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the quality of the product you're selling, and often pure, dumb luck.

Jeffrey Kluger

Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.

Jeffrey Kluger

There may be no more-radioactive term in the English language than what we now almost always refer to as the 'n-word' - itself a coy means of linguistic sidestepping that is a sign of how perilous it is to utter the thing in full, even in conversations about language.

Jeffrey Kluger

Part-black generally means all-black in Americans' minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups' camps.

Jeffrey Kluger

Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.

Jeffrey Eugenides

The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair

Jeffrey Eugenides

I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don't like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

Jeffrey Eugenides

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

Jeff Mangum

Soft silly music is meaningful, magical.

Jeff Koons

People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.

Jeff Koons

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

Jim Gaffigan

The idea of being a practicing Catholic, it's - for me, it's like - I need a lot of practice, you know what I mean?

Jim Gaffigan

I'm a big eater. I mean, a lot of my stand-up is about food, and you write about what you know, and that's the only thing I know. I don't know anything else.

Jim Gaffigan

We are all a little weird. And we like to think that there is always someone weirder. I mean, I am sure some of you are looking at me and thinking, “Well, at least I am not as weird as you,” and I am thinking, “Well, at least I am not as weird as the people in the loony bin,” and the people in the loony bin are thinking, “Well, at least I am an orange”.

Jim Bolger

I mean you really can target your answers to get the instant response and I think that is a very manipulative type of polling. I really have no time for that worm at all.