Famous Quotes & Sayings

Lloyd Alexander

Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.

Edith Hamilton

All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet

James Macdonald

You'll face overwhelming odds; you'll be incredibly outnumbered. Fear would be your natural inclination. But keep in mind, God is with you.

Karen Hesse

Sometimes, a flame can be utterly extinguished. Sometimes, a flame can shrink and waver, but sometimes a flame refuses to go out. It flares up from the faintest ember to illuminate the darkness, to burn in spite of overwhelming odds.

Eric Ries

Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.

Khaled Hosseini

She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.

Richard Branson

Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.

Robert A. Heinlein

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might improve the odds.

Ronald Fisher

If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.

Lewis Thomas

I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.

Marcia Wallace

I ignore all the doomsaying nonsense. I'm in a business where the odds of ever earning a living are a zillion to one, so I know itcan be done. I know the impossible can become possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

Swami Vivekananda

Sincerity of conviction and purity of motive will surely gain the day; and even a small minority, armed with these, is surely destined to prevail against all odds.

Julianne Moore

If you are at odds with the director, neither one of you is going to get anywhere. You really do have to be able to make both of you happy.

Henry Paulson

Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.

Robert Cormier

A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.

Robert Greene

No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.

Richard Linklater

As we know from our government, the more power you have, the more of a bureaucrat you are, and the more ego you have invested in being right, the greater the odds are that you will never change your opinion.

Rutherford B. Hayes

I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.

Robin McKinley

Never assume. Never make plans. Keep doing the press-ups and deep knee bends: you'll need all your strength and flexibility when your life suddenly implodes. Maybe it won't — some people do lead enchanted lives — but odds are that it will. Some time.

Tom Peters

Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.

Tony Goldwyn

The more decisions you make, the better, statistically, your odds of success are. And what I also learned was, it doesn't matter: anything can be fixed. When you're directing, you can agonize, but you can't indulge. Stuff has to happen

Suzanne Collins

One slip. One slip in thousands. The odds had been entirely in her favor. But it hadn't mattered.

Roger Martin

You need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success.

Suze Orman

I get more inspired by seeing everyday people succeed against the odds than anything else in life.

Walter Becker

I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

William J. Clinton

Volunteering is an act of heroism on a grand scale. And it matters profoundly. It does more than help people beat the odds; it changes the odds.

Warren Farrell

In brief, our genetic heritage is at odds with our genetic future. For the first time in human history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love.

Yoko Ono

The odds of not meeting in this life are so great that every meeting is like a miracle. It's a wonder that we don't make love to every single person we meet.

William Petersen

Sure, I always chose rebels to identify with - I still do - but to me a rebel isn't so much someone who breaks the law as someone who goes against the odds.

Zadie Smith

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.