Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herbert Spencer

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

Herbert Spencer

Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image.

Herman Melville

The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.

Herman Melville

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of ; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone ; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Herman Melville

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

Herb Asher

The state, for a long period of time, has been undergoing a wrenching economic transformation. The reality is much grimmer than in other states.

Herb Kohl

Judicial excellence requires an understanding that the law is more than an intellectual game and more than a mental exercise. He or she must recognize that real people with real problems are affected by the decisions rendered by the court. Justice, after all, may be blind, but it should not be deaf.

Henry David Thoreau

Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers.

Henry David Thoreau

If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.

Henry David Thoreau

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.

Henry David Thoreau

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

Henry David Thoreau

Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.

Henry David Thoreau

Real power is measured by how much you can let things be.

Henry David Thoreau

When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Henry David Thoreau

Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody.

Henry David Thoreau

Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived.

Henry David Thoreau

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

Henry David Thoreau

I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.

Henry David Thoreau

I am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it nota real triumph? I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again. So there is no danger of my repeating myself, and getting to a barrel of sermons, which you must upset, and begin again with.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

The suffering caused by the terrorists is the real torture.

Jean Genet

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.

Jill Soloway

There is a real comfort with the position of the victim, which can either result in true empathy or deep paranoia.

Jill Soloway

I think people don't really actually talk about what their real issue is, which is that white, cis men - not straight men, but cis men - have had their hands on the narrative ever since filmmaking has begun.

Jill Soloway

When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.

Jillian Michaels

The reality is that most of the time, the more bizarre the trend, the more bogus the results.

Jill Scott

I'm looking for someone who works as hard as I do. Who loves their work as much as I do, so at the end of the night we have something real to talk about, something exciting that makes our blood flow and boil.

Jill Scott

Find new treasures in yourself. Love doesn't die. Love is unyielding. It's going to come back. The more you love and appreciate yourself, the more prepared you are when the real thing shows up.

Jessica Jackley

Future is about creating value. If we have tools to empower each other, more possibility is reality.

Jessica Cutler

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.

Jessica Cutler

There's no point in living in an alternate reality.

Jessica Hagedorn

There is real beauty in my eyes when I lose my mind.