Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.

Henry David Thoreau

However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.

Henry David Thoreau

As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, they look to me now as a New-Englander.

Henry David Thoreau

The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth...these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven's floor.

Henry David Thoreau

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

Henry David Thoreau

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, - and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Henry David Thoreau

When I consider how, after sunset, the stars come out gradually in troops from behind the hills and woods, I confess that I could not have contrived a more curious and inspiring sight.

Henry David Thoreau

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

Henry David Thoreau

We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.

Henry David Thoreau

Truly the stars were given for a consolation to man.

Henry David Thoreau

Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.

Henry David Thoreau

It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content.

Jean Genet

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

Jill Tarter

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.

Jill Tarter

Earlier generations of stars in the galaxy could well have had planets. But really, there was only hydrogen and helium to work with, so they'd all be gas giants and not small, rocky planets.

Jill Sobule

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a spy detective or a rock star.

Jeremy Brett

I think the greatest star in American at the moment is Kevin Costner.

Jeremy Bentham

Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.

Jennifer Connelly

I don't know if I was a star. I was certainly working a lot and that was strange because there were good things about it and things that were difficult.

Jennifer Ellison

I'm very close to my family. Not like these big stars - not mentioning any names - who lose the plot and don't know who they are.

Jennifer Egan

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Jeff Vandermeer

Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.

Fernando Pessoa

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

Faye Dunaway

Since Star Wars, that film's success led to bigger budgets, more hardware, that the great movies like the ones I did, which were studio movies, are now independent movies. They range from half a million to several million, and a lot of those have very interesting roles.

Faye Dunaway

You are not an extra in somebody else's film. You are the star in your own life.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Variación / Variations El remanso de aire bajo la rama del eco. El remanso del agua bajo fronda de luceros. El remanso de tu boca bajo espesura de besos. * The still waters of the air under the bough of the echo. The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp

Federico Garcia Lorca

Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars and all roses are as white as my pain.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river.

Fawn Hall

The press was all over to get a picture of me. It got to the point where they were all over my house, following me to work... Then Tom Brokaw and everybody else was doing stories, 'A star is born.'

Fanny Brice

Esther Williams? Wet, she's a star. Dry, she ain't.

Faith Ringgold

I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge.

Faith Ringgold

Anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way. The next thing you know, you're flying among the stars.

Faith Prince

I have a very 'theatre' face. I have what they call a wide mask. I probably would have been a big film star in the '20s with the silent films where they used a lot of key lighting, and make-up carved out your face.