Famous Quotes & Sayings

Hans Haacke

Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It's more like going to a Jacuzzi.

Hans Hofmann

The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.

Geraldine Brooks

Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.

Harry Anderson

But I'm very thankful that no one is slamming my head against the wall anymore.

Horace

The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.

Herbie Hancock

Being vulnerable is allowing yourself to trust. That's hard for a lot of people to do. They feel a lot more secure if they kind of put walls around themselves. Then they don't have to trust anybody but themselves. But to allow you to trust not only yourself but trust others means - is what's required to be vulnerable, and to have that kind of trust takes courage.

Henry David Thoreau

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.

Henry David Thoreau

Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.

Henry David Thoreau

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau

A temple, you know, was anciently "an open place without a roof," whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters.

Henry David Thoreau

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

Henry David Thoreau

If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.

Henry David Thoreau

Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.

Henry David Thoreau

It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.

Henry David Thoreau

As far as our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especially squirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors. It is to them that we owe this gift. It is not in vain that the squirrels live in or about every forest tree, or hollow log, and every wall and heap of stones.

Henry David Thoreau

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Henry David Thoreau

I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money.... In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

Jill Scott

I never expected the White House to be warm, and the artwork on the walls was extraordinary. I am a fan of the Louvre, but being there it was almost just as good.

Jill Scott

I'm a secret interior decorator. There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.

Eugene Ionesco

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?

Ernst Haas

I don't believe so much in the value of a single picture anymore. I don't really photograph for the wall.

Ernest Hemingway

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Ernest Hemingway

I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.

Ethel Waters

I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.

Etty Hillesum

Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields--there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze--and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them.

Erma Bombeck

The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?

Henry Mayhew

The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis

Helen Keller

Poetry is the gate through which I enter the land of enchantment. Once inside the flaming wall, my limitations fall from me, and my spirit is free.

Cat Stevens

Don't you feel a change a coming From another side of time, Breaking down the walls of silence, Lifting shadows from your mind.

Cassandra Clare

Niches set back in the walls contained polished marble statues of entwined bodies. Will looked away from them hastily, and then back. It wasn't as if Magnus seemed to be paying attention to what Will was doing, and he'd honestly never imagined two people could get themselves into a position like that, much less make it look artistic.

Cassandra Clare

It's like banging my head against the wall, except if I were actually banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop.

Cassandra Clare

I don't see why its taking so long," Maryse was saying to Magnus "is that normal?" "What's not normal is the discount I'm giving you."Magnus tapped the heel of his boot against the wall. "Normally I charge twice this much