Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.
There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages, as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning.
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
Crafted with care and with love, this beautifully constructed novel reveals hard truths and difficult secrets. Diana Davidson is a writer of great honesty and integrity, a writer to trust.
When I was two years old, I heard about his [Dalai Lama] flight from Tibet. Being very little, I said, "Oh, good Tibetans, bad Chinese." Those were the black-and-white ways that I thought.
Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.
A man must know how to estimate a sour face. The sour face of the multitude, like thier sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspaper directs.
As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
Overhead the sanctities of the stars shine forever-more... pouring satire on the pompous business of the day which they close, and making the generations of men show slight and evanescent.
Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the words, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.
A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
Real freedom comes from the mastery, through knowledge, of historic conditions and race character, which makes possible a free and intelligent use of experience for the purpose of progress.
God discovers the martyr and confessor without the trial of flames and tortures, and will hereafter entitle many to the reward of actions which they had never the opportunity of performing.
In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow, Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow, Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee, There is no living with thee, nor without thee.
An indiscreet man is more hurtful than an ill-natured one; for as the latter will only attack his enemies, and those he wishes ill to, the other injures indifferently both friends and foes.
The human intellect is the great truth-organ; realities, as they exist, are the subjects of its study; and knowledge is the result of its acquaintance with the things which it investigates.
The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world. Who knows how big this audience is or how long it will last.
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, -friends?
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.
When you have worn out yourshoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber ofyour body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats andclothes you have worn out.
A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish ofthe men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex.
The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.
An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.
I can’t think of a more philosophical time in a person’s life than when they are children. It’s the one time when ideas are really beautiful and amazing and all-encompassing. They are life.
Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.
It's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends.
Yet [Dalai Lama] has said very strongly that basic freedoms of thought and speech have to be respected in Tibet and they're not at the moment. Tolerance doesn't mean accepting what's unfair.
To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!
In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.
Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.
There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don't know.