Quotes by Authors - Page 3747

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability ratherthanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates formwe are justified in supposingthat you must have brains. For you, a symbol of theunit, stiff and sharp,conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority andliking for everythingself-dependent, anything anambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, toattempt through sheerreserve, to confuse presumptions resulting fromobservation, is idle. You cannot make usthink you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you arebrilliant, itis not because your petals are the without-which-nothingof pre-eminence. Would you not, minusthorns, be a what-is-this, a mereperculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, theelements, or mildew;but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliancewithout co-ordination? Guarding theinfinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience tothe remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently,your thorns are the best part of you.
Marianne Moore
Sin aims always at the utmost; every time it rises up to tempt or entice, might it have its own course, it would go out to the utmost sin in that kind. Every unclean thought or glance would be adultery if it could; every covetous desire would be oppression, every thought of unbelief would be atheism, might it grow to its head. Men may come to that, that sin may not be heard speaking a scandalous word in their hearts - that is, provoking to any great sin with scandal in its mouth; but yet every rise of lust, might it have its course, would come to the height of villainy: it is like the grave that is never satisfied.
John Owen
A high-school teacher after all is a person deputized by the rest of us to explain to the young what sort of world they are living in and to defend if possible the part their elders are playing in it.
Entile Capouya
Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.
Robin McKinley
Quit questioning God and start trusting Him!
Joel Osteen
Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats
Garry Kasparov
The truth is this: People that give you focus, energy and anger do care. If you were nothing then you wouldn't be able to affect them. Behind every over reaction was first the thought that your opinion mattered and your respect was once of value or you wouldn't get the response you got.
Shannon L. Alder
Mindfulness meditation doesn't change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart's capacity to accept life as it is. It teaches the heart to be more accommodating, not by beating it into submission, but by making it clear that accommodation is a gratifying choice.
Sylvia Boorstein
The boy took my sketchbook.
Ashley Earley
Without risk, life is far too predictable
Renee Ahdieh
The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A bee-hive, when it swarms, appears to reproduce by broad-fronted budding, like a wolf pack. But if we look more carefully we find that, as far as the genes are concerned, their destiny is largely shared. The future of the genes in the swarm is, at least to a large extent, lodged in the ovaries of one queen. This is why—it is just another way of expressing the message of earlier chapters—the bee colony looks and behaves like a truly integrated single vehicle.
Richard Dawkins
Be the author of your life.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Sometimes your dearest friend whom you reveal most of your secrets to becomes so deadly and unfriendly without knowing that they were not really your friend.
Michael Bassey Johnson
What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.
Fredrik Backman
People don't need to know how good you are. Just smile, just slay and just show.
Janna Cachola
Success-minded people must understand that the use of profane and obscene words have no place in their vocabulary.
John Patrick Hickey
I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room.
Geoffrey O'Brien
If she’d thought the oncoming storm outside was crazy, it was nothing compared to what happened between her and Finn every time they so much as looked at each other.
Jill Shalvis
I will form good habits and become their slave.
Og Mandino
When I look at the multitude of the gods of the past held in esteem by great civilisations now cast aside as pagan idols, I wonder wether tomorrow the gods we hold in high esteem won't suffer the same fate.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
This is not a contest with your child. The winner is not the one with more points. The winner is the one whose child still loves them when they graduate from high school.
Martin L. Kutscher
If someone thinks you can help or heal them, and you think you can’t, choose their faith over your doubt.
Alan Cohen
I tumbled into the taxi alone, closing the door closed with a dull thud before I could possibly change my mind. Not like this, I remember thinking. Whatever this thing is between us, it could only be tainted and cheapened by a semi-drunken encounter on the night of our first meeting. As the car pulled away I stared back at him. The thought that I might never see him again, that I might never know what it would feel like to be kissed by him, seemed unbearably cruel.At a crossroads, I had been faced with a choice: two possible versions of my future mapped out ahead of me. But I didn't feel like I had made any sort of decision. All I had done was run away.
Catherine Sanderson
By the way, you haven’t seen an alien around here, have you? About six foot eight with a face like a cross between a boar and an upturned crab. Probably carrying a spear and a bag full of severed heads.’ Parker shrugged. ‘I dunno. It gets busy here.’ ‘He’s got quite an unusual laugh.’ ‘Oh, that bloke? He’s down the bottom of the ramp. You know him, then?
Toby Frost
Love was never meant to be contained solely in our hearts, just as life in a seed was always meant to break through into the world and become beauty to be shared.
Forrest Curran
I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.
Sara Sheridan
Happiness gives you the freedom to enhance your ability to achieve success. Your choices in life are a direct reflection of your level of happiness. It's the sunshine for your soul that you need in order to grow
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Little girls have large maternal instincts, and they take the Feast of Hungry Ghosts very seriously, and they were making their rounds with small lanterns made from candles inside rolled lotus and sage leaves. I could feel ghosts all around us, moving toward the warmth of the sweet singing voices: You are not alone, the girls sang, you are not forgotten, we care and understand, our own lives are but a candle flame from yours.
Barry Hughart
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
Barbara Ehrenreich
He didn’t want to admit that his daughter was something more now. I raised my hand guiding one of Nona’s lawn ornaments across the lawn. Making it dance.“Hope,” Dad warned from inside.I dropped it on the lawn. “Such a party pooper.
Holly Hood
A strange feeling of lonelinessAdrift near the blue canvasYou may stare long and listen deepYet not know whether sea-shore or sea-snore!
Avijeet Das
When a woman births, not only is a baby being born but so is a mother. How we treat her will affect how she feels about herself as a mother and as a parent.Be gentle. Be kind. Listen.
Ruth Ehrhardt
One's liberation begins once he does the darshan of kashaya-free (absence of inner anger, pride, deceit and greed) Gnani purush [the enlightened one]. Who is considered kashaya-free? The one whose state is that where there was no kashaya, there is no kashaya, and there never will be any. The one who is never in the state of the non-Self. Doing darshan of such a One brings ultimate well being.
Dada Bhagwan
That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.
Vincent H. O'Neil
She was surprised at how deflating his presence was.
Tom McNeal
The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower's fragility, to it's ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn't destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-...
Irène Némirovsky
Humility is a virtue of the heavenly, not arrogance. Are we the most superior beast on earth? No, not in strength and not in intelligence. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Both rats and monkeys have been shown to learn from error, yet we have not. More people have died in the name of religion than any other cause on earth. Is massacring God’s creations really serving God – or the devil? And what father would want to see his children constantly divided and fighting? What God would allow a single human life to be sacrificed for monetary gain? Again, the Creator or the devil?
Suzy Kassem
I thought it best to add nothing further, to let the line of his thought lead him to his own conclusions.
Geraldine Brooks
This is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don't know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you've got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you're satisfied with a fisherman's life in Cabrillo.Not that a fisherman's life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there?And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn't have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that's why there happened to him - what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working.("Before I Wake...")
Henry Kuttner
So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.
David Foster Wallace
Our minds are so cluttered with endless to-do lists that there's no room for us to experience the joy in being alive today.
Craig Groeschel
If you had one day left to live, what would you do?
Megan Miranda
We must learn from our struggles.
Roger Thurow
Network administrators all share an abiding and passionate desire for one thing: We want our users to shut up.
Michael W. Lucas
Although there are things that just tend to rub you the wrong way too! Smile and move on your choice!
Auliq-Ice
I'll never throw these small things away. There will never be a time when I don't want them, all the tiny parts of Cal that made a life.
Cath Crowley
If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!
Charles Dickens
I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.
Franz Kafka
Nothing is harder yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.Spoken by Albertus Secundus in "Das Glasperlenspiel
Hermann Hesse
From an illustration in her "Animals of a Bygone Era": a Leptictidium, an extinct rabbit-like animal who left no descendants, says: "Too bad, because we were really cute.
Maja Säfström
You don't run,' he corrected me. 'But you're more than able.' There was no shadow of doubt in his voice. Hearing it from someone else made me realize: there was nothing stopping me from running but me.
Alexandra Heminsley
I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}
Siri Hustvedt
His mercy is so great that it forgives great sins to great sinners after great lengths of time and then gives great favors and great privileges and raises us up to great enjoyments in the great heaven of the great God!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
Viktor E. Frankl
In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do several highly improbable, athletically difficult and possibly biologically impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and a dead fish.
Mercedes Lackey
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
Albert Camus
So you would kill Old Ireland?” Anna Livia said. “You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn’t be.
Andrew M Greeley
As our faith grows and we come to know more about the attributes of God and his role in our lives and our obedience, we learn to see our weakness in light of these words, "For is it God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13).
Hayley DiMarco
The Rakshasa," said Percy pedantically, "are a different breed altogether from our vampires. Much in the same way that poodles and dachshunds are different breeds of dog. Rakshasas are reviled in India. Their position as tax collectors is an attempts by the crown to integrate them in a more progressive and mundane manner."Rue said, "Oh, how logical. Because we all know ordaining someone as a tax collector is the surest way to get them accepted by society.
Gail Carriger
There is no treasure like the human heart.
Jocelyn Murray