Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels.
The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
Come in, -- come in! and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before!
People who start habitually exercising tend on average to eat better. They also tend to use their credit cards less and procrastinate less.
Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.
It is vain to speak of approaching judgment when finding our place, our portion, and our enjoyment in the very scene which is to be judged.
I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.
As half in shade and half in sun This world along its path advances, May that side the sun 's upon Be all that e'er shall meet thy glances!
Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?
If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!
Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.
We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.
Before Elle had come into his life, he didn't even know what tea was. Now it was a staple. Worse, he actually knew the differences in teas.
Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.
That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
At least I thought it was a wall. It sure felt like one. It was hard. It was flat. It stretched out on either side of me. You know... wall.
men have been in charge of according value to literature, and ... they have found the contributions of their own sex immeasurably superior.
I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
Hitler's Europe Yes, welcome to Hitler's Europe... Come on, human race - for our children's sake if not our own. This is wakey, wakey time.
I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.
I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.
So if the dance is five minutes long, make yourself run for perhaps eight minutes. That way, you over-train and the dance will seem easier.
I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.
Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?
Find a positive lesson and positive reason for all of your personal relationships. Accentuate the blessings and knowledge gained from each.
You write about what you have access to, and I have been fortunate enough to have a front-row seat on the rich and powerful my entire life.
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Any conversation including the mention of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, or Emily Dickinson is one worth getting into or at least eavesdropping.
A friend of mine, now retired, was then a major exec at a major bank, and one of her jobs, the last four years, was the farewell interview.
Half the time your kids end up hating you for at least 5 of their teenage years[.] And don't ever expect anything so mundane as a thank you
Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time.
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.
We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.
Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.
The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.
Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love. It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the Equator to the frigid cold of the North Pole.
I believe it is possible that I shall make other creeds, and change this one, or add to it, from time to time, as new light may come to me.