Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Political scientists have often described Gaullism as a sort of Bonapartism. I myself have occasionally compared Sarkozy to Napoleon Bonaparte.
I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.
I'm not sure I can write about America for the same reason I'm not sure I can write about adults - I have no critical distance on either place.
Be as soft as possible, if something good and wise wants to shape you; be as hard as possible, if something bad and foolish wants to shape you!
We need clear days to see the horizons; we need foggy nights to see beyond the horizons! Man sometimes can think much deeper when he sees less!
It would be fair in terms of justice that those who believe in 'Life After Death' live much less than those who do not believe in such a thing!
The purpose of life is to pass the frontiers! Attack the frontiers to go beyond them with the determination of a bull attacking the red colour!
If there were 'intelligence flu', there would be so many people walking around in the damn cold weather, hoping to be contaminated by that flu!
Men need discipline! Countries need discipline! World needs discipline! He who wants to be successful needs discipline! Be a man of discipline!
The greatest victory for man is not that his dreams were fulfilled but it is that to stand upright even when none of his dreams were fulfilled!
It is a source of happiness to see the elderly working in their garden or looking from their windows! It is so good to see them alive and well!
Land?' Froi whispered. 'You're giving them land? I'm not worth the valley.' 'You're worth a kingdom,' Finnikin said, turning back to the crowd.
Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape.
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire!
To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own.
Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.
If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.
Germany is a machine for producing geniuses. Its crowning product was the German Jew which in suitably dramatic style it then tried to destroy.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier years.
All of the life-changing awesome words and pictures and ideas inside your library are useless without just one word outside your library: Open.
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
Writing does not numb, comfort, or soothe me. It does the opposite. It tends to excite me and reinscribe pain. It doesn't function as exorcism.
Someone described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.
What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.
Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.
Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink.
Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.
I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.
The cult of happiness turns into a huge concern which to my opinion is exactly contrary to what happiness should be: a paradise of enchantment.
What do you mean?” Leslie’s voice was cool, as if she questioned witches who were flat on their backs being threatened by werewolves every day.
In every story I've written with Batman, there's an element of justice - you never want to have the story end on a defeatist or a cynical note.
I was a Ph.D. student at a very reputable university, I was a Harvard research associate at one of the world's premier leadership institutions.
I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn't born into it.
Tatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?" Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.
And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.
It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.
Women must begin to "save" themselves and their daughters before they "save" their husbands and their sons; before they "save" the whole world.
It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.