Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Man is the only mammal whose normal method of locomotion is to walk on two legs. A pattern of mammal behavior that emerges only once in the whole history of life on earth takes a great deal of explaining.
Yes, the United States is still the great meritocracy it's always been; but now, if you aren't brilliant or beautiful or both, there isn't much to do, because they can do it cheaper in Shanghai or Mumbai.
Not only does travel give us a new system of reckoning, it also brings to the fore unknown aspects of our own self. Our consciousness being broadened and enriched, we shall judge ourselves more correctly.
Here's a proposal, offered only partly in jest: no resident of the United States, whether born here or abroad, should get to be a citizen until age 18, at which time each such resident has to take a test.
Writing is a solitary profession; you are really alone when you write. Then the emotions become well shaped and distinct. But their transition into words must be done deliberately and with rigid artistry.
A great number of the women are victims to falling of the womb and weakness in the spine; but these are necessary results of their laborious existence, and do not belong either to climate or constitution.
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.
It's scary to become a woman in this world. We have to understand that some of the messages we get, messages that we are not enough, are there to keep our power in check. We can't buy into these messages.
I think depression creates in me an urgent need to write, but I also believe that daily stress, and even the positive stress of intense happiness, can compel me to express myself through the written word.
The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.
In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.
I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.
Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars.
I think the biggest single issue is income inequity and what this is doing to the good old "American dream." This and corporatism - this delusional idea that "shareholder value" outweighs everything else.
The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.
I find that the great artists I've met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn't come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it.
Let's say there's something operating in you called Mind. It's very powerful, but it's dampened by the body, by physicality. When you die, that tether gets cut and off the mind goes with incredible power.
I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."
Progress begins with the minority. It is completed by persuading the majority, by showing the reason and the of the step forward, and that is accomplished by appealing to the intelligence of the majority.
I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of.
Do not believe that man grows. No: he is born suddenly-a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.
The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.
I'm devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I'm a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system; tones you up.
A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?
Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.
Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.
Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
Within the human being there exists both the needful and the needed. You know that the needful exists in you. Your own dissatisfaction tells you so. But you believe the needed is somewhere outside of you.
The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.
We may taste of every turn of chance - now rule as Kings, now serve as Slaves; now love, now hate; now prosper, and now perish. But still, through all, we are the same; for this is the marvel of Identity.
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.
I am running for President because it is obvious that no Democrat or Republican is ever going to stop the relentless growth of the federal government. Only a Libertarian will free you from the income tax.
For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.
For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
Now and then may not be enough…You have to enjoy it while you’re still young. enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can’t do it anymore.
Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.
She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.
Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom.
One of the things that's great about writing for a magazine is that every week you get to be a different person. You're writing different things all the time and not slogging along for years on something.
One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.
The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans.