Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.
I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.
We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present - do we not?
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
Language follows its own path. It can bridge gulfs of class and geography in the most remarkable ways.
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
Treat every moment of your life with Divine respect. Love passionately your God-given miraculous life.
He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.
... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.
Let the young rain of tears come, let the calm hands of grief come. It's not all as evil as you think.
our love for the dead, like a floating iceberg, can only be measured by the depths of our resentments.
Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.
How blessed I am that I can walk beside you, lean upon you, and live within the warmth of your love...
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race... and the hearts of the meanest were humbled.
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.
Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.
It's like jazz: You learn the rules to break them - as long as you can break them in a meaningful way.
They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing - it only hastens fools to rush in where angels fear to tread.
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Cowardice encroaches fast upon such as spend their lives in company of persons higher than themselves.
I have adopted the Roman sentiment, that it is more honorable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy.
Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions
Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty.
A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.
To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.
Hunting was the labour of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England.
Nothing is more idle than to inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach.
You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful income.
Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.
Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.
The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another.
For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.
The problem with money issued by any government is that its only value is what those in charge decree.
Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.
Art forms render ideas accessible to readers who could not receive those insights in any other format.
I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.
In the end, though, maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.
Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.
I want my sex to claim nothing from their brethren but what their brethren may justly claim from them.
You're barely even wearing a shirt! What are you going to do if a mugger jumps out at you, flash them?
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.
It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and prefer things in measure to things in excess.
I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little.
If we want to make something really superb on this planet, there is nothing whatever that can stop us.