Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
What relationship can you have with yourself if you systematically hand your genitals over to someone else?
The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.
Virtue between men is a commerce of good actions: he who has no part in this commerce must not be reckoned.
If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer
Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
The first draught serveth for health, the second for pleasure, the third for shame, the fourth for madness.
If in argument we can make a man angry with us, we have drawn him from his vantage ground and overcome him.
It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.
We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
I believe the vulpine greed of the corporate world is cut from the very same cloth as the tyrant of history.
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
My own belief is that people can come back from anything. It doesn't mean that it won't come at a huge cost.
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness
I am brother to dragons, and companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.
I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.
I try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
... we see the poor as a mass of shadow, painted in one flat grey wash, at the remote edges of our sunshine.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
So-called restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge.
Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.
The local community is very important in one's life; the feelings of identification with a place and people.
What's the point of art, of any art, if it doesn't let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?
When I was 12 and met my real father for the first time, I was terrified I would lose the one I already had.
If those we love visit us when we dream, those who torment us almost always visit us when we're still awake.
The mind of a poet often performs miracles-a few coarse-grained words, apprehended become bullets and roses.
Easy come, easy go... "Achieve-everything-while-doing-nothing" schemes don't work, they are just not logical
Travel makes all men countrymen, makes people noblemen and kings, every man tasting of liberty and dominion.
Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps.
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!
Call me a dreamer, but I think it would be great if getting medical attention were as easy as getting a gun.