Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alan Watts

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.

Charles Krauthammer

Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. When the ad is over, I can't remember a thing about what the pill is supposed to do, except perhaps cause nausea, liver damage, projectile vomiting, a nasty rash, a four-hour erection, and sudden death. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about it being a side effect. What exactly is the main effect in that case? Relief from abdominal bloating?

Dean Young

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.

Douglas Adams

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.

Clifford Geertz

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Lord Byron

This is the age of oddities let loose.

Napoleon Bonaparte

It is not necessary to prohibit or encourage oddities of conduct which are not harmful.

George Eliot

Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.

Eugene Mirman

I laugh at weird times - at good and bad things alike. I laugh simply when things are incongruous. It's not necessarily a judgment - as it is noticing the oddity of something.

Dave Barry

What, exactly, is the internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a 'modem', can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo

Charlie Cook

And what exactly is nature walking? It's any and every kind of walking you can do in the natural world. The activity encompasses strolling, striding, sauntering, stepping, treading, tramping, traipsing, traversing, rambling, roving, roaming, racewalking, hiking, meandering, wandering, wending, pacing, peregrinating, perambulating ... in natural surroundings.

George Carlin

What exactly is 'viewer discretion'? If viewers had discretion, most television shows would not be on the air.

D. J. MacHale

What exactly is a french before it's fried?

Douglas Coupland

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

James M. Barrie

What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?

Jonathan Lethem

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

J. K. Rowling

What exactly is the function of a rubber duck?

Thomas Sowell

What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?

Charles Caleb Colton

There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts.

Charles Dickens

Of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not.

Charles Spurgeon

The repetition of small efforts will accomplish more than the occasional use of great talents.

Alan Bishop

There hasn't been a true breakdown or effort to break Thai music into genres. They're not into dicing and slicing everything up.

Alan Bennett

All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.

Al Ries

If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect's mind. A word that nobody else owns.

Akio Morita

If we do our best and make efforts, a peaceful and great future will become ours without fail. Whether we succeed or not depends on the strength of our resolve and the amount of our endeavor.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

In an effort to get the work of the Lord done we often lose contact with the Lord of work.

Childe Hassam

These small shows were decidedly a success. The exhibitions were not too large to be seen easily. It was not an effort, as larger collections of pictures usually are.