Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.

Charles Caleb Colton

We must suit the flattery to the mind and taste of the recipient. We do not put essences into hogsheads, nor porter into phials. Delicate minds may be disgusted by compliments that would please a grosser intellect; as some fine ladies who would be shocked at the idea of a dram will not refuse a liqueur.

Charles Spurgeon

The old, old gospel is the newest thing in the world; in its very essence it is for ever good news.

Ang Lee

The source of all the material comes from nothingness, illusion is working more on things you can prove. That's the principle, the essence of life, it is actually an illusion, not immaterial. That's worth pursuing. So illusion is not nothing. In a way, that is the truth.

Diane Wakoski

... poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization -- carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language ...

Catherine Drinker Bowen

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Cary Grant

Simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.

Jane Austen

Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

Janis Joplin

What we've had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we're doing - the music.

Agnes Repplier

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplier

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.

Alan Rudolph

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Charles de Gaulle

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

Charles Caleb Colton

A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

David Mitchell

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

David Graeber

It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.

David Suzuki

More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.

Cesare Pavese

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

Carlos Ghosn

Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it's never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.

Carlos Fuentes

If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.

Carlos Castaneda

Crows are not always available to give warning.

Carlos Castaneda

To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.

Carl Andre

I had no place to put anything. I would give my sculpture away because I had no place to put it.

C. S. Lewis

and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.

C. S. Lewis

Need-love says of a woman, "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection...appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

Agnes Martin

To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.

Agnes Repplier

Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.