Famous Quotes & Sayings

Felix Adler

The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism.

Bhagavad Gita

I am the strength, that is devoid of lust and attachment, of the strong.

Sam Veda

History is testimony to the fact that kings, who did so ended up in ruins and misery. Such kings were always devoid of stability, peace and success.

Rajeev Gupta

For the whole technology sector, what's devoid is a catalyst. What's going to drive these companies? What's the next big thing?

Rig Veda

The person, who treads on the path of truth, refrains from deception, treachery, pretension, and remains untouched by falsehoods is never devoid of eternal joy.

Liberty Bailey

Fact is not to be worshipped. The life which is devoid of imagination is dead; it is tied to the earth. There need be no divorce of fact and fancy; they are only the poles of experience. What is called the scientific method is only imagination set within bounds. Facts are bridged by imagination. They are tied together by the thread of speculation. The very essence of science is to reason from the known to the unknown.

Pamela Sargent

'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.

Larry Birns

This is being done devoid of public scrutiny. I personally think that it's outrageous that the US government can dispose funds with no real consultation.

Joseph C. Wilson

In the issue war in Iraq, it was very clear to me that the policies that were being espoused by neoconservatives were totally devoid of substance - but they marketed it wonderfully.

Charles Stross

I don't do flash fiction.

China Mieville

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

China Mieville

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

China Mieville

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

David Morrell

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.

David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Kurt Vonnegut

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

Edith Wharton

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Camille Paglia

There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.

C. L. R. James

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

Ai Weiwei

No matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy,

Arnold J. Toynbee

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

Antony Beevor

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

Cassie Steele

I like mythology - anything historical.

Tom Lewis

MLK really left his mark even today and influences us in our community.

Ralph Trine

Love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world.

Bruce Jackson

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

Alexandra Shipp

My influences are, number one, hand to Jesus, Halle Berry. I think that she's so brilliant, and I love everything that she does, even 'Catwoman.'

Adam Hicks

I'm a mad thinker in general. I think about everything, all the time. Especially when I write music, a lot of the influences come from personal experiences or from being on the outside looking in, being that person who witnessed things that stuck with me throughout my life.

Robert Quine

To me, the positive thing about it was we were pulling out these old influences like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges that were gone.

Frederica Mathewes-Green

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

Gregg Andrews

We're really starting to see the strongest influences of the '80s in spring 2006.

Elizabeth McCracken

When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

Charles Caleb Colton

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

Charles Dickens

... as lonesome as a kitten in a wash-house copper with the lid on.

Charles Dickens

There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind him, lighted here and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly striking two.

Charles Studd

Sometimes I feel... that my cross is heavy beyond endurance... My heart seems worn out and bruised beyond repair, and in my deep loneliness I often wish to be gone, but God knows best, and I want to do every ounce of work He wants me to do.

Alan Watts

Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

Alan Watts

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

Alan Watts

When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

Alan Moore

Please, don't go. It's lonely. There's a hole in my head as big as the world and it's so very lonely...

Alan Moore

I am but a stranger ... as we all are. Lonely inside our separate skins, we cannot know each others pain and must bear our own in solitude. For my part, I have found that walking soothes it; and that, given luck, sometimes we find one to walk besides us ... at least for a little way.

Charles Dickens

Novelties please less than they impress.

David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Mitchell

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Edmond de Goncourt

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

David Hume

Such is the nature of novelty that where anything pleases it becomes doubly agreeable if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing on that very account.

Audrey Tautou

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

Carol Shields

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Aleksandar Hemon

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

David Rubenstein

For me, few things are more compelling than watching a great opera.

Cecilia Bartoli

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.

Mark Klein

We're just operating at a slow rate of production. We'll just resume regular work tomorrow.

John Byrne

Ultimately it's going to be better for the patient. It's going to transform otherwise high-risk operations into lower-risk operations.

Charles Petzold

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.

Ashley Benson

I was on the soap opera 'Days of our Lives.

Bruce Beresford

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

Howard Thompson

The proceeds are used for the operation of the Bedouin Shrine Temple and to support our transportation department,

Elizabeth Bowen

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Keith Warren

We are primarily here to present an alternative message. We support the troops and the mission.

Jane Jacobs

The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.

Ewen Bremner

As parents, I think we're always novices, and every day presents a new challenge.

Terry Wogan

Most television could be presented by a dachshund. Radio can't, although there are a lot of dachshunds in there.

Alessandra Ambrosio

My little girl, Anja, is really excited. We had a baby shower yesterday and she took the presents from everyone for me and was telling them, 'No, it's my baby.'

O. J. Simpson

There are no talks with competitors at the present time... but with our share price where it is, we know we are vulnerable.

Derrick Jensen

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Bhumibol Adulyadej

Since that time up until the present time, there have been progress, and changes all through the time. The changes have not come by themselves; these changes have come from the doings of everyone in the country.

Daren Beaudo

When a statute is presented I'll have something to talk about.

Eric Brown

Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.

Isabel Allende

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

Jonathan Galassi

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

Ron Sanders

That's because they had published prices, and we haven't set prices.

Rebecca Stead

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

Louis Lane

The so-called No. 2 is actually the first one because he thought the first one, which he wrote second, was a little better, so he had it published first.

Siri Hustvedt

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

Morley Callaghan

I had my success too soon. Three books published with Scribner's in New York before I was 30.

Cavett Robert

When it's foggy in the pulpit it's cloudy in the pew.

Ellen G. White

The words of the Bible, and the Bible alone, should be heard from the pulpit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.

Tom Waits

I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.

Charles Caleb Colton

In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.

Charles Caleb Colton

No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.

Charles Caleb Colton

The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind; but that armour would be worse than useless, that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.

Alan Watts

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

Dave Barry

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Dave Barry

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.

Dave Barry

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and voilà (literally, "you have a compass")-you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

David Sarnoff

I ... began my career as a wireless amateur. After 43 years in radio, I do not mind confessing that I am still an amateur. Despite many great achievements in the science of radio and electronics, what we know today is far less than what we have still to learn.

David Sarnoff

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Charles Dickens

A boy's story is the best that is ever told.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.

Charles Caleb Colton

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.

Alan Greenspan

The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed

Akhil Sharma

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Do not allow the enemy of your soul to rob you of that unique quality God has breathed into you.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God's holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God's power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensibl e and unattainable... Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard.

Chris Asplen

What we've begun to do is discuss the issue, the constitutional issues around that idea, again the privacy issue, which may not be unconstitutional but may pertain to our unique sense of privacy in the United States.

David Knopfler

If you feel driven and compelled to make your work and to be fiercely original and have something unique to say, in a compelling way, then chances are the helpers will be there for you the doors will open some, the ice will crack.

David Grisman

Utilizing a unique acoustic blend never heard previously, the Aaron O’Rourke Trio has made a fine debut recording that is sure to please old and new grass fans alike.

David Quammen

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

Let me ask you outright, gentle reader, if there have not been hours, indeed whole days and weeks of your life, during which all your usual activities were painfully repugnant, and everything you believed in and valued seemed foolish and worthless?

Arthur Conan Doyle

I suppose I shall have to compound a felony, as usual. - Sherlock Holmes

Blaise Pascal

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

Raymond E. Feist

When you talk about fantasy, the usual problem is that whilst you've got the world of imagination, there are no controlling forces.

Ryan Robertson

We pounded it inside. That isn't something we do real well, but we did it better than usual tonight.

Jamie Oliver

As usual, my timing is bizarrely good.

Clara Barton

I went to the Senate, accomplished nothing as usual.

Franz Ferdinand

He would never do just the usual on-the-road burgers and chips.

Vandana Shiva

As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.