Famous Quotes & Sayings

M. H. Abrams

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

Edmund Burke

The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments - success

Karl Menninger

Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.

Dick Cheney

The governor has given me some criterion in terms of the kind of individual we're looking for, ... We've put together a very detailed questionnaire to gather info on each and every candidate, including public records, financial records, health records -- all of those kinds of things that you look at.

Stephen Covey

If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.

Sebastian Faulks

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.

Greg Graffin

There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we're still just infants. We're way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power.

Barack Obama

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.

Aubrey O'Day

Celebrity nowadays is so fleeting.

Gilbert Hernandez

I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.

Mary Ellen Mark

Looking at my own prom photograph reminds me of how significant that moment was - and how fleeting life is.

Ali MacGraw

Modeling was so fleeting it doesn't count in my life scheme.

Debbie Allen

Fame is fleeting, honey. Fame is fleeting and it changes.

Debbie Macomber

I'd found love -- only to discover how fleeting it can be.

Allen Ginsberg

The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred

Jim Butcher

Life is precious, fragile, fleeting - and Murphy's life was one of my favorites.

Fran Lebowitz

Generally speaking, it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight.

Carol P. Christ

Women must be the spokesmen for a new humanity arising out of the reconciliation of spirit and body.

Jeffrey Williams

We have salvageable patients we are going to lose because we can't get these people out of here. They are human beings, after all.

Elias Canetti

We have no standard any more for anything, ever since human life is no longer the standard.

John Salmons

When you're up like that it's human nature just to be like, 'We've got this game. But we've got to stop doing that.

Alan Rudolph

Anyway, I just haven't been able to find any humanity in any Republican candidate ever in my entire life.

Charlotte Bronte

You are human and fallible.

Charles Wagner

Humanity lives and always has lived on certain elemental provisions.

Charles Dickens

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

John Cassavetes

We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.

Carol Shields

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted...

Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Castaneda

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Carlos Castaneda

I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.

Carlos Castaneda

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Carlos Castaneda

One ,must have something to die for in order to have something to live for

Carlos Castaneda

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

C. S. Lewis

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

Agnes de Mille

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Anne Fadiman

The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.

Tawni O'Dell

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.

Ellen Potter

I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.

Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Andrea Hirata

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

Paul Theroux

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.

Ian Mcewan

Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.

Horace Engdahl

I think he is unassailable from a literary point of view, ... On the other hand, there may be some people who think he's too established.

Siri Hustvedt

It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!

Carre Otis

Just because you're a different size doesn't mean you're sitting on the couch eating bonbons all day long watching TV.

Carre Otis

Exposing any subject that is unpleasant or controversial means risking judgment and making some people feel uncomfortable.

Carol P. Christ

If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?

Carol Leifer

Some people have their marriages annulled, which means they never existed. Boy, talk about denial! What do you say when people see your wedding album? 'Oh that was just some play I was in.

Carol Moseley Braun

To me, that means getting back to the point where our Constitution means that you don't tap people's phones and poke into their e-mail and you don't arrest people and keep them hidden for a year and a half without charging them.

Carlos Ghosn

Being a good leader today doesn't mean you'll be a good leader 10 years from now. You have to adapt to the times

Carlos Ghosn

Employees are your most valuable assets. They are the heart and guts of a company. This doesn't mean that from time to time, you aren't going to do what is good for the company.

Carlos Fuentes

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you dont necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.

Carlos Castaneda

My benefactor said that when a man embarks on the paths of sorcery he becomes aware, in a gradual manner, that ordinary life has been forever left behind; that knowledge is indeed a frightening affair; that the means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and that he must adopt a new way of life if he is going to survive. The first thing he ought to do, at that point, is to want to become a warrior...

Aasif Mandvi

From my parent's generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It's about creating family. It's about creating offspring.

Charles Dickens

I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

Charles Stanley

Romantic love reaches out in little ways, showing attention and admiration. Romantic love remembers what pleases a woman, what excites her, and what surprises her. Its actions whisper; you are the most special person in my life.

Diablo Cody

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with.

Bryan Adams

Search your heart, search your soul, and when you find me there you'll search no more.

Catherine Deneuve

That's what I like about film-it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing.

Evangeline Lilly

I had my baby outside in a thunderstorm. It was really romantic.

Jane Austen

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy

James Wolcott

It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

Carl Gustav Jung

Sensation tell us a thing is.Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.

Francis Spufford

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

GG Allin

Everybody picks up on the sensational things, but no one really gets it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

Michael Cunningham

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.

Norma Shearer

Somehow or other I always got myself rigged up in something sensational.

Elvis Presley

I was an overnight sensation.

Robert Wagner

It's sensational to be a part of a series that takes on a life of its own.

Van Cliburn

I'm not a success, I'm a sensation.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Charles W. Chesnutt

There's time enough, but none to spare.

Charles de Lint

In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.

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.

Wendell Perkins

We know how to value companies. And we go where the value is.

Charlize Theron

We value some lives more than others.

Brian Tracy

Nobody values your time but YOU.

Demi Lovato

When you treat your body like a Bentley, you value yourself and you start to look at your body differently.

Michael Cloherty

Yields have cheapened up, but if the Fed's going to go further, they still may not have value at that level.

Tom Kuefler

We see the value of having our dealers involved.

Roy Blunt

This report's only of value if we use it in a positive, forward-looking way, and not try to get into meaningless blaming, who could have done what when; now that it doesn't matter, ... American Morning.

Christine Callies

We think there's a lot of value in semiconductors.

Dick Durbin

We need to know as much as we can and as much as he will tell us about his values and beliefs,

Dexter Scott King

Life too is precious to waste - to spend on anything but the best.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's up to you how you waste your time and money. I'm staying here to read: life's too short.

Jane Yolen

If you love a waist, you waste a love.

Barbara de Angelis

when your field is architecture, you go visit the great cathedrals of the world. My field was relationships. I got married many times. I was practicing. I didn't date much; I just would get married. I thought, why waste time?

Brad Lidge

It doesn't make a whole of sense to me to waste pitches.

Chaim Potok

If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.

Eli Roth

'Troll 2' is one of the rare sequels where you don't have to waste time watching the first one, since the films have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

Charles R. Swindoll

When each elder or pastor has his will aligned with the Lord's, we waste no time arguing for our own.

Debra Wilson

If you're going to do something, make it right and make it as good as you can. Don't waste anybody's time, especially your own.

Matt Mullenweg

Ultimately, Captchas are useless for spam because they're designed to tell you if someone is 'human' or not, but not whether something is spam or not.

Leos Carax

I like tragedies, whether they're sci-fi or something else, but I can't say I know much about any genre in particular.

Kate Bush

There's always ideas buzzing around, but it's whether they actually end up materialising into a song.

Gene Simmons

If someone likes you, they'll buy what you're selling, whether or not they need it.

Rick Rudesill

Whether they play (against Mitchell) is kind of up in the air. You have to wonder about their stamina.

Pierce Brosnan

Whether they made the right choice, who knows?

Karen Burk

Whether someone thought it was a joke, we take it very seriously. This is a food-tampering issue.

Shannon Cross

Whether or not they do it is still in question.

John Podhoretz

Whether my columns are worth reading isn't for me to say.