Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Page

As someone who has shot in most disciplines, I can tell the House that when one is lying on ones stomach in Bisley with a sling round ones arm to hold the rifle steady, it is hard enough to hit the target on the right spot even when it is obligingly staying still. Foxes do not stay still. They move with remarkable rapidity.

Richard P. Feynman

The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction — a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory — who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself.

Richard Hofstadter

Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.

Richard Hofstadter

To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.

Rebecca West

There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition.

Umberto Eco

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Umberto Eco

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Umberto Eco

The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

Raymond Chandler

Dames lie about anything - just for practice.

Winston Churchill

Never flinch, never weary, never despair.

Rebecca Solnit

Despair is easy, or at least low cost.

P. J. O'Rourke

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

Avi Arad

When you get to know me, I don't despair - I just get up, clean up, and start again.

Pierre Corneille

He who has resolved to conquer or die is seldom conquered; such noble despair perishes with difficulty.

Kate Morton

Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

John Keats

I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.

Lisa Kleypas

Only someone who had experienced such bitter despair would be able to recognize it in another.

Leo Tolstoy

There it is!' he thought with rapture. 'When I was already in despair, and when it seemed there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She's confessed it.

Evan Bayh

I think I should hear what the man has to say before making up my mind, ... Whoever is chosen for this spot could be on our nation's highest court for 30 years perhaps, and deal with some of the most fundamental liberties that we have in this country. So I think it's important we take our time, ask the right questions, listen carefully to the answers and then reach a considered judgment.

Paul Heath

It answers who did it and possibly why they did it, and to that extent, there is closure.

Robert Vaughn

The world's philosophers and theologians searched for answers to the same mysteries.

Robert Reich

Education is not the only answer and it's certainly not the immediate solution. At best, it's a necessary, but not sufficient response to widening inequality.

Will Thomas

Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves.

Warren Buffett

Unless your answers are clearly better, copy the answers of your betters.

W. H. Auden

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

Robert M. Pirsig

every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.