Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.

Charles Dickens

All is going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away.

Charles Dickens

To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.

Charles Dickens

In love of home, the love of country has its rise.

Charles Stewart Parnell

No man has the right to say to his country

Charles Stewart Parnell

No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country - thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Charles Sturt

Yet, upon the whole, the space I traversed is unlikely to become the haunt of civilized man, or will only become so in isolated spots, as a chain of connection to a more fertile country; if such a country exist to the westward.

Alan Paton

There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

Alan Moore

In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing.

Charles Caleb Colton

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Courage is like the diamond,--very brilliant; not changed by fire, capable of high polish, but except for the purpose of cutting hard bodies useless.

Charles Stanley

When God speaks, oftentimes His voice will call for an act of courage on our part.

David Hume

Courage, of all national qualities, is the most precarious; because it is exerted only at intervals, and by a few in every nation; whereas industry, knowledge, civility, may be of constant and universal use, and for several ages, may become habitual to the whole people.

Benazir Bhutto

The forces of moderation and democracy must, and will, prevail against extremism and dictatorship. I will not be intimidated...Despite threats of death, I will not acquiesce to tyranny, but rather lead the fight against it.

August Strindberg

I always disliked dogs, those protectors of cowards who lack the courage to fight an assailant themselves.

Antony Sher

As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wealth lost is something lost, honor lost is something lost: Courage lost all is lost.

Simon Deng

The people who will walk to Washington, D.C., are here to tell the world about courage, a word the United Nations has been unable to pronounce.

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Alan Watts

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

Chogyam Trungpa

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chogyam Trungpa

When you drop your unnecessary things, you finally can swoop and fly in vast space. It is so blue, so bright, and so nice, so airy and fresh. You can stretch your wings and breathe the air. You can do anything you want. You have experienced cheerfulness and joy, and finally the bliss of freedom occurs in you.

Edward Gibbon

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince

Arnold J. Toynbee

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.