Famous Quotes & Sayings

Antoine Rivarol

Generally speaking, there is more wit than talent in the world. Society swarms with witty people who lack talent.

Bill Bryson

I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.

Becca Fitzpatrick

He grinned. “Busted. I’m a monster. Jev is my deceptively harmless — and shockingly handsome — alter ego.” “And I’m on top of it,” she announced with witty triumph. “Is that a Freudian slip?” His bluntness caught her off guard. A self-conscious blush rose in her face.

William Shakespeare

Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink: if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss; and as many lies as will lie in thy shee.

William Shakespeare

I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange with-out heresy.

William Shakespeare

Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.

Dave Barry

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A tautology is a thing which is tautological. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. If your kids look like you, it's hereditory. If they look like the neighbor, it's the environment. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

Dave Barry

What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrific-ally witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties.

Carl Sagan

The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.

Bill Bryson

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

Bill Bryson

I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.

Bill Bryson

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

Bill Bryson

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

Bill Bryson

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

Bill Bryson

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Bill Vaughan

It is easiest to lose your way in the forest after it is cut.

Bill Hader

The nature of 'SNL' is that it's so in-the-moment.

Carl Reiner

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

Carl Sagan

The passion to explore is at the heart of being human.

Bill Bryson

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Benoit Mandelbrot

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).

Benoit Mandelbrot

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

Tom Leighton

That was a very sophisticated attack; the nature of it was novel,

Sebastian Horsley

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe.

Manoj Bhargava

The more you consume, the more insecure you are. It's the nature of the world.