Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

C. S. Lewis

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

Cecelia Ahern

She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.

Cecelia Ahern

Truth is, something that I thought was perfect was taken away from me, and I never wanted perfect again. I wanted middle of the road, stuff I didn’t care about so that I couldn’t lose anything I really loved ever again.

Carrie Brownstein

I think one of the reasons I haven't been doing music is because I think that some of my performance, like, needs are being taken care of in other mediums.

Carl Sagan

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

Carl Sagan

We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.

Benjamin Rush

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

I've spent more time than many will believe [making microscopic observations], but I've done them with joy, and I've taken no notice those who have said why take so much trouble and what good is it?

Antoni Tapies

At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.

C. S. Lewis

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

C. S. Lewis

I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them.

Cecelia Ahern

When you're on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they're actually there, but most of the time you can't tell the difference from the two.

Carrie Fisher

I have two moods. One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs... Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it's out.

Carrie Fisher

There are two things that I know for certain guys are good for: pushing swings and killing insects.

Carl Rogers

Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.

Carl Sagan

Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.

Carl Sagan

First rule in government spending: Why build one, when you can have two at twice the price?

Bill Bryson

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.