Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Umberto Eco

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

Reid Hoffman

We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.

William James

To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.

William James

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

William James

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

William James

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

William James

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.

Richard Ford

I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed me something about where I was from which was worthwhile.

Roald Dahl

Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful.

Tori Amos

I have a rule that I don't read my press, but then somebody in the crew will be reading it and of course it's right there, so what do you think I do?

Sarah Waters

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

Sarah Vowell

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren

Sara Nelson

Interest in reading memoirs is universal. What has happened is that people are writing about more and more outrageous things. Our threshold for weirdness - you can't have just a normal childhood - has gone way up.

Sara Sheridan

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.

Sara Gruen

I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I'm writing.

Sara Shepard

Last but not least, she put on a pair of black-framed reading glasses she’d found on Mr. Mercer’s bedside table. If it worked for Clark Kent, it’d work for her.

Peter Tork

The Monkees was a straight sitcom, we used the same plots that were on the other situation comedies at the time. So the music wasn't threatening, we weren't threatening.

Ayn Rand

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.