Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dan Brown

Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.

Ambrose Bierce

ORTHODOX, n. An ox wearing the popular religious joke.

Tad Williams

If God is all-powerful, then the Devil must be nothing more than a darkness in the mind of God. But if the Devil is something real and separate, than perfection is impossible, and there can be no God... except for the aspirations of fallen angels....

Tadao Ando

In the West there has always been the attempt to try make the religious building, whether it's a Medieval or Renaissance church, an eternal object for the celebration of God. The material chosen, such as stone, brick, or concrete, is meant to eternally preserve what is inside.

Tacitus

Christianity is a pestilent superstition.

Sylvia Plath

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

Swami Vivekananda

All these practices and struggles to become religious are only negative work, to take off the bars, and open the doors to that perfection which is our birthright, our nature.

Rupert Everett

If you're gay or religious you're always hearing this word tolerance. It's a pathetic word. It's actually just a politically correct word for the term intolerance.

Tom Robbins

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.

Bobby Scott

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

Tommy Lee

That's the good part of having my past follow me, is that sometimes some of that stuff can help.

Tommy Lee Jones

My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.

Tom Wolfe

a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.

Steven Spielberg

I did not make this film about Frank Abagnale because of what he did . . but because of what he has done with his life the past 30 years.

Steven Johnson

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.

Steven Erikson

Ben Adaephon Delat," Pearl said plaintively, "see the last who comes. You send me to my death." "I know," Quick Ben whispered. "Flee, then. I will hold them enough to ensure your escape no more." Quick Ben sank down past the roof. Before he passed from sight Pearl spoke again. "Ben Adaephon Delat, do you pity me?" "Yes" he replied softly, then pivoted and dropped down into darkness.

Steve Martin

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.

Steve Berry

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.

Meryl Streep

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

Dennis Potter

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

Debby Ryan

Music is such an intensely personal thing for me, and I knew if I was going to do it, it would be in my own way.

Jose Bergamin

Even if you're not going anywhere, don't get in the way.

Julian Casablancas

A band is a good way to break up a friendship.

Ellen Page

I'm really passionate about music - I get really emotionally connected, probably in a weird way.

Holly Black

You're yourself," Tana said, grinning. "More purely yourself than anyone I know. And if you can't see who that is anymore, then see yourself the way I see you.

Gore Verbinski

I always wanted to do an animated movie. I find it to be incredibly liberating as a way of telling a story.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.