Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carrie Fisher

I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.

Carl Rogers

Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.

Carl Sagan

Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good.

Carl Sagan

These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion -- wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, 'There's a sucker born every minute.' But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic -- however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney.

Bill Bryson

So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right. According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

Arnold Schoenberg

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

Aron Ralston

Saying farewell is also a bold and powerful beginning.

Bill Budge

I have a really powerful urge to see things work.

Bill Bryson

Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you.

Alan Watts

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.

Charles Krauthammer

Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. When the ad is over, I can't remember a thing about what the pill is supposed to do, except perhaps cause nausea, liver damage, projectile vomiting, a nasty rash, a four-hour erection, and sudden death. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about it being a side effect. What exactly is the main effect in that case? Relief from abdominal bloating?

Douglas Adams

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.

Dean Young

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.

Clifford Geertz

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Pierre Salinger

The things that stand out are often the oddities.

Eugene Mirman

I laugh at weird times - at good and bad things alike. I laugh simply when things are incongruous. It's not necessarily a judgment - as it is noticing the oddity of something.

Martha Plimpton

I feel comfortable in the presence of oddity. Probably because I'm a little bit odd.

George Eliot

Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.

C. S. Lewis

Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.

Bette Davis

There may be a heaven, but if Joan Crawford is there, I'm not going.

Anthony Storr

The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.

Bill Vaughan

What a pity that the only way to heaven is in a hearse.

Bill Vaughan

Something larger is happening than just going to heaven.

Bill Vaughan

Do not ask God the way to heaven; He will show you the hardest way.

Bertrand Russell

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens.

Bertrand Russell

[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.

Bertrand Russell

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.