Famous Quotes & Sayings

Larry Birns

This is being done devoid of public scrutiny. I personally think that it's outrageous that the US government can dispose funds with no real consultation.

Bhagavad Gita

I am the strength, that is devoid of lust and attachment, of the strong.

Rajeev Gupta

For the whole technology sector, what's devoid is a catalyst. What's going to drive these companies? What's the next big thing?

Sam Veda

History is testimony to the fact that kings, who did so ended up in ruins and misery. Such kings were always devoid of stability, peace and success.

Felix Adler

The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism.

Pamela Sargent

'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.

Joseph C. Wilson

In the issue war in Iraq, it was very clear to me that the policies that were being espoused by neoconservatives were totally devoid of substance - but they marketed it wonderfully.

Frank Black

I remember at the time telling my therapist that it felt really good to be down, to be in pain or whatever. Because it was like: 'Oh yeah, I am human.' Not that I was devoid of emotion before, but to go that far, that deep, it's like: 'Wow, this is what it's like to be human.' In some sick way it felt good.

Liberty Bailey

Fact is not to be worshipped. The life which is devoid of imagination is dead; it is tied to the earth. There need be no divorce of fact and fancy; they are only the poles of experience. What is called the scientific method is only imagination set within bounds. Facts are bridged by imagination. They are tied together by the thread of speculation. The very essence of science is to reason from the known to the unknown.

Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Phil Klay

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

Nikolay Sevastiyanov

We're starting to look at the moon as a source of fuel. Maybe it's science fiction right now, but we need to start moving in that direction.

Dennis Lehane

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Denise Mina

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

Ben Browder

Farscape is not what you call hard science fiction.

Bill Gates

I don't generally read a lot of fiction.

Frederik Pohl

A lot of science fiction is science-based, and it comes about because people notice something interesting about science and work it into a story.

Philip Dick

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Bill Gates

We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

Ai Weiwei

No matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy,

Whit Ayres

the most challenging of his presidency, but not that unusual from a historical perspective.

Sun Yuxi

For historical reasons, there is still some room for us to improve with respect to human rights.

Dan Richardson

It's not the idea of historical preservation we object to; it's the ordinance and the raw power it creates.

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Bill Hall

As a historical society, we knew we had to preserve history, but now we have to pursue it, too.

Sam Ginzburg

Another wild day in the market place. There's defiantly a confluence of influences right now.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.

Rita Ora

Streetwear for me is what I was raised wearing in London, and my style influences growing up were always people who wore streetwear.

Ralph Trine

Love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world.

Adam Hicks

I'm a mad thinker in general. I think about everything, all the time. Especially when I write music, a lot of the influences come from personal experiences or from being on the outside looking in, being that person who witnessed things that stuck with me throughout my life.

Tom Lewis

MLK really left his mark even today and influences us in our community.

Alexandra Shipp

My influences are, number one, hand to Jesus, Halle Berry. I think that she's so brilliant, and I love everything that she does, even 'Catwoman.'

Elizabeth McCracken

When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

Bruce Jackson

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

Charles Dickens

... as lonesome as a kitten in a wash-house copper with the lid on.

Charles Dickens

There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind him, lighted here and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly striking two.

Charles Studd

Sometimes I feel... that my cross is heavy beyond endurance... My heart seems worn out and bruised beyond repair, and in my deep loneliness I often wish to be gone, but God knows best, and I want to do every ounce of work He wants me to do.

Alan Watts

Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

Alan Watts

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

Alan Watts

When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

Alan Moore

Please, don't go. It's lonely. There's a hole in my head as big as the world and it's so very lonely...

Alan Moore

Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was lonely.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the 'poor in spirit.'

Charles Dickens

Novelties please less than they impress.

David Hume

Such is the nature of novelty that where anything pleases it becomes doubly agreeable if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing on that very account.

Audrey Tautou

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

Carol Shields

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Neel Mukherjee

I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.

Natsuo Kirino

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

Austin Grossman

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

Alice Oswald

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Anthony Burgess

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although. . . he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Richard Flanagan

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Simon Mawer

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Ruth Rendell

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Mark Klein

We're just operating at a slow rate of production. We'll just resume regular work tomorrow.

Rob Navias

It seems to have ceased operating very quickly after its deployment.

Andrew Wright

They plan to operate it as an apartment.

John Brady

They patted the pocket, ... The thing was they were all together in the room. Once they dispersed, it would have been gone. ... This is standard operating procedure.

Carina Perelli

This has been a much more solid operation than the one we saw in January, ... It has been a peaceable election. Voters were much better prepared.

Kevin Long

This is true regardless of the operating system being used. It is a universal vulnerability.

Brian Billick

There's a wide variety of things we could do. The most operative question is, who would that be? We could target a lot of guys.

Kazimierz Krzowski

The rescue phase of the operation is over.

Paul Lee

There, I was an opera coach. The school was competitive, but in a positive way. We supported each other and our abilities.

Keith Warren

We are primarily here to present an alternative message. We support the troops and the mission.

Alexa Von Tobel

When you're at work, it's about being present and getting as much done as humanly possible.

Charlie Rose

The younger generation watches what's interesting, not whether it's presented by someone who is as old as I am or someone who is as old as a 21-year-old. It's the material. If I did a series of conversations on things most interesting to Millennials, they would respond to it, and I do.

Shannon Davis

They put together a scholarship and presented it to me,

John Taylor

A smart entrepreneur will go back and present it again.

Rose McIver

Really, I'm never much of a goal-setter. Whenever I've tried to make big, solid plans, they don't happen. I'm more into whatever the circumstances are that present themselves, making wise decisions around that.

Robert Webb

The strength of 'Peep Show' has always been that that it's quite traditional, but it's obviously presented in a very new way.

John Siira

Right now, this is just a little feeler. I think we do have some property or, working with Wakefield Township, could present something.

Joni Mitchell

Say, won't you stay; we'll put on the day and we'll talk in present tenses

Louis Lane

The so-called No. 2 is actually the first one because he thought the first one, which he wrote second, was a little better, so he had it published first.

Eric Brown

Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.

Rebecca Stead

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

Ron Sanders

That's because they had published prices, and we haven't set prices.

Jonathan Galassi

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

Siri Hustvedt

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

Morley Callaghan

I had my success too soon. Three books published with Scribner's in New York before I was 30.

Isabel Allende

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

Tom Waits

I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.

Ellen G. White

The words of the Bible, and the Bible alone, should be heard from the pulpit.

Cavett Robert

When it's foggy in the pulpit it's cloudy in the pew.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.

Nicolas Roeg

There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!

Kurt Vonnegut

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

Kurt Vonnegut

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

Bertolt Brecht

Science knows only one commandment - contribute to science.

Benjamin Jowett

Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.

Bertrand Russell

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

Bertrand Russell

One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.

Bertrand Russell

You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.

Bertrand Russell

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.

Charles Caleb Colton

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it: he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.

Charles Caleb Colton

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Do not allow the enemy of your soul to rob you of that unique quality God has breathed into you.

Deepika Padukone

My choices are like my fingerprints, they make me unique

Mark Cuban

Success is about making your life a special version of unique that fits who you are - not what other people want you to be.

Carol Leifer

I always say to women, 'Take advantage of the fact that you're in the minority, don't see it as a disadvantage. You're that much more unique when there's fewer of you.

Alan Rudolph

So one of the most unique things on screen in American movies today is everyday behavior.

Charles Taylor

[E]ach of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I can't even find the model by which to live outside myself. I can only find it within.

Charles Edward Merriam

Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America.

Charlize Theron

I'm interested in human behavior, and what happened in my family life is definitely not a unique story. There are aspects of that I'm sure you can see through the work. But I'm just looking for something that touches me.

Charlaine Harris

Eric turned to me, kissed me on the lips very lightly, and looked at my face for a long moment. “He’ll spare you,” Eric said, and I understood he wasn’t really talking to me but to himself. “You’re too unique to waste.” And then he opened the door.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

Let me ask you outright, gentle reader, if there have not been hours, indeed whole days and weeks of your life, during which all your usual activities were painfully repugnant, and everything you believed in and valued seemed foolish and worthless?

Arthur Conan Doyle

I suppose I shall have to compound a felony, as usual. - Sherlock Holmes

Blaise Pascal

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

Phyllis Theroux

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

Clara Barton

I went to the Senate, accomplished nothing as usual.

Timothy Geithner

This crisis is not simply a more severe version of the usual business cycle recession, the typical downturn in which economies ultimately adjust and stabilize.

Robert Henri

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.

Richard Branson

Screwing business as usual fundamentally recognises that doing good is good for business.

Sebastian Coe

This is not going to be business as usual. This is business unusual