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.

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.

Wendy Kopp

The teachers are trying to build the same culture in the classroom as we're building in the organization.

David Friedman

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.

Chris Crutcher

If we are to stop bullying in schools, we have to start with teachers and administrators. If we want to stop it, we have to stop it.

C. S. Lewis

In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who 'happen to be there.' Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

Carrie Underwood

The first one I remember singing on stage was 'Somewhere Out There' from 'An American Tail.' I was around 7, and my choir teacher at school asked me if I would sing it. My parents told me that I needed to move around the stage, so for the entire time I just walked back and forth from side to side while I was singing - there's videotape of it.

Carl Rogers

An empathic way of being can be learned from empathic persons. Perhaps the most important statement of all is that the ability to be accurately empathic is something which can be developed by training. Therapists, parents and teachers can be helped to become empathic. This is especially likely to occur if their teachers and supervisors are themselves individuals of sensitive understanding. It is most encouraging to know that this subtle, elusive quality, of utmost importance in therapy, is not something one is "born with", but can be learned, and learned most rapidly in an empathic climate.

Carl Rogers

The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.

Carl Rogers

A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another's learning

Carl Sagan

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.