Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bill Bryson

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

Charles Caleb Colton

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Bryant H. McGill

Your intelligence is a fire that can illuminate any darkness. Awaken and let your mind burn so brightly! You are alive for a reason!

Ludwig von Mises

One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.

Anais Nin

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

Andrew Lang

Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-postsfor support rather than illumination.

Orson Scott Card

Madness, and then illumination.

Idries Shah

The union of the mind and intuition which brings about illumination, and the development which the Sufis seek, is based upon love.

Harry S Truman

This generation, raised on "Eyewitness News," conditioned by the instant replay, and spared the illumination that comes from tedious historical study, tends to be even more ahistorical than most.

Giles Foden

Ordinary Kenyans rightly want to be able to shop safely, and there is a long history of them doing just that, irrespective of their religion or that of the shop owner.

Colm Meaney

It's interesting because I haven't done a lot of period work in the past, but I always wanted to because I'm interested in history.

Rick Perlstein

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

F. Sionil Jose

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

Bernard Beckett

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

Bernard Berenson

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

Antoine Rivarol

History is only time furnished with dates and rich with events.

Megan Smith

We have two boys, and one of our kids is much more interested in history and stories, so if you want him to do some calculations about lenses, you would start talking to him about Galileo... Then he would be into the lenses, but if you just start talking to him about lenses, he might not stay with you.

Scott Stossel

I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life.

Anthony Bourdain

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Steven Wright

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.

Mario Vargas Llosa

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

John McTiernan

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.