Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

Charles Caleb Colton

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Charles Dickens

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.

Charles Dickens

There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.

Charles Dickens

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Charles Dickens

Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.

Charles Dickens

Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.

Charles Dickens

Love is not a feeling to pass away Like the balmy breath of a Summer's day....... Love is not a passion of earthly mould As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold

Charles Dickens

My life is one demd horrid grind.

Charles Dickens

They don't mind it: its a reg'lar holiday to them - all porter and skittles.

Charles Stuart Calverley

Life is with such all beer and skittles. They are not difficult to please About their victuals.

Charles Simmons

Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Charles Simmons

Sensible men show their sense by saying much in few words. If noble actions are the substance of life, good sayings are its ornament and guide.

Charles Spurgeon

The resurrection is a fact better attested than any event recorded in any history, whether ancient or modern.

Charles Spurgeon

I would not choose to go where I would be afraid to die, nor could I bear to live without a good hope for hereafter.

Alan Watts

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

Alan Watts

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Alan Watts

Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.

Alan Watts

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.

Alan Watts

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

Alan Watts

More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.

Alan Watts

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.

Alan Watts

The destination of life is this eternal moment.

Alan Watts

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service ofmankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hatingoneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

Alan Watts

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Alan Watts

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Alan Watts

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Alan Perlis

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Alan Paton

Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die?... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

Alan Moore

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Alan Chadwick

We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.

Alan Bennett

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

Alan Bennett

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.