Famous Quotes & Sayings

J. K. Rowling

The truth is always easier than a lie or an evasion - easier to deal with and easier to live with.

J. K. Rowling

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

Ivan Pavlov

As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal.

H. G. Wells

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

H. G. Wells

I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.

H. G. Wells

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?

H. G. Wells

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.

H. G. Wells

Advertising is legalized lying.

H. L. Mencken

The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man

H. L. Mencken

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.

H. L. Mencken

Two simple principles lie at the bottom of the whole matter, and they may be precipitated into two rules. The first is that, when there is a choice, the milder drink is always the better-not merely the safer but the better. The second is that no really enlightened drinker ever takes a drink at a time when he has any work to do. There is, of course, more to it than this; but these are sufficient for the beginner, and even the virtuoso never outgrows them.

H. L. Mencken

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

H. L. Mencken

No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.

H. L. Mencken

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

H. L. Mencken

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

H. L. Mencken

Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.

Guillaume Canet

I've had gay friends who grew up in small towns in France who had to lie for most of their lives, even to themselves. But eventually such lies become stronger than the people, and they have to face them.

Grace Jones

I've had more misrepresentations than I can handle, and people have told the wickedest lies about me. A lot of them have taken their frustrations out on me, and I don't like that because it can wound. Not necessarily me, but those around me. Journalists can be so bad.

Grace Paley

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

Grace Paley

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Believe in miracles but don't depend on them.

H. P. Lovecraft

Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.

Grant Morrison

Abandon the 'I', because it's a lie.

George Herbert

Though a lie be well drest, it is ever overcome. [Though a lie be well dressed, it is ever overcome.]

George Herbert

Reason lies betweene the spurre and the bridle. [Reason lies between the spur and the bridle.]

George Herbert

Let an ill man lie in thy straw, and he looks to be thy heire.

George Herbert

Honour and profit lie not in one sacke. [Honour and profit lie not in one sack.]

George Herbert

Hee that lies long a bed, his estate feeles it.

Georg Cantor

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Georg Brandes

[Nietzsche] attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of another's nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at ease hi his presence

Georg Brandes

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is ... the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished.

Georg Brandes

A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.