Famous Quotes & Sayings

J. K. Rowling

He felt that he was still groping in the dark; he had chosen his path but kept looking back, wondering whether he had misread the signs, whether he should not have taken the other way.

Ivan Pavlov

It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients.

H. L. Mencken

I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf; it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.

Greg James

There's going to be a lot of eating. My listeners have tweeted me and said "You've just got to keep eating, keep your energy up and have someone on duty to give you a massage if you need it." It will be a case of getting it done and making sure I don't get too cold, because that's crucial for the muscles. So that's all going to be taken care of. But really there's not much you can do - if you start cramping up you've just got to get on with it.

J. Tillman

My idea of that[idea of career] is constantly changing. I mostly just throw it out to the universe and I can't really do much after that. I've never taken the steps to be "successful": I've never had a manager or signed to a publishing house. I've talked to people about it but I've never followed through because it gives me the creeps.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

George Herbert

There were no ill language, if it were not ill taken.

George Herbert

Presents of love fear not to be ill taken of strangers.

George Herbert

I was taken by a morsell, saies the fish. [I was taken by a morsel, says the fish.]

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The natural scientists of the previous age knew less than we do and believed they were very close to the goal: we have taken very great steps in its direction and now discover we are still very far away from it. With the most rational philosophers an increase in their knowledge is always attended by an increased conviction of their ignorance.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We take a fancy to something: and scarcely have we thoroughly taken a fancy to it when that tyrant in us calls out: "Give me thatin sacrifice"--and we give it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.

Hunter S. Thompson

He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humor. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub, then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away.

Humphrey Bogart

I’m not good-looking. I used to be, but not anymore. Not like Robert Taylor. What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there. When I go to work in a picture, I say, ‘Don’t take the lines out of my face. Leave them there.’

Will Ferrell

I guess ultimately a lot of comedians just wanna be taken seriously.

Salman Rushdie

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

Salman Rushdie

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

W. H. Auden

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

Wayne Newton

When you take of a man's time, you've taken a part of his life.

Wayne Huizenga

We're looking for something where we can make something happen: an industry where the competition is asleep, hasn't taken advantage. It's going to be hard to find another Blockbuster, but that doesn't mean you can't have three good companies growing. The point is, we're going to be busy.

Van Jones

Nobody wants a nanny state, where the government is stamping out initiative and telling us what to do, but the idea that the only alternative to that is to throw the American people overboard into a global economy with no protections to cushion us from some of these blows is absurd on its face. That's why I think there's been a concerted effort to distort my message. When you hear me speak beyond the sound bites taken out of context, I think I make a lot of sense to people, even those in Red States like the one where I grew up.

Van Morrison

These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.

Upton Sinclair

Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

Robert Pattinson

I've never really taken myself seriously as an actor, It is surprising the amount of people who think I'm going to be really dumb. I think they think anyone who has done teen movies is just an idiot. I don't know, maybe I am. Some of the best actors, if you talk to them, they're not the smartest people in the world.

Robert Pattinson

I think someone follows me. They do the most random stuff. I get a photo taken through a burger drive-through window and it's like, 'What?'. They always seem like they're six feet away. I don't understand. I'm walking around and I don't see anybody.

Robert M. Pirsig

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

Robert Fitzgerald

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Vinton Cerf

The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.

Saul Bellow

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

Sandra Day O'Connor

We hold that the reckless disregard for human life implicit in knowingly engaging in criminal activity known to carry a grave risk of death represents a highly culpable mental state that may be taken into account in making a capital sentencing judgment not inevitable, lethal result.

Roland Barthes

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

Roger Wicker

Decisive action has been taken on the home front with passage of the USA Patriot Act, which has strengthened the hand of law enforcement agencies to stop terrorists before they can act.