Famous Quotes & Sayings

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.

Winston Churchill

I was shown a picture by Cézanne of a blank wall of a house, which he had made instinct with the most delicate lights and colours.

William S. Burroughs

His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

Virginia Woolf

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

Virginia Woolf

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

Virginia Woolf

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

Virginia Woolf

Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

Woody Guthrie

Was a great high wall there that tried to stop me. Was a great big sign there said private Property but on the back side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me.

Woody Harrelson

I'm an anarchist and I do think things such as Occupy Wall Street are about getting a little closer to the solution.

Woody Allen

There are three things Jewish people worship-God, Chinese food and wall-to-wall carpeting.

Woody Allen

I don't like to reminisce much, and my walls don't have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff. I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.

Woody Allen

We knew the front door was always left open, but we broke in just to keep in practice. Doxy turned all the Washburn family photos to the wall so there wouldn't be any witnesses.

William Wordsworth

I'm not talking about a "show me other walls of this thing" button, I mean a "stumble" button for wallbase.

William Morris

If there is a reason for keeping the wall very quiet, choose a pattern that works all over without pronounced lines...Put very succinctly, architectural effect depends upon a nice balance of horizontal, vertical and oblique. No rules can say how much of each; so nothing can really take the place of feeling and good judgement.

William J. Clinton

A world without walls is the only sustainable world. . . . If the world is dominated by people who believe that their races, their religions, their ethnic differences are the most important factors, then a huge number of people will perish in this century.

William James

... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.

William James

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

William Friedkin

I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that's, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior.

Will Ferrell

Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, you write on walls and you get poked by people you don't know

Will Durant

All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.

Sarah Rees Brennan

Jared had his back to the wall, which Kami thought was a reflex when he was uncomfortable. She wanted to shield him. “He was doing some—Zen jogging,” she claimed. Jared flicked her an incredulous glance. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Zen jogging. I wasn’t wearing that many clothes because—that’s part of the process. You’re meant to commune with the elements. Normally, I wouldn’t have worn my jeans, but I put them on because I know the English are a modest people.

Sarah Burton

I always drew dresses. I remember loving Richard Avedon's early Versace campaigns. I used to plaster my whole walls with them when I was a kid.

Samuel Beckett

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

Samuel Butler

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

Salman Rushdie

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.

Wesley Snipes

I actually take images of things and put them up around the wall and in a room. I set a room aside. It might be colors, it might be animals, or energy and words. And I'll just leave it there, so it begins to work on my subconscious when I think about the character. Which gives me some latitude to be really flexible and spontaneous but within the context of the character and the world of the character without having to think about it. Or I'll look at something or read something and let it work on my subconscious mind.

Wanda Sykes

These CEOs, man ... If you're that ruthless, you're a scary dude. I tell you, now when I walk past a little gang banger, I don't even blink. But if I see a white dude with a Wall Street Journal, I haul ass. Before I walk past the Arthur Andersen building, I cut through the projects. If you cut through the projects, you may just lose what you have on you that day. I ain't never been mugged of my whole future.

W. G. Sebald

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind...

Virginia Euwer Wolff

A good book is never finished—-it goes on whispering to you from the wall.

W. H. Auden

All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

William D. Cohan

Having worked at four separate Wall Street firms, having seen a variety of talent at those places, and having competed against Goldman as a banker, one thing you have to be struck by is the power of their recruiting.

Wayne LaPierre

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave — while provoking others to try to make their mark? A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?

Tracee Ellis Ross

Throughout high school, I was obsessed with magazines. I used to just comb through them and plaster things on my wall.