Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Alfred Quotations
We found 117 matching quotations.
The only unnatural sexual act is that which you cannot perform.
Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.
Television has brought murder back into the home-- where it belongs.
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant.
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me,
than in half the creeds.
Believe me,
than in half the creeds.
I am a part of all that I have met.
Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.
Love can never give too much, But those of us who love Can give in too much.
We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons...
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
Has ever truly longed for death.
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even murder with the truth.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.
Avoid destructive thinking. Improper negative thoughts sink people. A ship can sail around the world many, many times, but just let enough water get into the ship and it will sink. Just so with the human mind. Let enough negative thoughts or improper thoughts get into the human mind and the person sinks just like a ship.
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
I hold it true,what'er befallI feel it, when I sorrow most'Tis better to have loved and lostThan never to have loved at all.
Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
What brings joy to the heart is not so much the friend's gift as the friend's love.
I never said actors were cattle. I said that actors should be treated like cattle.
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.
...For the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies.
A use in measured language lies.
Censor a self-appointed snoophound who sticks his nose in other people's business.
Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.
Before every action ask yourself. Will this bring more monkeys on my back. Will the result of my action be a blessing or a heavy burden?
In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.
So long as faith with freedom reigns
And loyal hope survives,
And gracious charity remains
To leaven lowly lives;
While there is one untrodden tract
For intellect or will,
And men are free to think and act,
Life is worth living still.
And loyal hope survives,
And gracious charity remains
To leaven lowly lives;
While there is one untrodden tract
For intellect or will,
And men are free to think and act,
Life is worth living still.
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
Ours not to reason why Ours but to do and die.
The person who can bring the spirit of laughter into a room is indeed blessed.
Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.
What you have in your mind, your talents, your native abilities, no one can take from you. When you die you take them with you.
Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.
The greater man the greater courtesy.
Believing where we cannot prove.
Her eyes are homes of silent prayers.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.
Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
There are no whole truths all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
We'll talk without listening to each other that is the best way to get along.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The only calendar I need is just outside my window. With eyes to see and ears to hear, nature keeps me posted.
Every time you get angry, you poison your own system.
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan... believe... act!
Is life worth living? Yes, so long
As there is wrong to right.
As there is wrong to right.
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Great artists have no country.
This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.
Ideas won't keep something must be done about them.
We believe that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.
If thou shouldst never see my face again,Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayerThan this world dreams of.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.
I am a part of all I have seen.
Till last by Philip's farm I flowTo join the brimming river,For men may come and men may go,But I go on for ever.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
Fools rush in and get the best seats.
The main source of our wealth is goodness. The affections and the generous qualities that God admires in a world full of greed.
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else.
If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.
In life, the first thing you must do is decide what you really want. Weigh the costs and the results. Are the results worthy of the costs? Then make up your mind completely and go after your goal with all your might.
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
Ah, what shall I be at fifty,
should nature keep me alive,
if I find the world so bitter
when I am but twenty-five?
should nature keep me alive,
if I find the world so bitter
when I am but twenty-five?
Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.
Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.
What we learn with pleasure we never forget.
The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop.
Cleave never to the sunnier side of doubt.
There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
Hope smiles on the threshold of the year to come, whispering that it will be happier.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.
Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistical structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.
These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
Every person has free choice. Free to obey or disobey the Natural Laws. Your choice determines the consequences. Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.
Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
For I dipt into the future, as far as human eye can see, saw the vision of the world, and the wonder that would be.
For I dipped into the future, as far as human eye could see, saw a vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity.
How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . . But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-- and a little mad.
Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.