Quotes by Biographers - Page 2

The tourist may complain of other tourists but he would be lost without them.
Agnes Repplier
The busiest man is the happiest man.
Sir Theodore Martin
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier
We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
Agnes Repplier
The fox changes his skin but not his habits.
Suetonius
Themistocles said "The Athenians govern the Greeks I govern the Athenians you my wife govern me your son governs you."
Plutarch
Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.
Plutarch
The gentleman is a Christian product.
George H. Calvert
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble never unhappy or ill never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
Many a person has held close throughout their entire lives two friends that always remained strange to one another because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity the other by difference.
Emil Ludwig
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
James Boswell
Prosperity is not just scale adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.
Plutarch
What strange perversity is it that induces a man to set his heart on doing those things which he has not succeeded in and makes him slight those in which his achievement has been respectable.
Gamaliel Bradford
It is a hard matter my fellow citizens to argue with the belly since it has no ears.
Plutarch
They are doing away with drive-ins. Now where are the teenagers going to go to not watch a movie?
Bob Thomas
We are less likely to fail if we measure with judgement our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
From their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
Plutarch
To make no mistake is not in the power of man but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
Plutarch
Humor brings insight and tolerance.
Agnes Repplier
General Quotations about Evenings Let us add this one more night to our lives.
Suetonius
The Lord Chief Justice of England recently said that the greater part of his judicial time was spent investigating collisions between propelled vehicles each on its own side of the road each sounding its horn and each stationary.
Philip Guedalla
Hail Caesar those who are about to die salute thee.
Suetonius
He shall fare well who confronts circumstances aright.
Plutarch
A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.
Agnes Repplier
The wildest colts make the best horses.
Plutarch
Conscience is a treacherous thing and mine behaves badly whenever there is a serious danger of being found out.
Margaret Lane
Character is long-standing habit.
Plutarch
Individualism is rather like innocence there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.
Plutarch
Art is a staple like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.
Irving Stone
Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.
Louis Kronenberger
From their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
Plutarch
Ours must be the first age whose great goal on a nonmaterial plane is not fulfillment but adjustment.
Louis Kronenberger
Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.
Plutarch
We may fail of our happiness strive we ever so bravely but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Jack Kennedy brought an "intense concentration" and a "gently teasing humor" to the dinner table, along with what Katherine Graham called his habit of "vacuum cleaning your brain.
Sally Bedell Smith
It's not macho to read? Nonsense. Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-itness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slamdunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.
Irving Stone
I went down like a tray of dishes
Blake Bailey
What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had topaint. Whether he painted well or badly didn't matter; painting was thestuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, liesin the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knewto be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had beenworthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than ifhe had put down his desire and become the richest merchant inAmsterdam. (Mendes Da Costa
Irving Stone
[Theseus] soon found himself involved in factions and troubles; those who long had hated him had now added to their hatred contempt; and the minds of the people were so generally corrupted, that, instead of obeying commands with silence, they expected to be flattered into their duty.
Plutarch
Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments- as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligations to own his talents.In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was confused and upset that his life wasn't stacking up to be what he and everyone around him had always assumed it would.
Jeff Hobbs
Neither blame or praise yourself.
Plutarch
Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.
Hilary Spurling
He who least likes courting favour, ought also least to think of resenting neglect; to feel wounded at being refused a distinction can only arise from an overweening appetite to have it.
Plutarch
But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practise and exercise. We are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form.
Plutarch
So long as he was personally present, [Alcibiades] had the perfect mastery of his political adversaries; calumny only succeeded in his absence.
Plutarch
Antipater, in a letter written upon the death of Aristotle, the philosopher, observes, "Amongst his other gifts he had that of persuasiveness"; and the absence of this in the character of Marcius made all his great actions and noble qualities unacceptable to those whom they benifited: pride, and self-will, the consort, as Plato calls it, of solitude, made him insufferable. With the skill which Alcibiades, on the contrary, possessed to treat every one in the way most agreeable to him, we cannot wonder that all his successes were attended with the most exuberant favour and honour; his very errors, at time, being accompanied by something of grace and felicity. And so in spite of great and frequent hurt that he had done the city, he was repeatedly appointed to office and command; while Coriolanus stood in vain for a place which his great services had made his due. The one, in spite of the harm he occasioned, could not make himself hated, nor the other, with all the admiration he attracted, succeed in being beloved by his countrymen.
Plutarch
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven. Rob considered these excursions a much-needed dose of reality, the social equivalent of an antidepressant.
Jeff Hobbs
Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer."I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob.
Jeff Hobbs
The word "fronting" was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around.
Jeff Hobbs
The loneliness of command had made Eisenhower emotionally self-sufficient.
Jean Edward Smith
Recalling his mother’s endless drudgery, (Senator) Richard (Russell) Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had “thought that mothers never had to sleep.
Robert A. Caro
The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown. The only way out is through.
Plutarch
You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)
Robert A. Caro
Cricket to us was more than play,It was a worship in the summer sun.
Edmund Blunden
Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls. So that now, if he sat looking down upon Grape Street, the letters and images encircled him. And it was while he sat here, scarcely moving, that he was in hell and no one knew it. At such times the future became so clear that it was as if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was in any case no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.
Peter Ackroyd
And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown’s most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career.
Judith Thurman