Quotes by Writers - Page 69

The law is not an ass but a chameleon in ass skin: it turns deathly black when around blacks and pristine white when around whites
Agona Apell
To exist as an interpreter of the law, you first have to follow that law yourself. Law is the glue that holds society together. It's flawed, but absolute, and corruption only hinders its progress.
Rebecca McNutt
Oh judge! Your damn laws! The good people don't need them, and the bad people don't obey them.
Ammon Hennacy
If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.
Voltaire
The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.
John Adams
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
And God created every living creaturethat now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak.God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke.Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.“Certainly,” said man.“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And Hewent away.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and finds its analogy in Nature, where the elements are combined in certain ways to give us fruits or flowers or grain.
Elbert Hubbard
These earthenware bowls are fragile and easily broken, they are only made of a little clay on which fortune has precariously bestowed a shape, and the same could be said of mankind.
José Saramago
Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Then, only then would she realize that the life that she created will extinguish with nothing to offer but the sorrow that she harvested in our souls and the holes that she dug in our hearts.
A.P. Sweet
We all have the choice as to how we want to create our world.
Mark Andrew Poe
As truly as God by His power oncecreated, so truly by that same power must God every moment maintain.
Andrew Murray
Creation and destruction are one, to the eyes who can see beauty.And the greatest praise to India is this: not only are her people beautiful; not only are her daily life and cult beautiful; but, in the midst of the utilitarian, humanitarian, dogmatic world of the present day, she keeps on proclaiming the outstanding value of Beauty for the sake of Beauty, through her very conception of Godhead, of religion and of life.
Savitri Devi
Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It's better to dance like a fool, than to stand around like an idiot.
Oliver Gaspirtz
For the first time ever, I was alone in a different country. I was nervous about how I was going to cope in this big bustling city and so I employed a technique which still serves me well today. I imagined myself as someone who relished new exciting opportunities, who was utterly unafraid and perpetually optimistic. It was a kind of reinvention. Everyone I met was new. These people didn't know me, there was no shared history, so I could be anything or anyone I wanted to be. My theory was that if I behaved like a confident, cheerful person, eventually I would buy it myself, and become that. I always had traces of strength somewhere inside me, it wasn't fake. It was just a way of summoning my courage to the fore and not letting any creeping self-doubt hinder my adventures. This method worked then, and it works now.
Dawn French
We're shadows! of naught - living, dying! for what's not.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Forms come and go. You, the quantum non-entity behind your human identity, comes nor goes.
Fakeer Ishavardas
She shook her head. "It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana." "What's wrong with that?" "Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof—that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work." "This is better," Will insisted. "You mean, it's more delicious. That's why it's such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You've just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him." A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding. "Supermango to fruit of knowledge — I'm going to wean you," she said, "by easy stages.
Aldous Huxley
You’ll get lost and then you’ll find it.
Mark Darrah
It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment.
John Cleese
There is strong shadow where there is much light.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Everything transitory is but an image.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He imagined that he was looking for her and couldn't find her anywhere, that the two of them were lost on a vast ship, sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another, the woman is sleeping only a few yards away from him and he cannot reach her, yet it's so very easy to go from port to starboard.
José Saramago
For me, sleep equaled death. How was closing your eyes and losing consciousness any different from death? What separated temporary loss of consciousness from permanent obliteration?
Lena Dunham
May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.
H.P. Lovecraft
I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook.
George Grossmith
Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep.
Rebecca McNutt
He buried his nose in his pillow and went to sleep—to dream of anything rather than getting on in the world, as a sensible young man in his position ought to have done.
H.G.Wells
It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing...The reverbations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in a scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace... the voice was like a combination of all this.
Banana Yoshimoto
...sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another...
José Saramago
I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.
Fernando Pessoa
Of course I love you. For real. I will sure come and personally meet you myself. Just to make sure you're well. When is your funeral?
Fakeer Ishavardas
Now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of retirement, I feel it my duty to teach you everything I’ve learnt about love, so listen closely. Love is like… That’s as far as I’ve gotten I’m afraid.
Ben Mitchell
The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
William Zinsser
Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.
William Zinsser
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.
Rebecca Goldstein
A good student learns from his teacher. A great student learns to teach himself.
A.P. Sweet
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
Amos Bronson Alcott
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.
Elbert Hubbard
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Aldous Huxley
Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.
Voltaire
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
Joseph de Maistre
It’s not easy to be God.
Péter Zilahy
War is hell, but sometimes in the midst of that hell men do things that heaven itself must be proud of. A hand grenade is hurled into a group of men. One of the men throws himself on top of it, making his body a living shield. In the burst of wild fire he dies, and the others live. Heroism is only a word, often a phony one. This is an action for which there is no good word because we can hardly even imagine it, let alone give it its proper name. Very literally, one man takes death into his bowels, takes fire into his own sweet flesh, so that the other men can take life, some of them men he hardly knows.
Frederick Buechner
You can hardly call Deor old.' Arisa wrapped her arms around herself; the breeze was brisk despite the sunlight. 'He didn't live long enough to get old. Why would he do that? I know kings are supposed to care for the realm above all else, and so on, and so on, but that's rot. They're men, just like anyone else. Do you think he really, deliberately, laid down his life?''Yes,' said Weasel. 'At least, I think it's possible.'It was the last answer she'd expected from Weasel-the-cynic.'But why?' Arisa asked.'Not having been there, I can't say for sure.' Weasel stuck his hands in his pockets. 'But I'd guess it was for the future.'Arisa frowned. 'I don't understand.''The One God willing,' said Weasel softly, 'you never will.
Hilari Bell
This is neither the time nor the place, however, to ponder how often the soul, in order to be able to boast of a clean body, has burdened itself with sadness, envy, and impurity.
José Saramago
…the worshipers here are not likely to kill one another, they all offer the same sacrifice, and how the fat spits and the carcasses sizzle as God in the sublime heavens inhales the odors of all this carnage with satisfaction. Jesus pressed his lamb to his breast, unable to fathom why God could not be appeased with a cup of milk poured over His altar, that sap of life which passes from one being to another, or with a handful of wheat, the basic substance of immortal bread. Soon he will have to part with the old man’s generous gift, his for such a short time, the poor little lamb will not live to see the sun set this day, it is time to mount the stairs of the Temple, to deliver it to the knife and sacrificial fire, as if it were no longer worthy of existence or being punished…
José Saramago
Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. Proud and terrible king, he needs everything and nothing resists him ... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses ... And who in all of this will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man ... So it is accomplished ... the first law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.
Joseph de Maistre
I mean it, it’s another gap in your education. Until you can learn to understand her, you’ll get nowhere as a detective. She’s everybody’s conscience, Bob—the universal maiden aunt, cousin or sister. Humanity’s backbone. Throughout history, she’s gone to the stake for you again and again; not with any sense of heroism, but as a matter of principle and because it would never occur to her to do anything else.
Heron Carvic
It goes so fast, he thought, they don't tell you that, how fast it goes...
S.E. Hinton
But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.
H.P. Lovecraft
Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.
Tim Burton
I heard a bird sing in the dark of December. A magical thing. And sweet to remember. We are nearer to Spring than we were in September. I heard a bird sing in the dark of December.
Oliver Herford
Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here.
José Saramago
At its core, each vocation is a particular, unique instantiation of the father’s summons to the true homeland of the kingdom. The etymological root of the word ‘vocation’ points in this direction. The word is derived from the Latin verb “vocare” – “to call.” Thus, through the son the father calls each one of us home.
Mark Doherty
Perhaps that is the real surprise of love; it exists, but one may not attribute causes and effects to it. The existence may appear to be a mere fallacy to the minds of some, and by the time they realise what hit them, they would already be down and dead.
Faraaz Kazi