Insightful Quotes - Page 3

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?

Tina Fey

from the beginning, through themiddle years and up to theend:too bad, too bad, too bad.

Charles Bukowski

Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.

Anthony Trollope

...there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:"He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.

P.G. Wodehouse

I reckon if you care for someone and you can't have their love, you can either be a spiteful bastard about it or you can try your damnedest to make sure they're going to find some happiness in the world.

Lindsay Buroker

An empty man is full of himself.

Edward Abbey

The more a man judges, the less he loves

Honoré de Balzac

Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.

Anthony Powell

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.

Oscar Wilde

To broaden one's prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.

Joel T. McGrath

What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real--significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene--the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five. That's when individuality has a chance.

Agatha Christie

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes.

Joseph Heller

There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates.

David Menadue

Adversity is only yet another means to remind us of 'How Truly Awsome We All Are'!

W.O. Wainwright

He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. 'I've never taken a chance in life,' he said. 'I need to run in front of traffic bucknacked and get arrested.

H.G. Bissinger

There ain't half been some clever bastards

Ian Dury

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

Zora Neale Hurston

I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.

David Sedaris

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

Larry Niven

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

Nancy Mitford

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

Saul Bellow

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.

P.G. Wodehouse

It's hard to be nice when the rest of the world is so mean.

Sarah Dessen

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

Vladimir Nabokov

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Alexis de Tocqueville

...just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives.

Steve Martin

At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he’d ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else.

Victoria Forester

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Clive Barker

If you believe something will make the world better, then it's always worth a try, even if you fail.

Sierra St. James

The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.

Sean Carroll

Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow porcession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.

Laura Hillenbrand

Your pain made you strong. It made youpassionate and alive. It made us both who we are. -Cade

Cora Carmack

She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.

Banana Yoshimoto

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

Jennifer Egan

Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.

George R.R. Martin

What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!

Leo Tolstoy

Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.

Nicholas Sparks

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!

Anne Frank

That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I've worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I've met some who hated the army and others who wanted to make it a career. I've met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done,we do what we do for one another. For friendship. Not for country, not for patriotism, not because we're programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to you. You fight for your friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for you, and everything about the army is built on this simple premise.

Nicholas Sparks

He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been br

Brandon Sanderson

I knew everything! Yet, I'm still not perfect.

kent Ian N. Cny

It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construct, not as an inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

David Levithan

The greatest of all faults is to imagine you have none".

Unknown Author 692

Greed and corruption isn't in the world.It's in the people".

Suzanne Collins

Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception [men] hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception

Friedrich Nietzsche

BAIT GOATThere is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.

Kay Ryan

You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.

Ruth Ozeki

Life’s easy.It’s living it that’s difficult.

Mike Sasso

An American Family Sampler is a book any reader will find insightful, thoroughly researched, and fun to read. Robert Frump, author, award winning journalist, business leader

Donald Mazzella

It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it—gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.

Ann Packer

You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

Sarah Dessen

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness

Peter Høeg

I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end...

Ishmael Beah

.....we find ourselves inhabitants of the last few living cells of a dying god

Billy Kazee

Phil Needle stood in the parking lot, suddenly grasping that this was so, that nothing is lost in a world utterly mapped, that nothing is rogue with everything cross-pollinated, as the shouts on the beach lured him across the street to the sand.

Daniel Handler

I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.

Oswald Chambers

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Steven Johnson

Chance favors the connected mind.

Steven Johnson

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Insightful Quotes - Page 3

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