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date From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium
Quotes of the day from previous years:
Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair? |
~ Walker Percy ~ |
I feel that in my own life anything I have done of possible worth has happened in spite of my gross, worldly self. I have been no more than the vessel used to convey ideas above my intellectual capacities. When people praise passages I have written, more often than not I can genuinely say, "Did I write that?" I don't think this is due to my having a bad memory, because I have almost total recall of trivialities. I see it as evidence of the part the supernatural plays in lives which would otherwise remain earthbound. |
~ Patrick White ~ |
I enjoy decoration. By accumulating this mass of detail you throw light on things in a longer sense: in the long run it all adds up. It creates a texture — how shall I put it — a background, a period, which makes everything you write that much more convincing. Of course, all artists are terrible egoists. Unconsciously you are largely writing about yourself. I could never write anything factual; I only have confidence in myself when I am another character. All the characters in my books are myself, but they are a kind of disguise. |
~ Patrick White ~ |
Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence. Certainly the state of simplicity and humility is the only desirable one for artist or for man. While to reach it may be impossible, to attempt to do so is imperative. |
~ Patrick White ~ |
The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal. |
~ Louis Agassiz ~ |
You only live twice: Once when you are born And once when you look death in the face. |
~ Ian Fleming ~ |
The bugle echoes shrill and sweet, The roses blossom white and red Above their wreath-strewn graves we kneel, May we, their grateful children, learn |
~ Joyce Kilmer ~ |
This country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts. |
~ Ian Fleming ~ |
Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all. |
~ George Washington ~ |
Never say "no" to adventures. Always say "yes", otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life. |
~ Ian Fleming ~ |
As you all are aware there was another mass shooting today, this time in my home town of Uvalde, Texas. Once again, we have tragically proven that we are failing to be responsible for the rights our freedoms grant us. … As Americans, Texans, mothers and fathers, it's time we re-evaluate, and renegotiate our wants from our needs. We have to rearrange our values and find a common ground above this devastating American reality that has tragically become our children’s issue. This is an epidemic we can control, and whichever side of the aisle we may stand on, we all know we can do better. We must do better. Action must be taken so that no parent has to experience what the parents in Uvalde and the others before them have endured. |
~ Matthew McConaughey ~ |
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored. |
~ Ian Fleming ~ |
I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. |
~ Walker Percy ~ |
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD:
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I'm iron. I lasted through ten years of war, and now I can last through this. It's true, it's not good for the nerves. ~ Sepp Dietrich (born May 28)
Conversation is imperative if gaps are to be filled, and old age, it is the last gap but one. ~ Patrick White
The essence of what you have to say you pick up before you're twenty... ~ Patrick White
Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape. ~ György Ligeti (born May 28)
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures? ~ Walker Percy
Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch. ~ Ian Fleming (born May 28, 1908)
The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive light, there must have been light to enter it. ~ Louis Agassiz
Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day: the very idea of cosmos out of chaos, a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales. ~ In commemoration of the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BCE, from the sixth episode of the science documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
While it is nice to describe a beautiful rose in full bloom, it would be incomplete without a description of everything—right from its roots, the stem, the manure and nutrients that have sustained it, the fresh and dried leaves as also the thorns, in order to conceptualize the beauty of that rose in all its dimensions. Likewise, for a human being’s biography, he needs to be presented ‘as is’ and not ‘as should be’—from head to toe, nothing more, nothing less, as transparent and true to reality as one can be. Everything that can be said or unsaid, that is embarrassing or praiseworthy has to be documented without inhibitions and fears. |
~ V. D. Savarkar ~ |
Come, Death! If really thou hast started already to come—welcome! These flowers may tremble to fade away, These juicy grapes to wither, But why should I fear Thee? I have but these wines of tears that fill my cup to offer Thee And which I thought over-drinking cannot exhaust; Come if that be acceptable to Thee! |
~ V. D. Savarkar ~ |
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