Avotek Quotes & Sayings

After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know. — Mary Doria Russell

It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable. — David Brin

By early 2009 the risks and losses associated with more than a trillion dollars' worth of bad investments were transferred from big Wall Street firms to the U.S. taxpayer. — Michael Lewis

We're a team, and just by the nature of our sport, we're always promoted together. I think we are definitely two different people with two different personalities, but we're always linked. — Misty May-Treanor

If we start worrying whether our nose is too big or too small, we should think, "What if I had no head? - now that would be a problem!" As long as we have life, we should rejoice. If everything doesn't go exactly as we'd like, we can accept it. If we contemplate impermanence deeply, patience and compassion will arise. We will hold less to the apparent truth of our experience, and the mind will become more flexible. Realizing that one day this body will be buried or burned, we will rejoice in every moment we have rather than make ourselves or others unhappy. — Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway. — Stephen Leacock

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized. — Ayn Rand

Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? — Seneca.

Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality. — Henning Mankell

How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible? — John William Draper

When the water is very calm and very beautiful, it won't take a long time that a thick head will throw a stone in it! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Finally, I drew in a long breath. It was noisy and painful and just heaven. — Charlaine Harris

My parents encouraged us to commit to things, so if we wanted to learn an instrument, it was all the grades and all the theory. — Laura Mvula

Every cell in your body is eavesdropping on your thoughts. — Deepak Chopra

the son of Olaf. The latter was a tall, — Peter Darman