Character Defining Lines Quotes & Sayings

It is extremely difficult for a Jew to be converted, for how can he bring himself to believe in the divinity of - another Jew? — Heinrich Heine

The collective benefits of higher education will not be asserted unless the public can be engaged in defining them. A student's future returns on his or her personal investment of time and money will seem more critical than the public benefits to be derived from ensuring that all students become people of character as well as of competence. An institution's prowess in potentially lucrative lines of scientific research will seem more essential to its mission than its participation in the development of an aesthetically engaged and broadly humane society. Unless there is public discussion that can help support the balancing of public and private priorities, colleges and universities will dance only to the private ambitions that ensure continuing high levels of enrollment and high ratings in the various surveys of satisfaction that give institutions a boost in national rankings. — Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

I've been wrong so often, I don't find it extraordinary at all. — Ronald Coase

Contrition for an offence must precede the pardon of an offence. — Octavius Winslow

When a star reaches for you, it is difficult to look away. — Alice Hoffman

Those things don't happen today. I feel sorry for the kids in the industry today. They have on sunglasses, eat caviar in jet planes, but they'll never know the true feeling that we did. — Ben E. King

What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself? — Charles Stross

Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course. — Catherynne M Valente

So much about life was disappointment. He often wondered how humankind endured so long, and if the few moments when things went right really made up for all the rest. — Brandon Sanderson

My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour. — Jim Butcher

Thanks, now I have a wet T-shirt."
I felt his smile on the back of my neck. "Perhaps that was my intention. — Colleen Houck

Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything. — Victor Hugo

England has forty-two religions and only two sauces. — Voltaire

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human — Christopher Hitchens

He holds his guitar like a Tommy gun. — Elvis Presley

Golf acts as a corrective against sinful pride. I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman Emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strange chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip shot. If Cleopatra had been ousted in the first round of the Ladies' Singles, we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness. — P.G. Wodehouse