Exempla Quotes & Sayings

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten. — Kurt Vonnegut

You're wrong."
"I am?"
"I thought things through this time around. I even managed to restrain myself."
Theo stared at her, incredulous. "You did."
"I thought about kicking him in the balls, but I didn't. I figured that would be over kill." - Rendezvous with Destiny — Jess Schira

Yet the age was not so utterly destitute of virtues but that it produced some good examples.
[Lat., Non tamen adeo virtutum sterile seculum, ut non et bona exempla prodiderit.] — Tacitus

If thy friends tire of thee, remember that it is human to tire of everything. — John Lancaster Spalding

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves. — James Hollis

( ... )we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures. — Bill Bryson

We're living under the Obama economy. Any CEO in America with a record like this after three years on the job would be graciously shown the door. This president blames the managers instead. He blames the folks on the shop floor. He blames the weather. — Mitch McConnell

The basic problem is not political, it is a-political and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves. — Thomas Merton

It was officially the most horrible time of the summer, when everyone was starting to come back, unpack, do laundry, repack, and go to school, all while noisily updating social media with pictures of everybody hugging each other and their stupid siblings and their stupid dogs. — Emma Straub

Id i think i was god that i had to lie and take it did i think then i was a mountain or a hill or a ridge and who told me that and who decided stones had no rights for stones can waste away from being denied from being abused and who decided who is the ploughed and who ploughs and why did i not get up and why not go away and what would have happened if i had resisted.. — Marlene Van Niekerk

In order to keep surfing (getting-a-job avoidance) we just automatically got into hashish smuggling. Didn't even occur to us that something bad might happen. — Allan Weisbecker

The trouble with this business is the dearth of bad pictures. — Samuel Goldwyn