Explicative Def Quotes & Sayings

The emphasis on the birth of Christ tends to polarize our pluralistic society and create legal and ethnic belligerence. — John Clayton

You are a beautiful danger. Do not force me to open up. Some books are bound tightly for years for reasons. — Yrsa Daley-Ward

Probably the easiest and most efficient approach was to hate everybody. Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson? — Robert B. Parker

There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage. — Moliere

It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it. — Charlie Munger

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it. — Paul Theroux

Finally, a principal reason for the lack of attention to "unclean spirits" and Jesus' "acts of power" in the Gospel stories is surely the modern "scientific" frame of mind that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment reduction of reality to what was natural and comprehensible by reason. — Richard A. Horsley

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards. — Alan K. Simpson

Your passion is your internal compass that will guide you from where you are towards where you want to go. — Julie Connor

You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival! — Rainer Maria Rilke

Truth doesn't have a color. And it doesn't have a smell. It doesn't quiver or make noise. It doesn't shimmer. Yet it does - it does all these things, depending. Because truth is capricious. It may be hovering there all the while, but one moment you think you see it - it seems so clear, so well defined, as if you could catch it and hold it steady in your hand. But the next moment it's gone, or at least so fast moving it's a blur, at best. That's the thing Africa taught me about truth. You know it's truth because it's busy. Any seeming truth that's idle? Well, that's just not truth. — Christina Meldrum

He comes here at the peril of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In the moment of realization, after all his toil and waiting, you cut the ground from under his feet, destroy his idea, and make his gains worthless to him. Do you see nothing that he might do, under the disappointment? — Charles Dickens

You can't have expectations. You just have to do it. If you go into it expecting something, then you'll always be disappointed. Just dive. — Shannon McCrimmon

My father was both a scientist and a magician, but he declared that it was in literature wherein we discovered our truest natures. — Alice Hoffman

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. — Kazuo Ishiguro