Little Engine That Could Quotes & Sayings

There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: "The noise-producing animal." Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little towns no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace. — George R. Stewart

The best self help book I've ever read was, The little Engine that Could. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing - I am just beginning to realize - may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go. — Christian Wiman

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs. To — Charles Dickens

When I was little, I used to work with my dad on the engine of his car. Mostly this was a matter of me handing him wrenches. — Mireille Enos

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming! — Evelyn Waugh

I don't know if I could rebuild an airplane engine, but I know a little bit about rotors and rivets. — Dane Cook

An example of perfection in nature is the cockroach. It was living six million years before us and it may outlast us by that long. The brain of a cockroach is a splendid little engine. It doesn't evolve and it doesn't need to. The human brain is a disaster from the point of view of perfection
great intellectual power combined with primitive emotional reactions. Human beings today are living with terrible risks of their own creation
nuclear weapons, the exploitation of natural resources, the great disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Our brains will probably bring us to destruction, but we also have the possibility of growth, evolution. I prefer being a human. We shouldn't always look for perfection, in nature or our lives. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

The reason I moved to California the first time was to build the Cobra. I thought it was stupid to have a 1918 taxicab engine in what Europeans like to call a performance car when a little American V-8 could do the job better. — Carroll Shelby

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot
choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spides and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before. — Jeff VanderMeer

On the whole, and providing one is in good spirits and feeling reasonably bright, it is not hard to converse for a short space of time on subjects about which one knows little, and it is indeed often amusing to see how cunningly one can steer the conversational barque, hoisting and lowering her sails, tacking this way and that to avoid reefs, and finally racing feverishly for home with the outboard engine making a loud and cheerful noise. — Virginia Graham

I turned around and waved my fingers at Taylor. "Don't worry, I'm nothing to be jealous of. I'm just using Holt for sex. He's so good in bed."
Her mouth dropped open.
I climbed in the truck.
Holt was still laughing when he fired up the engine and backed out of the driveway. Since her car was parked right behind his, he had to swerve wide and drive on the lawn before pulling out onto the street and driving away.
Taylor just stood there and watched.
"You're a little feisty, aren't you?" he said, giving me an approving stare.
"I am a redhead. — Cambria Hebert

Little Engine That Could - I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can. — Watty Piper

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances. — F Scott Fitzgerald

How quick, brutal, and fragile is life. You are born, you live a few years in wild hope, then you are dragged back into the night. You might have breathed on a little longer, had you not dared think yourself a human creature instead of an engine of muscle and bone. — Donna Gillespie

Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing. — Doris Lessing

27 July

Rage-thought to live by: in The General, Buster gets so annoyed at his girlfriend's stupidity for stoking the engine with tiny pieces of wood, he facetiously gives her little toothpicks - which she dutifully feeds into the fire. He then stares at her in disbelief, then delights in her anyway and leaps at her with a kiss. Sweet axiom! — Guy Maddin

I have lived my life in the shelter of too many northern alliances. I have made alliance with the gentle cow, the health department, the local policeman. In the shelter of such alliances I have got out of bed in the morning with moderate assurance that I shall still be alive at bedtime. But south of the moon my allies vanish, and I have an emptiness in my stomach. I fear the cobras in the garden. I lack a treaty with the lioness. I dread the crocodiles of Lake Victoria, the tsetse fly in the Tanganyika bush, the little airplane with the funny engine, and the mosquito in the soft evening air. But most of all, I am afraid of the African street. — Robert Ardrey

When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe. — Nikola Tesla

This unique and deep meaning of power laws perhaps explains our excitement when we first spotted them on the Web. It wasn't only that they were unprecedented and unexpected in the context of networks. It was that they lifted complex networks out of the jungle of randomness where Erdos and Renyi had placed them forty years earlier and dropped them into the center of the colorful and conceptually rich arena of self-organization. Gazing at the power laws that our little search engine carried home from its journey, we caught a glimpse of a new and unsuspected order within networks, one that displayed an uncommon beauty and coherence. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Most people, on waking up, accelerate through a quick panicky pre-consciousness check-up: who am I, where am I, who is he/she, good god, why am I cuddling a policeman's helmet, what happened last night?
And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time -there's that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking. — Terry Pratchett

One of these days I would give Pratt and Whitney back this engine and they could send it round airports as an advertisement, wearing a little brass plate reading This engine actually worked in this condition thus enabling Bill Cary to work in his condition. If you, too, are an idiot, P & W engines may save you from yourself. — Gavin Lyall

... He sounded as though he had just seen The Pokey Little Puppy meet the business end of The Little Engine That Could. — Thomm Quackenbush

The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people
they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. — Henry Ford

The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song? — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Democratic Party had failed (in 1983)
'to remember waht got us this far and how we got here
moral indignation, decent instincts, a sense of shared sacrifice and mutual responsibility, and a set of national priorities that emphasized what we had in common.. The Party that was the engine of the national interest
molding our pluralistic interest into a compelling new social contract that served the nation well for fifty years
became perceived as little more than the broker of narrow special interests. Instead of thinking of ourselves as Americans first, Democrats second, and members of interest groups third, we have begun to think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.. We have let our opponents set the agenda and define what is at stake.
p. 140 — Joe Biden

Except for when I was very little and thought that being an "engineer" meant he drove a train. Then I imagined him in the seat of an engine car the color of coal, a string of shiny passenger cars trailing behind. One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you. — Nicole Krauss

And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time - there's that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. — Terry Pratchett

I'm about to sharpen up the engine a little. — Robert M. Pirsig

I have a huge Lego collection - I have a really big Lego collection. We're talking pretty darn large. I also have a huge collection of original stainless steel Thomas the Tank Engine train toys. Beautiful little trains; they're my favorite thing in the world. — Callan McAuliffe

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives? — Wilhelm Reich

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing - and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that. — Mark Twain

There's a time in some years, after the first frosts, when the sun gets hot again, and summer returns for a time. Winter is coming; you know that from the way the mornings smell, the way the leaves, half-turned to color, are dry and poised to drop. But summer goes on, a small false summer, all the more precious for being small and false. In Little Belaire, we called this time
for some reason nobody knows
engine summer. — John Crowley

Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior.
With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal. — Morton Hunt

That looked like an intense little conversation," she said. "Who called?" "President of the United States," he answered, starting the engine. "Okay, fine," Cori sighed. "Don't tell me. — Brett King

Instead of giving the effort the level of attention needed, the Air Force has wasted a year doing very little to end our reliance on Russian rocket engines, if the Air Force is unwilling to do what is necessary to meet the 2019 deadline, they are going to have to figure out how to meet our space launch needs without the RD-180 (Russian engine). — John McCain

I slammed the doors open a little harder than I needed to, stalked out to the Blue Beetle, and drove away with all the raging power the ancient four-cylinder engine should muster. Behold the angry wizard puttputt-putting away. — Jim Butcher

My mother hasn't asked the questions that a normal person would ask, and I'm grateful for it. It's like the world has become so crazy that it makes sense to her now.
I turn on the engine and drive us out. 'Thanks, Mom. For coming to rescue me.' My voice comes out reedy and a little wobbly. I clear my throat. 'Not every mom would do that in a world like this. — Susan Ee

Sorry, Jericho. I almost didn't recognize you with your dick in your pants. If you'll excuse me, I have to get home." I tried to flounce off, but walking in short steps with a paper sack around my hips wasn't a graceful way to make an exit. He rolled the truck beside me and the engine rumbled, but he didn't say a word. So I walked a little faster. He drove a little faster. Finally, I broke into a run. Jericho hit the gas and kept up with me. "Get in the goddamn truck, Isabelle." "No.""You're a female wolf running naked in the street. Get in." "I'm not naked," I panted. "I'm wearing recyclables."
Dark, Dannika (2014-07-27). Five Weeks (Seven Series #3) (pp. 49-50). Kindle Edition. — Dannika Dark

The little green Ford had regular front-hinged doors, like most cars, and the doors had a restraint about two-thirds of the way through their travel, so stepping out meant stepping back too, which improved Reacher's angle. It put the engine block between him and the two guys. If they drew down immediately and started shooting from the get-go, he could hit the deck behind a bulletproof shield. If they had guns. Which was not proven. — Lee Child

When Alex leaves a little later, Carlos steps forward. "Need help?"
I shake my head.
"Are you ever gonna talk to me again? Dammit, Kiara, enough with the silent treatment. I'd rather have you say your little two-word sentences than stop talkin' altogether. Hell, just flip
me off again."
I toss my backpack in the backseat and start the engine.
"Where are you goin'?" Carlos asks, stepping in front of my car.
I beep.
"I'm not movin'," he says.
My response is another beep. It's not an intimidating, deep beep like most cars, but it's the best my car can give.
He places both hands on the hood.
"Move," I say.
He moves all right. With pantherlike quickness, Carlos jumps through the open passenger window, feet first.
"You should get the door fixed," he says. — Simone Elkeles

You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew who wrote the Bible.
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival. — Leonard Cohen