Mantlepiece Quotes & Sayings

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Through great input you get great output. — RZA

Don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure. Yes, you will make mistakes. But they will be your mistakes, not someone else's. And you will survive them, and you will know yourself better for having made them, and you will be a fuller and a stronger person. — William Deresiewicz

I was born in Yangzhou, China, two years after World War II ended. I was 5 when my family escaped to Taiwan. Eight years later, we moved to Japan. — Andrew Cherng

In terms of pure comedic value, 'Tootsie' is brilliant. — Will Tudor

27 Whoever w restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. — Anonymous

Once more he became silent, staring before him with sombre eyes. Following his gaze, I saw that he was looking at an enlarged photograph of my Uncle Tom in some sort of Masonic uniform which stood on the mantlepiece. I've tried to reason with Aunt Dahlia about this photograph for years, placing before her two alternative suggestions: (a) To burn the beastly thing; or (b) if she must preserve it, to shove me in another room when I come to stay. But she declines to accede. She says it's good for me. A useful discipline, she maintains, teaching me that there is a darker side to life and that we were not put into this world for pleasure only. — P.G. Wodehouse

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else - not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness - one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. — Sam Harris

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being! — Robert Farrar Capon

I'm a curious person. I like to ask questions. Well, why? People would say, it's never been done. It's never been done does not mean that it can't be done. — Kathy Ireland

How I dressed in high school is the way we dressed. — Jam Master Jay

See, Six? This is what makes life worth living. Men who don't know if they wanna fight or fuck, but will climb into a cage to figure it out in front of everyone in the sector. — Kit Rocha

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it. — Alan Bennett

You should keep a photograph of Mick Lyons on the mantlepiece to keep children away from the fire — Colm O'Rourke

I'm waiting now, but I will be ready. We are mutual participants, you and I, intertwined. — Diana Butler Bass