Picayune Quotes & Sayings

It is always a vulgar and often an unhealthy pastime, and it is a vice which does not go alone; the man who gambles will find himself capable of any evil. — Jules Verne

Children feel hounded by symbols they don't understand the need of, verbal demands that seem picayune, and rules and codes that call them away from their pleasure in the straightforward expression of their natural energies. And when they try to master the body, pretend it isn't there, act "like a little man," the body suddenly overwhelms them, submerges them in vomit or excrement-and the child breaks down in desperate tears over his melted pretense at being a purely symbolic animal. Often the child deliberately soils himself or continues to wet the bed, to protest against the imposition of artificial symbolic rules: he seems to be saying that the body is his primary reality and that he wants to remain in the simpler physical Eden and not be thrown out into the world of "right and wrong. — Ernest Becker

Condemning ourselves is the quickest way to get a substitute sense of worth. People who have almost, but not quite, lost their feeling of worth generally have very strong needs to condemn themselves, for that is the most ready way of drowning the bitter ache of feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. It is as though the person were saying to himself, "I must be important that I am so worth condemning," or "Look how noble I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short." A psychoanalyst once pointedly remarked that when someone in psychoanalysis berates himself at great length for picayune sins, he feels like asking, "Who do you think you are?" The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he is that God is so concerned with punishing him. — Rollo May

Saturday, September 17, 2005: Today in New Orleans, a traffic light worked. Someone watered flowers. And anyone with the means to get online could have heard Dr. Joy's voice wafting in the dry wind, a sound of grace, comfort and familiarity here in the saddest and loneliest place in the world."
Chris Rose, The Times-Picayune — Suzanne Johnson

The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering. — Meister Eckhart

In, 1950, at the age, 19 I dropped out of St. George William College in Montreal, as it then was, and sailed for England on the Franconia. Foolishly, no arrogantly, believing I could put Canada and its picayune problems behind me, never dreaming it would become the raw material of most of my fiction and non-fiction. Or that I would care so deeply about its surviving intact. — Mordecai Richler

I'm always changing. I still have the same morals and values and foundation of who I was, growing up in Jacksonville, FL, but I'm such a different person from who I was when I was 17. You live and you learn and you grow. — Ashley Greene

The best-dressed women I know pay very little attention to the picayune aspects of fashion, but they have a sound understanding of style. — Amy Vanderbilt

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by. — Steve Wozniak

We have all heard a great deal about the opportunities of bygone years. We envy the men who discovered and settled the West. We wish that all the railroads were not built so that those opportunities would still be open. Why, the opportunities of yesterday are as nothing compared with the opportunities that await the courageous, resourceful man today! There are fortunes to be made that will make those of Astor and Rockefeller seem picayune. — F.C. Minaker

Word For The Day PICAYUNE (PIK uh yoon') adj. Trivial or petty, small or small-minded. — Deb Baker

Internet porn makes everything more reasonable
once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy. — Chuck Klosterman

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching — Gerard Way

If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I." "Christ was given, not for picayune and imaginary transgressions, but for mountainous sins; not for one or two, but for all; not for sins that can be discarded, but for sins that are stubbornly ingrained. — Martin Luther

Every selfish man, strangely enough, becomes a self slayer — Sadhu Sundar Singh

Since we don't have a body to confirm identity, we believe Nathan Drake is alive and threatening people, which means he faked his own death. (Josie)
And maybe fat flying fairies ate the rest of your blouse, which explains why so much of it's missing. (Terri) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Instead of trying to manufacture feelings, use the way you already feel. Or at least add that in. — Geena Davis

Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving. — Don DeLillo

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review. — Susan Larson

The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. — Sam Altman

An essential feature of a decent society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of outcome - not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state ... These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the core of classical liberalism, of Enlightenment thinking ... Like Aristotle, [Adam] Smith understood that the common good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues. — Noam Chomsky

War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that's all there is in it. — Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy