Primum Non Quotes & Sayings

One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch
With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars
Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile
Coiled and gleaming to the end of space
And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds
To the last tooth of time, and the case closed. — John Ciardi

We're just kinda surviving at a very comfortable level. — Bruce Johnston

This is the great evil in wine, it first seizes the feet; it is a cunning wrestler.
[Lat., Magnum hoc vitium vino est,
Pedes captat primum; luctator dolosu est.] — Plautus

He thought she was the most beautiful sight he'd ever seen and looking into her eyes made him believe he gazed into heaven. She had become his life, his entire world, and he loved her with his very soul. "I — Laurann Dohner

Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines. — Wally Lamb

I reached in experience the nirvana which is unborn, unrivalled, secure from attachment, undecaying and unstained. This condition is indeed reached by me which is deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand, tranquil, excellent, beyond the reach of mere logic, subtle, and to be realized only by the wise. — Gautama Buddha

The anti-Stratfordians hold that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays - it was another fellow of the same name, or of a different name. In this they invert the megalomaniacal equation and make themselves not the elect, but the superior of the elect. Barred from composing Shakespeare's plays by a regrettable temporal accident, they, in the fantasy of most every editor, accept the mantle of primum mobile, consign the (falsely named) creator to oblivion, and turn to the adulation of the crowd for their deed of discovery and insight - so much more thoughtful and intellectual than the necessarily sloppy work of the writer. — David Mamet

I was raising a child full time, sharing the responsibility with his mom. He lived with me half the time, so I chose not to go away and make certain movies. — Michael Keaton

Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. — Tamora Pierce

When fear has seized upon the mind, man fears that only which he first began to fear.
[Lat., Ubi intravit animos pavor, id solum metuunt, quod primum formidate coeperunt.] — Quintus Curtius Rufus

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help?
However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder
in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes. — Thomas Szasz

I hope I'm at least half the dad that he didn't have to be. — Brad Paisley

If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too — Vladimir Nabokov

Money is to be sought for first of all; virtue after wealth.
[Lat., Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos.] — Horace

Primum non nocere, 'First, don't make things worse,' was an essential principle of Hippocrates' medicine. Nowadays, unfortunately, it seems to have been forgotten. Conventional modern medicine aims at getting rid of patients' symptoms. Little, if any consideration is given to the fact that some of these symptoms may actually be used by the body in an attempt to correct deeper disorders. When this is the case, suppressing the symptom does not necessarily help the patient. — Samuel Sagan

How miserable a solipsist is! It is rather senseless for him to even assert his belief in solipsism, for, on the one hand, if his belief is false it is like committing intellectual suicide, and, on the other hand, if his belief is true it is an act of intellectual insanity. — Kedar Joshi

The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics. — Oswald Spengler

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Estragon: we lost our rights?
vladimir: we got rid of them. — Samuel Beckett

Fancy meeting you here," Jasper said.
"That is such a tired villain line, Jasper, and you know it," said Call. — Cassandra Clare

This always confuses liberals, that conservatives like the military and don't like the bureaucracy. That's because the military has their guns pointed out and the bureaucracy has them pointed in. — Grover Norquist

She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch. — Nenia Campbell

Mexico City is very different now than when I grew up, but I was in the streets all the time - though I was born to a middle-class neighborhood where there weren't a lot of gangs and things. I was always comfortable. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu