Promissory Quotes & Sayings

He wrote and kept reading aloud what was written, while Vasilisa considered what she ought to write: how great had been their want the year before, how their corn had not lasted even till Christmas, how they had to sell their cow. She ought to ask for money, ought to write that the old father was often ailing and would soon no doubt give up his soul to God ... but how to express this in words? What must be said first and what afterwards? — Anton Chekhov

We were born and brought up with the maxim that 'time is money'. We know exactly what money is, but what does the word time mean? The day is made up of twenty-four hours and an infinite number of moments. We need to be aware of those moments and to make the most of them regardless of whether we're busy doing something or merely contemplating life. If we slow down, everything lasts much longer. Of course, that means that washing the dishes might last longer, as might totting up the debits and credits on a balance sheet or checking promissory notes, but why not use that time to think about pleasant things and to feel glad simply to be alive? — Paulo Coelho

I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me. — Pat Conroy

It is there within and among us, for we are ordained of God to be people of hope. It is there by virtue of our being in the image of the promissory God. It is sealed there in the sacrament of baptism. It is dramatized in the Eucharist - "until he come." It is the structure of every creed that ends by trusting in God's promises. Hope is the decision to which God invites Israel, a decision against despair, against permanent consignment to chaos (Isa 45:18), oppression, barrenness, and exile. — Walter Brueggemann

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance. — Pat Conroy

There are many ways to rule, many things required to be un hombre or to be una mujere, for each person can decide for himself. Sometimes you can even be both. Without having to choose one or the other — Mayra Santos-Febres

There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production. — Ayn Rand

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists ... who often confuse their religion with their science. — John C. Eccles

When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one becomes foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one's particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all. — David Bentley Hart

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.' — Andrea Seigel

Love is not a promissory note. — Todd May

Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see. — Cristina Nehring

I don't think you could function on set if you think like that. I think once you start to think of the impact, then you're not really coming from a truthful place. I think the best thing to do for me is what's worked in the past. — David Duchovny

Yesterday is a cancelled check. Today is cash on the line. Tomorrow is a promissory note. — Hank Stram

Whatever rationale is used to justify expanding the role of the state in economic life, the inescapable outcome will be the increase of coercion. Legal — Herbert Schlossberg

Yesterday is a cancelled check;
Tomorrow is a promissory note;
Today is the only cash you have,
so spend it wisely. — Kim Lyons

The man who is wantonly profuse of his promises ought to sink his credit as much as a tradesman would by uttering a great number of promissory notes payable at a distant day. The truest conclusion in both cases is, that neither intend or will be able to pay. And as the latter most probably intends to cheat you of your money, so the former at least designs to cheat you of your thanks. — Henry Fielding

Yesterday is a canceled check: Forget it.
Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it.
Today is ready cash: Use it!
— Edwin C. Bliss

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January. — Hal Borland

My fitness is good. I hope to improve it even further during training. — Andriy Shevchenko

Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. — Hilary Mantel

God does not give us ready money. He issues promissory notes, and then pays them at the throne. Each one of us has a check-book. — Theodore L. Cuyler

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio ... But after 1400? Nihil. — Cathleen Schine

It's no longer the older paradigm of, 'I want to own this market, and no one else can own this market because I own this market.' The Internet has made the market limitless. — Michelle Phan

Your greatest acts result from your greatest love. — Matshona Dhliwayo

In love and friendship, small, steady payments on a gold basis are better than immense promissory notes. — Henry Van Dyke

He had put them [his family] first by coming home [to India] and the irony was that they had put him first by arranging this marriage. He had walked into it with his eyes open. But his eyes had been open too long in the West and by the time he adjusted his vision to India, it was too late. — Anne Cherian

To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it. — Pope Francis

The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage. — Charles Bukowski

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. — Theodor W. Adorno

That a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime ... he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note. — John Burnham Schwartz

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' — Martin Luther King Jr.

The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century. — Michael Graves

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. — Martin Luther King Jr.

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't actually promise anything. It's not backed by gold or silver. — P. J. O'Rourke

If it's true love, then it will abide. If it was a fleeting crush, then it will turn to dust. Either way, the truth will out. — Sarah Strohmeyer

Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age — Walter Brueggemann

This question lies at the heart of the debates over justification: Is the promissory covenant subsumed under (or absorbed into) the covenants of law, resulting in a covenatal nomism? Or are the two covenant always distinguished and, on the point of justification, to be treated in fact as antithetical means of inheriting eternal life? P.22 — Michael S. Horton

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world. — John C. Eccles

Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note. — Arthur Schopenhauer