Quotations Or Quotes & Sayings

To be in the present time, keep yourself busy always or else you will find yourself either in the past or in the future! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw - which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them. — Nigel Rees

The Lord says that "truth is knowledge of things as they are and as they were, and as they are to come" (Sec. 93.) Some of our brethren in writing, and a good many in talking, say truth is the knowledge, or a knowledge of things. . . . The insertion of a or the is a mistake. Truth is knowledge itself, information, intelligence, things that are, things that were, things that are to come--knowledge concerning them. That is truth. It is a splendid definition and answers the question of ages more clearly than anything I have ever heard attempted; even better than "truth the sum of existence," and yet the two in meaning are identical. Now, let us be correct in that little thing, and so in all things that pertain to our doctrines, our duties in the Priesthood, brethren, and in our quotations of scripture let us try to be right, as nearly correct as we can. — Charles W. Penrose

That the system of morals propounded in the New Testament contained no maxim which had not been previously enunciated, and that some of the most beautiful passages in the apostolic writings are quotations from Pagan authors, is well known to every scholar ... To assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on the part of the asserted either gross ignorance or wilful fraud. — Henry Thomas Buckle

Waiting for something or somebody for hours, for days and even for years is a common human behavior. Take the word 'waiting' out of your dictionary! Move! Act! These are the words and the behaviors you need! The dead can wait for, but the quick must not! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Quotation ... A writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, or because they are beautiful or witty, or because he expects them to touch a cord of association in his reader, or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well read. Quotations due to the last motive are invariably ill-advised; the discerning reader detects it and is contemptuous; the undiscerning is perhaps impressed, but even then is at the same time repelled, pretentious quotations being the surest road to tedium. — Henry Watson Fowler

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. — Gary Saul Morson

Qualia of God refers to the private subjective experience or conception of God in people. — Abhijit Naskar

Sometimes war takes an arm, or an eye, or it takes two legs from us, but above all the war takes our belief in humanity away from us! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display ... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art. — Gary Saul Morson

If you are living a colorless life, it doesn't matter whether the world is colorful or not! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Our marketable equities tell us by their operating results - not by their daily, or even yearly, price quotations - whether our investments are successful. The market may ignore business success for a while, but eventually will confirm it. — Warren Buffett

A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation. — Jonathan Swift

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Frog who wants to be a king of the lake by terrorizing other frogs is not a frog but a scorpion or a snake! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Tonight or every night if you wish you can have a very distinguished guest from the space: Just open your curtain at night, then the Moon will visit you! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Don't perceive the facts as a false criticism or else you lose badly! Because facts are facts and they need to be respected and be taken into consideration promptly! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Thinking is a personalized activity that can lead us into a state of happiness or cause us to be sad. Who we are becomes a product of how we think. What we think about and how we integrate knowledge into a comprehensive schema regulates our evolving self-identity. The precision of the human mind and the interplay between cognitive thinking and reactive emotions plays a central role in self-identity. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The great charm of St Francis, that which explains the wonderful attraction he has even for spirits apparently removed from him, is that no one was less a churchman. He was neither a priest nor theologian. He did not even know his bible well. He ignored the first rules of scholasticism... He hardly knew the Saints, of whom he was to become the greatest. He spoke to the crowds, not like the ecclesiatical preachers, from high pulpits, but simply, from among the peasants and the womenfolk, without dogmatic paraphernalia, without theological quotations or pompous phrases. He was an orator without oratorical method. His way of renouncing earthly goods was not the way of the ascetics. He forbade himself riches, he did not forbid himself joy... — Gabriel Faure

Today, in a world with instant access to Google, we rely on the electronic web to supply everything we need, from historical facts to word definitions and spellings as well as extended quotations. All of us who use a computer are aware of the shock of inner poverty that we suddenly feel when deprived (by a virus or other disaster) of our mental crutches even just for a day or a week. Plato is right: memory has been stripped from us, and all we possess is an external reminder of what we have lost, enabling us to pretend to a wisdom and an inner life we no longer possess in ourselves.13 — Stratford Caldecott

The whole man was in all his judgments and activities, and a discriminating zest for life, for 'common life', informs every page he wrote. He saw education as actualizing the potentiality for the leisured activities of thought, art, literature and conversation. 'Grete clerk' as he was, he was never willfully esoteric: quotations and allusions rose unbidden to the surface of his full and fertile mind, but whether drawn from Tristram Shandy or James Thurber they elucidate not decorate. His works are all of a piece: a book in one genre will correct, illumine, or amplify what is latent in another. — Jocelyn Gibb

When it comes to the New Testament, we can be confident we are reading from accurate sources, because we have so many ancient copies to compare. For many ancient texts there are only a handful of manuscripts in existence. We have only nine or ten good copies of Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars. The best-preserved, non-biblical ancient writing we have is Homer's Iliad, of which there are only 643 copies. Compare these numbers to the New Testament, which is based on nearly six thousand Greek manuscripts plus over nine thousand ancient copies in other languages. If that were not enough, even if all of these copies were lost, we could reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from ancient quotations of the Bible. — Douglas M. Beaumont

Reading any collection of a man's quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won't go away hungry, but it's not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal. — Christopher Buckley

You can be an unhappy person, but you must never be a hopeless person! You can be an unsuccessful person or a defeated or an abandoned unlucky person, but you must never be a hopeless person! Being hopeless is the worst of the worst, it is the ultimate worst! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Economics operates legitimately and usefully within a 'given' framework which lies altogether outside the economic calculus. We might say that economics does not stand on its own feet, or that it is a 'derived' body of thought - derived from meta- economics. If the economist fails to study meta-economics, or, even worse. If he remains unaware of the fact that there are boundaries to the applicability of the economic calculus, he is likely to fall into a similar kind of error to that of certain medieval theologians who tried to settle questions of physics by means of biblical quotations. Every science is beneficial within its proper limits but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them. The — Ernst F. Schumacher

A person experiences time by traveling through the environment consisting of time and space, and encounters a variety of sense impressions. Time is the combined experience and cataloguing what is taking place now, a recollecting what took place before now, and the anticipation or expectation of a person registering future physical and mental sensations. Time is a happening that will arrive from the future and it will last for about as long as it takes to a person to inhale and exhale one deep bodily breath. In each recognizable segment of time, a person experiences in a thematic breathing cycle a tangible sense perception of either seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or some combination thereof. Then that distinct morsel of life detected by the physical senses passes from the slipstream of now and lodges into the silted fold of bygone memories. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I almost trust her to burn the bridges while standing at the cliff herself. She hardly agrees to be on the same page as others, either ahead of all or all in a different book. — Parul Wadhwa

I realized that my kisses with Dane had become a form of punctuation, the quotations or the hasty dash at the end of a conversation — Lisa Kleypas

There's two ways to become a famous Poet, find that one person that knows somebody, that knows somebody, that knows somebody.
Or die trying — Stanley Victor Paskavich

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then what is the laptop? A light saber or a life saver? — K.S. Collier

It's Okay to Play or Work Alone in the Information Age But If We Must Make Headway in this Transformation Age, Collaboration is the Way to Go. — Anyaele Sam Chiyson

Discover the God in Life itself. And one who does, becomes a better version of himself or herself. If the entrepreneur thinks that he or she is the God, he or she will be a better entrepreneur. If the student thinks he or she is the God, he or she will be a better student. If the Scientist thinks that he or she is the God, he or she will be a better Scientist, and so on. — Abhijit Naskar

As these quotations are examined and exposed, it will become quite clear that those Jesus mythicists citing the Church Fathers in such a fashion are not competent students on the subject of Christianity's origins. They have merely copied accusations from less than reliable sources without concern for whether their citations were interpreted properly or even existed. Nor have they ever bothered investigating the responses given by Christian apologists to these quotes. That it attacks Christianity is enough for them. — Albert McIlhenny

Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? — Audre Lorde

Sex and love represent one of the numerous absurdities and hopeless incongruences demarking human nature. A person whom only seeks out sex and eschews love will live a barren existence. Sex without love is a brute display of physical reproductive capacity. Sex is not a worthless or stupid activity when it forms a cog in a loving and affectionate relationship. Sex and love might not make the world go round, but when joined they make it a better place to live in. — Kilroy J. Oldster

No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature. — Abhijit Naskar

I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "goeth"? — Gary Saul Morson

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles. — Italo Calvino

Tomorrow is an assumption; it is just a theory! We must wait for tomorrow to see whether tomorrow is real or not! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Have you ever noticed that folks will say 'Look, he has his mama's eyes' or 'his daddy's nose,' but they never say 'We're so proud! Look! He's hung just like grampa'?"
- Zach McKnight — Suzie Quint

I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then. — Walter Kirn

Love can literally transform a human being. It can make us do either heroic or evil deeds. It is the best inspiration ever. — Abhijit Naskar

Inevitably, almost everything we say is either quotation or paraphrase. — Mason Cooley

Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything. — Nicolas Chamfort

What is it you're interested in exactly?" the man asked
slowly. "Just the color?"
"I think we both know," said Adrian cunningly. "I want the
color. I want the 'bonus effects.' And I want it to look
badass. You probably can't even do the design I want."
"That's the least of your worries," said the guy. "I've been
doing this for years. I can draw anything you want."
"Yeah? Can you draw a skeleton riding a motorcycle with
flames coming out of it? And I want a pirate hat on the
skeleton. And a parrot on his shoulder. A skeleton parrot.
Or maybe a ninja skeleton parrot? No, that would be
overkill. But it'd be cool if the biker skeleton could be
shooting some ninja throwing stars. That are on fire."
"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," said the
tattooist.
"That's not what the ladies are going to say," said Adrian — Richelle Mead

I have never found a better way to enhance the communications process than by reinforcing the points or concepts I wish to make with timely, memorable quotations. — Carolyn Warner

If they were afraid of him, then he must be Satan or something even worse, like maybe Sarah Palin. — Stephani Hecht

A man can smile and smile yet still be a villain,' I quoted. (Or misquoted. It was probably Shakespeare, most quotations seem to be.) — Trisha Ashley

Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority. — Justin Kaplan

In lieu of fixating upon details of our life which can lead to sadness or madness, we achieve an enhanced perspective regarding the perplexity haunting our being by thinking abstractedly, a process that allows us to discern the essential principles of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What is the name of your dream? A lovely wooden cottage in the middle of a forest? Or walking in an endless autumn path? What is the name of your dream? Don't give a name, always give a list! Fill yourself with dreams because dream is the path to reality! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Death is the truth of the 21st century and we know that it was the truth of the older centuries as well but it may not be the truth of the next day or the next year or the next centuries ahead! Why? Because we have created the idea of immortality and once we think of something, once an idea is created, it will appear in reality sooner or later! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

There were quotations that were openly and reverently emphasized as such, or that were half-hidden, completely hidden, half-conscious, unconscious, correct, intentionally distorted, unintentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted and so forth. The boundary lines between someone else's speech and one's own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused. Certain types of text were constructed like mosaics out of the texts of others. — Mikhail Bakhtin

The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. — Benjamin Graham

When animals behave like humans or when humans behave like animals, don't be surprised because in every animal there is a human and in every human there is an animal! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When you're part of an illegal government conspiracy, your actual job description gets hazy. [...] If you're working off the books, but the books don't officially exist in the first place, have you really gone rogue, or are you just putting in unpaid overtime? — Craig Schaefer

A fool will study for twenty or thirty years and learn how to do something, but a wise man will study for twenty or thirty minutes and become an expert. In this world, it isn't ability that counts, but authority. — Barry Hughart

When I went to bed, I stared earnestly at my face in the glass. Was I really good-looking? Honestly I couldn't say I thought so! I hadn't got a straight Grecian nose, or a rosebud mouth, or any of the things you ought to have. It is true that a curate once told me that my eyes were like "imprisoned sunshine in a dark, dark wood" - but curates always know so many quotations, and fire them off at random. I'd much prefer to have Irish blue eyes than dark green ones with yellow flecks! Still, green is a good colour for adventuresses. — Agatha Christie

Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books ... — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. — Guy Debord

I pick my favourite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence. — Robert Burns

Some political leaders in the world make big mistakes but they never resign; some make a small mistake but they immediately resign! What makes a political leader to resign or not to resign has something to do with having an honour or not! Those who have honour always choose the honourable way: Resignation! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Observation:

Thanks to technological advances, avid readers seem to be replacing DTBAD (Dead Tree Book Acquisition Disorder) with an alphabet soup of more more modern-day hoarding behaviors: EBAD (E-Book Acquistion Disorder), EGAD (Electronic Gadget Acquisition Disorder), and ABAD (Audiobook Acquisition Disorder). Of course, there's also MYBAD (Movie and YouTube Acquisition Disorder: the hoarding or obsessive viewing of digital films and videos, some based on books). If any of these syndromes describes you, take heart: there's probably an app for that! - 8/9/2013 — Lisa Tolliver

We are living in an artificial world - a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand - only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult. — Boris Gorbachevsky

Whether you have teeth or not, smile! Because our world always needs a smile! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Perhaps the most powerful and appealing aspect of another's words, however, is simply their convenience. Whether distilled in the briefest apophthegm, or spread out across some voluminous tome, the thought is ready-made, the heavy lifting done. It's there to be used like a weapon or tool, and as time wanders on, seemingly leaving us fewer and fewer new things to say, it becomes ever more useful. As technology moves forward, as well, it also becomes much easier. Indeed, in this "information age" where so much is available to so many so quickly that enlightenment nearly verges on light pollution, it can sometimes appear that expression has been reduced to nothing more than a mad race to unearth and claim references. As such, the citation is also there to be donned, like some article of fashion from which we may reap the praise of discriminating taste without ever exerting ourself in the actual toil of manufacture. — Jasper Siegel Seneschal

Do you want to give a special gift in the New Year to someone you love? Then let him or her realize this: We are the main shepherd of our fate, we are the main designer of our destiny! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

There are few writers of note, of any country or of any age, from whom quotations might not be made in proof of the love with which they regarded Nature. — Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway. — Frank Portman

Truth is independent of all dogmas, ancient or modern. — Abhijit Naskar

Many trains arrive at your station; treat them good whether they stay or leave! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Carl Jung never said: "There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was:
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99. — C. G. Jung

Below are some quotations along these lines. Select a quote for your Gothic Myspace layout or contribute one of your own. — Laura Ramirez

Let fascism find not even a single passage to power or else that poisonous snake will infiltrate into the every vital corner of the country and kill the future of the nation! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When you do something different, you are either blessed or cursed! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

We have not been impressed with any attribute of the Senate other than its appearance and manners. We have heard the best speakers: they all fire off speeches which deal with the entire subject in general terms and which do not attempt to debate, to answer opponents' arguments or offer new points for discussion. And the speeches are constantly degenerating into empty rhetoric; they abound in quotations from well-known authors or from their own former speeches. — Beatrice Webb

Love is like a lighthouse, a beacon in the dark. When you lose the path that lights your way, you feel that you have died, but I assure you, you have not. You are reaching out for help or you would not have found this page. So red these quotations, allow yourself to feel your pain and cry out your loss and anguish. As you let it go, you will find the strength and courage to put your relationship in perspective and move on. — Laura Ramirez

Those were my last words. To be listed in some book of quotations, alphabetically after Wilde:
Wilde, Oscar (of the wallpaper in his bedroom): "Either it goes, or I do."
Wilding, Adelyn (of the gum splooches on the sidewalk): "Ditto." — Roberta Pearce

A person is bound to experience troubling doubts when attempting to forge a viable philosophy for living. When we are young, the world appears as a dream, no desire is unattainable, and no goal is impossible. We do not entertain the notion that the world will blunt our passionate aspirations, we assume that the world will yield to our resolute will. Misfortune, poverty, illness, and death crush a person's hopes, awakening us to parts of oneself and the world that we previously denied. When fate has spoken harshly we initially feel ruined, life appears as a bleak wasteland. We must then chose to accept a misery ridden existence or rally the courage and fortitude to turn our thoughts from bitterness and regrets, surrender vain notions that we are somehow special and immune from the terrors of a life when reality does not care a wit for our survival. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A person can transfigure the disquiet of solitude in a positive or negative manner. Periods of enforced solitude can cause a person to develop eccentricities of conduct and character, parley with a number of mental aberrations, partake in self-destructive diversions, or use their time productively to contemplate worldly issues and diligently work on self-improvement. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Looking for a cricket quote for inspiration? Or, maybe a cricket quote to make you laugh? Check out this collection of the best cricket quotations. — John Arlott

Men are born with a great asset of weak memory, especially for the bad moments. It's not the same with women though. Good or bad, they would keep the memories intact like permanent data in ROM. — Mita Jain

The forms of direct-half-hidden and completely hidden quoting were endlessly varied, as were the forms for framing quotations by a context, forms of intonational quotation marks, varying degrees of alienation or assimilation of another's quoted word. And here the problem frequently arises: is the author quoting with reverence or on the contrary with irony, with a smirk? Double entendre as regards the other's word was often deliberate. — Mikhail Bakhtin

I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality. — George Eliot

The best thing is to walk on the right path without looking back, without knowing who is following you because you must walk with your own speed, with your own freedom! Your followers will catch you or your ideas somehow somewhere ahead, somewhere in time! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

You do not have a mind belongs to yourself! Your thoughts are the thoughts of your culture! When you speak, it is not you but your culture, your religion, your traditions, your political or spiritual leaders speak! If not you but your culture, your religion etc. are speaking on behalf of you, then what are you, who are you? A stupid puppet? Get a mind which belongs to yourself! Only then you will be able to speak with your own thoughts on behalf of your own self! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I remember the will said, 'May God thy gold refine.' That must be from the Bible."
"Shakespeare," Turtle said. All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare. — Ellen Raskin

You exist because the universe exists. You owe your existence to the universe. You may call the universe as god or something else, it doesn't matter. What matters is this: Thank to it! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Whatever you do or wherever you go in life, after a while everything you did will look like a dream to you! — Mehmet Murat Ildan