Sources Of Old Quotes & Sayings

When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness. — Stephen Jay Gould

Old age is the most precious time of life, the one nearest eternity. There are two ways of growing old. There are old people who are anxious and bitter, living in the past and illusion, who criticize everything that goes on around them. Young people are repulsed by them; they are shut away in their sadness and loneliness, shriveled up in themselves. But there are also old people with a child's heart, who have used their freedom from function and responsibility to find a new youth. They have the wonder of a child, but the wisdom of maturity as well. They have integrated their years of activity and so can live without being attached to power. Their freedom of heart and their acceptance of their limitations and weakness makes them people whose radiance illuminates the whole community. They are gentle and merciful, symbols of compassion and forgiveness. They become a community's hidden treasures, sources of unity and life. They are true contemplatives at the heart of community. — Jean Vanier

For example, the notion that getting chilled can cause one to catch a cold is dismissed as an old wives' tale by many usually reliable sources. — Sherry Seethaler

Then again: from the critic's point of view, one of the truly wonderful things about the Star Wars universe is that the territory is so sprawling and borrows from so many sources that it's possible to find just about anything here, if you look hard enough. For example, the story of the original movie can also be summarized as, A restless young boy chafes at life on the dusty old family farm, until he meets a wizard and is swept away to a wondrous land where he meets some munchkins, a tin man, a cowardly lion and Harrison Ford as the scarecrow. — David Brin

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey
chanced, unplanned, solitary
was the thing to relish.
Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own ... — Rohinton Mistry

Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales. — Kate Morton

How did you know I was here in town?"
"The old quarter here in Cadence is my neighborhood now," she said smoothly,"Let's just say I have my sources."
"Right", He nodded, evidently satisfied and picked up his sandwich. "your mother phoned and told you I was on my way here to Cadence. — Jayne Castle

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. — Marilynne Robinson

It's okay. I'm a rhinoceros astronaut." She was silent a moment. "Oh, sparks. You're going delusional." "No, no. I mean, I'm surprising. I'll surprise him. What's the most surprising thing you can think of? Bet it's a rhinoceros astronaut. — Brandon Sanderson

Innovative technologies such as cold fusion, and radical energy sources, including sonoluminescent-triggered fusion and anti-gravitational propulsion, are either being withheld or blocked by governments, old-fashioned science academia and multinational corporations. — Takaaki Musha

I'm 52 years old, which means I'm of an age where my reading habits are more or less set. I read plenty of stuff on line but I rely on pretty traditional sources. I'm a newspaper reader, whether in hand or on my iPad. — Michael Wilbon

Emily Ferrin." The sovereign glanced about, as if expecting objections. When none came he continued, "Three years ago she married a man named Fred Smithson. They live in a different land, the land of LakeHillsTexas. They have a one-year-old daughter, Madison. My sources tell me Emily wants to have another child." "You're going outside the bounds of Oomaldee? This is crazy! How'd she even get there?" fired Sine Ster. — L.R.W. Lee

Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since. — Bill Bryson

Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the chords. Deftly taking from all sources, old rock, Four Freshman, he got in his records a beautiful hybrid sound - Let Him Run Wild, Don't Worry Baby, I Get Around, Fun, Fun, Fun - 'and she had fun, fun, fun 'till her daddy took her T-bird away.' — Lou Reed

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray. — Christopher Hitchens

I think if you want to become a great football player, professional, you must give all the time one hundred percent, you must work hard - to be lucky is a good thing - but if you work hard and you give everything you will have great success. — Greg Akcelrod

To William Ford, on his own land at last, free of the old country, the farm was liberating; to Henry Ford, bored and restless, it was like a prison. (Cows came to symbolize his hatred of the farm. They were lazy, and they lay around all the time. He spent an entire lifetime railing against them. "The cow is the crudest machine in the world," he once said. On another occasion he said that if people would destroy all the cows in the world, they would eliminate the sources of war. When his company became large, he had his labs working constantly to find substitutes for dairy products.) — David Halberstam

I love plans. Checklists, spreadsheets, timelines. I am literally passionate about that stuff. — Claire Kingsley

But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I
well, you may say that at present, I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell, he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits. — George Gissing

In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a "dove" and a "hawk," say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional. — George Saunders

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

It's a slow process, but it is scary, because if someone can control your energy sources, they can control you. We are already being told what light bulbs we can and cannot use ... through legislation. We are being forced to fund research into alternative energies sources that are inefficient, and that cause the price of food, energy, and everything else to rise ... through legislation ... rather than allow free enterprise to allocate funds to those energy sources that will survive through good old American innovation! — Mike Thompson

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ] — Jim Jarmusch

Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion — Bill Bryson

There are dozens of writings outside of the Bible that verify the historical accuracy of many of the names of people, places, and events mentioned in the Bible. In fact, external sources verify that at least eighty persons mentioned in the Bible were actual historical figures. Fifty people from the Old Testament, and thirty people from the New Testament. — Charlie Campbell

The urge to leap across feminism to "human liberation" is a tragic and dangerous mistake. It deflects us from our real sources of vision, recycles us back into old definitions and structures, and continues to serve the purposes of the patriarchy, which will use "women's lib," as it contemptuously phrases it, only to buy more time for itself - as both capitalism and socialism are now doing. Feminism is a criticism and subversion of all patriarchal thought and institutions - not merely those currently seen as reactionary and tyrannical. — Adrienne Rich

In sum, freedom can run a monetary system as superbly as it runs the rest of the economy. Contrary to many writers, there is nothing special about money that requires extensive governmental dictation. Here, too, free men will best and most smoothly supply all their economic wants. For money as for all other activities of man, liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. — Murray N. Rothbard

There are no good or evil people. There is only a great, unfathomable mob trampling itself underfoot. The life-giving sources of the old morality have dried up and vanished in the sands of oblivion. There's no other source to draw from, no place to refresh oneself. There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Romanticism embodied a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals. — Isaiah Berlin

More than developing confidence in the reliability of new energy technologies, and even more of a challenge than the admittedly complex task of designing and constructing an infrastructure that will allow consumer access to them, what stands in the way of our apparent will to wean ourselves from conventional energy sources is the reluctance to wean ourselves from old ways of thinking. — Jane Hoffman

An old joke puts its thus, "when a man speaks to a god its prayer , when a god speaks to a man its schizophrenia" ... Many people hear voices without suffering any of the debilitating and dysfunctional effects associated with schizophrenia, some treat these as sources of inspiration of develop religious ideas around them, others become mediums or occultists. — Peter J. Carroll

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind. — Max McKeown

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! — Knut Hamsun