William Burke Quotes & Sayings

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. — Soren Kierkegaard

We must in imagination sweep off the drifted matter that clogs the surface of the ground; we must suppose all the covering of moss and heath and wood to be torn away from the sides of the mountains, and the green mantle that lies near their feet to be lifted up; we may then see the muscular integuments, and sinews, and bones of our mother Earth, and so judge of the part played by each of them during those old convulsive movements whereby her limbs were contorted and drawn up into their present posture. — Adam Sedgwick

Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't gamble, if you will concede that poker is a game of skill. — Robert A. Heinlein

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him. — Samuel Butler

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it. — Duane Michals

Everyone and everything oppresses me, chokes and maddens me; I am troubled by a crushing physical sense of other people's lack of comprehension. — Pessoa, Fernando

Those who live with insomnia and who consider sleep both an enemy and a gift will understand the following. Some of us cannot comprehend how anyone except the very good or those who have no conscience at all can sleep from dark to dawn without dreaming or waking. We hear William Blake's tiger padding softly through a green jungle, his stripes glowing, his whiskers spotted with gore. Psychoanalysis does no good. Neither does a health regimen that induces physical exhaustion. The only solution that is guaranteed is the one provided by our old friend Morpheus, who requires our souls in the bargain. — James Lee Burke

Real happiness is so simple that most people do not recognize it. They think it comes from doing something on a big scale, from a big fortune, or from some great achievement, when, in fact, it is derived from the simplest, the quietest, the most unpretentious things in the world. — Orison S. Marden

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court. — Michel Foucault

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible — Arthur Schopenhauer

Earth is a homicide victim. We lose our children. There are wars. Disease. And God comes strolling by like a cosmic Billie Burke. — William Peter Blatty

Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it's the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we're actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not. — James Lee Burke

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch. — William Blake

I always worried I'd forget my lines or say the wrong words or the audience would laugh in the wrong places. — Lawrence Welk

We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence. — William Butler Yeats

My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor. — Celia Imrie

Sir Humphrey looked like a sleepy old hippo
and when he yawned in that big, big, hippopotamus way Charity couldn't help doing likewise. — Elizabeth Jane Howard

Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men — Abraham Lincoln

Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen. — J. Courtney Sullivan