Wising Quotes & Sayings

The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means. — Robertson Davies

Nobody gets to you without going through me - and nobody's getting through me. — William Landay

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb. — P. J. O'Rourke

[Death is] a gimmick. It's the time-birth-death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up. — William S. Burroughs

Tucker," I say. "I'm so glad you're still here."
I throw myself into his arms. He hugs me tightly.
"I couldn't leave," he says.
"I know."
"I mean, literally. I don't have a ride. — Cynthia Hand

Make each day an adventure — H.G. Howell

Part of growing up is developing a bullshit detector, and kids usually do a pretty fair job of wising each other up. — Pauline Kael

Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify. — Christopher Ryan

Didn't they realize how much interesting shit there was to see and do in this world if you just woke up at a normal fucking time like a normal fucking person? — B.J. Novak

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how ... If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up. — William, Saroyan

The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then - revealing - just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur - maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason. — Sari Botton