Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Hume

The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.

David Hume

Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence.

David Hume

When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness.

David Hume

He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper; but he Is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance.

David Dunn

To praise is an investment in happiness.

Beatrice Wood

My life is full of mistakes. They're like pebbles that make a good road.

August Strindberg

Because in the midst of happiness there is always a seed of unhappiness; it consumes itself like fire--it can't burn forever, sooner or later it must die; and this presentiment of the end destroys my happiness when it is at is height.

August Strindberg

Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.

August Strindberg

I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something.

David Walliams

I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.

David Heyman

I love books. I read voraciously, and I happened to have been fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time.

David Icke

In terms of the way people see me, it breaks down into two very clear and distinct groups: those who think they know me from reading the papers and those who really know me by reading my books.

David Hume

It is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint and airs and apparel which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.

David Hume

For as to the dispersing of Books, that Circumstance does perhaps as much harm as good: Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason; though indeed no particular species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism.

David Dreman

I buy stocks when they are battered. I am strict with my discipline. I always buy stocks with low price-earnings ratios, low price-to-book value ratios and higher-than-average yield. Academic studies have shown that a strategy of buying out-of-favor stocks with low P/E, price-to-book and price-to-cash flow ratios outperforms the market pretty consistently over long periods of time.

David Dunn

For any leftover inventory, publishers must have a program to maximize the sale of a book.

David Duchovny

I'm not a comic book character. I'm not Indiana Jones or Bond, I'm a flesh and blood guy who is ageing and changing. I don't have to do what I did in '93. I couldn't do it and thank God.

David Brock

When I wrote the Anita Hill book I believed everything I wrote was accurate.

David Walliams

We sort of expect to see men in women's clothes. It's part of our culture. The key thing is, it has to be done quite badly.

David Riesman

Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

David Riesman

Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.

David Riesman

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

David Ricardo

I have endeavoured to show that the ability to pay taxes depends, not on the gross money value of the mass of commodities, nor on the net money value of the revenue of capitalists and landlords, but on the money value of each man's revenue compared to the money value of the commodities which he usually consumes.

David Henry Hwang

Why, in the Peking Opera, are women's roles played by men?...Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

David Hewson

In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.

David Horowitz

For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions - poverty, racism and oppression - for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.

David Hilbert

No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite