Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

Charles Simmons

Live only for today, and you ruin tomorrow.

Alan Watts

What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Alan Watts

Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.

Al Stewart

Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day.

Chogyam Trungpa

Humans are the only animals that try to dwell in the future. You don't have to purely live in the present situation without a plan, but the future plans you make can only be based on the aspects of the future that manifest within the present situation.

China Mieville

You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.

David Miliband

...the science is getting worse faster than the politics is getting better

David Rakoff

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

Alan Watts

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

Alan Perlis

Optimization hinders evolution.

Alan Perlis

Any noun can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Alan Perlis

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Alan Perlis

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

Bruce Barber

We want them to go back to doing what they used to do, which is migrate. The reason they migrate is for food. When they don't migrate, their offspring don't learn to migrate.

Wissam Nasr

We want to stop profiling. The more that people learn about Islam, the more tolerant they become.

Alan Watts

You can't figure out the Universe, especially if you're using figures to figure it.

Alan Paton

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

Alan Moore

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

Alan Moore

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Alan Bennett

I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Alan Bennett

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Alan Ball

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Alan Alda

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

Alan Alda

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

David Rakoff

Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

In [my] youth I was smacked around.

Dick Clark

The music of your youth stays with you throughout your life.

Elizabeth Arden

Hold fast to youth and beauty.

Agnes Repplier

the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.

Charles Fourier

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

Anton Chekhov

It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.

Chris Evans

For the youth, the indignation of most things will just surge as each birthday passes.

Dean Koontz

Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.