20th-century Author Quotes

I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

William Faulkner

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

György Konrád

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

You say you do not know what God's will is, but I'll tell you what it is. Above all it is that you know Christ and then that your neighbors hear about Christ. That is His will. So often we sit around twiddling our thumbs, dreaming about God's will in some distant future when we are not even willing to stand up on our own two feet, walk down the street, and do God's will right now.

John F. MacArthur

It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.

Abigail Tarttelin

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

Mark Haskell Smith

Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing energy fields of life. In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone.

David R. Hawkins

Being alone in our present society raises an important question about identity and well-being.

Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.

Richard Marcinko

I truly believe that our major social ills would disappear if we just spent our lives perfecting the art of connecting with each other.

Sean Stephenson

Reality is a formless lure, And only when we know this Do we dare to be unreal.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Catching people doing things right is a powerful management concept.

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers.

If, as you teach, the universe has no beginning and no end, why should we?

As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing...

How do you show up for your relationships? Are you healthy or crippled? Are you prepared or needy? Are you ready to give or too tired to talk?

One can fall in love as often as a tree grows leaves. It is perfectly natural but not free of guilt and complications, unless one takes oneself to be a leaf.

We are all of us invented. We are all of us cobbled together from cartilage and dust. Few of us know with certainty the name of our maker. But I do... Bram Stoker.

If you train yourself to listen to your intuition and to follow its bidding, you will greatly increase your percentage of success in life.

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

Lincoln Kirstein