Author Quotes

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes V. Jensen

"A child!" said Edith, looking at her. "When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight."

Charles Dickens

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

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

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

Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions. Illusions are at the mercy of any winds that blow. Real happiness must come from within, from a fixed purpose and faith in one's fellow men.

There are times when Science does not satisfy.

Rudyard Kipling

A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

Please understand the reason why Chinese vegetables taste so good. It is simple. The Chinese do not cook them, they just threaten them!

Jeff Smith (chef)

In the house, and on the street, how many, many feet you meet.

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

Agatha Christie

Let people catch something from your heart that will cause no discomfort, but help them to sing.

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.

Beautiful... as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Comte de Lautréamont

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

Alexander Pushkin

Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

There are public lives, personal lives, and private lives. The public life is the one everyone sees in your daily routine, the personal one you reveal to your family and closest friends, but your private life, that's just what you know about yourself, what you hide from everyone else.

Lisa Jackson (author)