Big Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

You can knock me down, but you better have a big rock to put me there... It's been tough, but that's alright. I am the oldest of ten kids and I am a survivor. I love this business so much, that there's no way I could think of retiring. When I'm 87, I'll still be walking on the Grand Ole Opry and singing "Here comes more tears to cry...". I still don't feel that I have the biggest record yet, or sang it the best. I think the best is yet to come, and that's the truth!

To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

It took me over three years to get the beret and the most enriching part of the experience was getting to know men for whom you would have given your life on the battlefield. It is a big thing to say there are people who are not your family for whom you would give up your life. But that is how close we became.

Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.

William O. Douglas

We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching tomorrow's future or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?

Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going.

Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet.

I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't curt yourself of... I'm only against the most obvious things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular concept about an utopian way things should be. I have a prejudice or a bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities, with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year after year.

Robert Rauschenberg

I felt myself in the presence of something enormously big, as if a small barbarian was desecrating the colossal Zeus of Pheidias with a coal hammer. But I also felt it inhuman, and I hated it, and I clung to that hatred.
"You fear nothing and you believe nothing," I said. "Man, you should never have been allowed to live."

Ransom thought her girly tendencies the funniest thing ever, constantly teased her over them, but the last time he'd opened his big mouth, she'd gotten her own back by pointing out that his long black hair sure did look well conditioned.

I learned quickly that trying to force Country Folk to love the Big City is like telling your gay cousin, "You just haven't met the right girl yet.

Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnace within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Invariably at the last minute somebody in the family unearthed a big bore who of course had no friends, no other place to go for Thanksgiving.

Betty MacDonald

And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.

In truth, it's usually failure, disappointment, and frustration that motivate people to reexamine that which they've taken for granted. It's rare to find big change without significant bad news.... In that sense, the pain of failure creates the largest opportunities for progress.

Judith M. Bardwick

I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours.

Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery at any time at all; that he has never bothered to do so because it's not normal; that he has decided to set aside his fanatical dedication to living like a normal person so I can have a studio big enough to roller-skate across; that I am being an ingrate. "Clare? Earth to Clare..." "Thank you," I say, too abruptly.

Audrey Niffenegger

Darius didn't have any trouble finding the Street Cats building. It was a cozy-looking square brick building with big front windows crowded with cat stuff. I made a mental note to pick up a little something for Nala from their gift shop. My cat was grumpy enough without her thinking that I'd been cheating on her (translation: I would smell like a zillion other cats) and hadn't even brought her a present.

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.

Dan instantly recognized the angry scratch that stretched from the corner of Ian's eye all the way along the olive skin to his chin. "Have you been messing with Saladin?" "No. Saladin has been messing with me," Ian shot back. "He isn't big on Lucians," Dan explained. "Animals are really good judges of character.

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Robert Penn Warren

You'll live forever in our hearts, big man. That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU!

Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake it all. I fake it very well, and the feelings are never there.

Jeff Lindsay (writer)