Personal Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema... I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of _____; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected.

Anthony Trollope

One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.

Charles Eisenstein

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.

John Stuart Mill

For a democracy to be healthy and effective, three political parties fight elections so that they can replace one another in Governments every few years. Dictatorial governments are either communist, or fascist, or military or personal. Nothing can control the power and wealth of a dictator. History has shown that there were no benevolent dictators and even if a saint became a dictator, he would be corrupted by the unlimited power and wealth at his command, and soon become a despot and tyrant. Mahatma Gandhi, who got us freedom by the unique method of non-violent resistance against evil was an ideal democrat.

Ancient Indians had a far deeper confidence in living speech than in the moral, impersonal and derivative written communication. When words issued from the mouth of a sayer, they carried a personal endorsement.

Robert T. Oliver

The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activity… a picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas... A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object... And it is something which happens in life not in art: a picture which was merely the product of art would not be very interesting and could tell us nothing we were not already aware of. The old saying, what you don't know can't hurt you, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.

A good sermon is an engineering operation by which a chasm is bridged so that the spiritual goods on one side — the "unsearchable riches of Christ" — are actually transported into personal lives upon the other. Here lies the difference between a sermon and a lecture.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help, and thus we are able to recapitulate in the one word motherliness that which we have developed as the characteristic value of woman. Only, the motherliness must be that which does not remain within the narrow circle of blood relations or of personal friends; but in accordance with the model of the Mother of Mercy, it must have its root in universal divine love for all who are there, belabored and burdened.

The Christian will sometimes be brought to walk in a solitary path. God seems to cut away his props, that He may reduce him to Himself. His religion is to be felt as a personal, particular, appropriate possession. He is to feel, that, as there is but one Jehovah to bless, so there seems to him as though there were but one penitent in the universe to be blessed by Him.

The Spirit of Rotary is to voluntarily improve the lot of their fellow human beings because it is the ultimate calling in life. Not for reward of for personal gain, but for the satisfaction of having made a positive difference to someone else. How different would life be if those of us with more advantages could all practice these virtues? This would be a society where the strong would be just and the weak secure. It is an ideal that we can all work towards.

Joni Madraiwiwi

To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.

I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me.

Clare Boothe Luce

You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.

That is how I would have acted before my accident, but now my personal history had become unimportant. It had stopped being history and was once more becoming a legend, a search, an adventure, a journey into and away from myself. I was once more in a time which the things around me were changing and that is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my days.

When it comes to developing character strength, inner security and unique personal and interpersonal talents and skills in a child, no institution can or ever will compare with, or effectively substitute for, the home's potential for positive influence.

Imagination over dogma, vulnerability over serenity, aspiration over obligation, comedy over tragedy, hope over experience, prophecy over memory, surprise over repetition, the personal over the impersonal, time over eternity, life over everything.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad —the maddest of all being the historian's belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it —our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors.

As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It is better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for someone else.

The author took the only course in cartography available to him in 1937; it must have been fairly typical of the few being offered in America: lectures based largely on personal experiences were supplemented by a relatively few assigned readings, and by Deetz and Adam's Elements of Map Projection. No textbook was used because there was none in English.

Arthur H. Robinson

I believe we would be happier to have a personal revolution in our individual lives and go back to simpler living and more direct thinking. It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, and living close to nature.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.

Herbert Marcuse

…he had found an image of one of the big Western-style business hotels along the waterfront: one of those places where it was possible to be a white person without attracting one's own personal Stonehenge of cataleptic, openmouthed gapers.

Neal Stephenson