Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.”
― William Arrowsmith

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
― Martha Graham

“By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

- Albert Schweitzer”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer … Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant

“If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“To have a viable civilization, people have to have a benign government, a semblance of education, spare time, imagination, and manners”
― Jonathan Chamberlain Williams

“Let me tell you something about meditation. At the absolute center, is the vortex we are spun from like clay, there is a shaping hand which is neither Godlike nor peaceful as you imagine.”
― Forrest Gander, Torn Awake

“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
― Bob Marley

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
― Albert Einstein

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
― Oscar Levant

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there”
― George Harrison