Ray > Ray's Quotes

“One never quite allows for the moron in our midst.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at.”
― W.H. Auden

“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem. ”
― John Galsworthy

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse”
― Epictetus

“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”
― Alan Watts

“When you treat your time as though you are a machine; a doing machine; you are committing violence against the sacredness of life itself.”
― Phillip Moffitt

“The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”
― Rod Serling

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
― Stephen Covey

“The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.”
― Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
― Will Durant

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”
― George Saunders

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. ”
― Robert Benchley

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.”
― Arnold Bennett

“It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.”
― John Galsworthy

“It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Has not heaven an ear? Is all the lightning wasted?”
― Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy

“All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.”
― Stephen King

“The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to look fools.”
― Arnold Bennett, Tales of the Five Towns

“Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga