Bianca > Bianca's Quotes

“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since – on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to displace with your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.”
― John F. Kennedy

“I'm amazing and studly, but I have limits.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

“He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

“Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“We think we are being interesting to others when we are being interesting to ourselves.”
― Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things

“La vanidad se encuentra en los lugares más inesperados: al lado de la bondad, de la abnegación, de la generosidad.”
― Ernesto Sábato

“Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.”
― Rousseau Jean-Jacques

“If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night / The Last Tycoon

“Clichés so often befall vain people.”
― Ann Beattie, Walks With Men

“A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov