Laura > Laura's Quotes

“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life, the power to create.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
― Henry Thomas Buckle

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.”
― Oscar Wilde

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“But I could be wrong.”
― Carl Sagan

“Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate--with the best teachers--the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“We are all star stuff.”
― Carl Sagan

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.”
― Douglas Adams

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.”
― Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt), The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time