A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“At one point you think, well, it's funny, I could just be a starving actor... So if somebody were to pull the plug right now, there'd be no room for complaint.”
“At one point, 'feminist' became a pejorative term. How did that happen? If you're a feminist, you're basically saying you're a humanist.”
“At one point, as Samuel urges Adam to raise his boys well regardless of the blood that might be in them, Adam tells him, "You can't make a race horse of a pig." Samuel replies, "No, but you can make a very fast pig.”
“At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.”
“At one point, Donald Trump even had to say, yes, whatever Ted Cruz said, I agree with.”
“At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit?”
“At one point, for example, [Donald Trump] argued that he knew much more than military leaders about the pursuit and defeat of ISIS. His assuredness of his own correctness seems also rooted in arrogance reflecting his fundamental insecurity. This insecurity and his belief in his own rightness, when combined with his success at making money, leads him to be self-reliant in his decision-making, which could result in his taking risks with threatening or using nuclear weapons.”
“At one point, I actually, ironically, thought I might go into criminology and work with the FBI.”
“At one point, I animated villains in our stories, a bear or a giant, then on The Little Mermaid Ariel just called to me and I started to fall in love with characters who had that burning desire inside of them, this hope.”
“At one point, I didn't get out of bed for, I think, three months, and I went down to the bottom of the hill one day and I had to call somebody to get me to come back up - come pick me up because I couldn't physically walk up the hill.”
“At one point, I even thought, "Oh, I'll take diet pills." I tried it for one day, and I thought my heart was going to explode. It's awful, and I would never, ever recommend it.”
“At one point, I had 14 pairs of golf shoes.”
“At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.”
“At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older, life is totally about losing everything.”
“At one point, I was hell-bent on being a Disney animator, and sort of got over that in college and wanted to do my own stuff. You know, towards the end of college I had actually planned to go to the Boston Conservatory of Music for musical theater.”
“At one point, I was in a place where it didn't feel like it was going to happen and I was feeling pretty down on myself. But I stuck to it, and now I have a hit comedy on my hands. You've got to keep plugging away at it. If you really believe in yourself, you can definitely make it happen.”
“At one point, I was just perceived as only being angry, but now I'm being perceived as angry, peaceful, and spiritual.”
“At one point, I was painting shells and selling them at gas stations for five cents. I was six years old or something.”
“At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.”
“At one point, Lucille's agent wanted to have me fired, telling her that my eyes were bigger than hers. When I head this, I told her that if I had her looks and talent, I'd keep me and fire the agent!”
“At one point, my house was a school for autistic children. I opened up my doors to about 30 kids and their families at the time. I was turning into Mary Poppins because I had to do something for these kids who have nowhere to go. So my house was the school for two years.”
“At one point, people thought that Eddie Murphy would only reach one sector of the audience, but now everyone sees everything Eddie Murphy does.”
“At one point, she'd wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she'd remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn't: cleanup.”
Source: Kristin Hannah's Family Matters 4-Book Bundle: Angel Falls, Between Sisters, The Things We Do for Love, Magic Hour
“At one point, the old school club retires and you're next up to bat, but if you stop before your time, you will see someone else live your dream.”
“At one point, we were all fearful. But as you get older, it's the things you don't do that you regret, more so than the things you do. When fear knocks, answer.”
“At one point, we were stuck at the border of Peru and Colombia and met this large Haitian population that was stranded there without passports and couldn't move. We had this revelation that, as tourists, we were so free to move, and here was this other population who couldn't cross borders.”
“At one seminar where I was speaking on the concept of proactivity, a man came up and said, "Stephen, I like what you're saying. But every situation is so different. Look at my marriage. I'm really worried. My wife and I just don't have the same feelings for each other we used to have. I guess I just don't love her anymore and she doesn't love me. What can I do?"
"The feeling isn't there anymore?" I asked. "That's right," he reaffirmed. "And we have three children we're really concerned about. What do you suggest?"
"Love her," I replied.
"I told you, the feeling just isn't there anymore."
"Love her."
"You don't understand. The feeling of love just isn't there."
"Then love her. If the feeling isn't there, that's a good reason to love her."
"But how do you love when you don't love?"
"My friend, love is a verb. Love -- the feeling -- is a fruit of love the verb. So love her.
Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?"
In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. They're driven by feelings. Hoolywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.
Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.”
“At one side of the creek, she builds a small cairn of stones underneath a large, oak tree. “In remembrance of Aunt Beca,” she says. “Thank you for all the things you taught me. For all the times you listened when I needed someone to talk to. For all the love and support you offered me.”
Source: Lost and Found
“At one side of the palette there is white, at the other black; and neither is ever used neat.”
Source: A Man of Destiny: Winston S. Churchill
“At one stopover on the train journey home, Hans told his sister Inge later, he saw a young girl with the Star of David on her breast; she was repairing tracks on the line, along with other people with yellow badges on their clothes. Her face was pallid, sunken in; her eyes, beyond grief and terror. Impulsively, Hans thrust his rations in her hand. She looked up at him, then at his uniform. She threw the packet of food to the ground.
He scooped it up, wiped off the dust, and picked a daisy growing by the side of the tracks. He placed the package, with the daisy on top, at her feet. He said, "I would have liked to give you a little pleasure." He boarded the train.
When he looked back, the girl was standing there, watching the train disappear, the flower in her hair.”
Source: Shattering the German Night: The Story of the White Rose
“At one store, Gansey had started to pay for Blue's potato chips and she'd snatched them away. "I don't want you to buy me food!" Blue said. "If you pay for it, then it's like I'm... be---be---" "Beholden to me?" Gansey suggested pleasantly. "Don't put words into my mouth." "It was your word." "You assumed it was my word. You can't just go around assuming." "But that is what you meant, isn't it?" She scowled. "I'm done with this conversation.”
“At one stupendous evolutionary moment in pre-history, one of nature's creatures separated himself from the unconscious flowing and burgeoning of nature and became conscious of himself. Prometheus stole fire. Adam ate the apple. Man sundered his bond with nature and set himself on a course of conscious individuation. In his mythologies, man has forever after felt guilt about that sundering. For when he became conscious of himself, man was able to choose between good and evil, and he realized that he was flawed, striving for good but prone to evil. He had taken a momentous step forward, but something in him, and in his myths, still longed for the half-remembered union with unconscious nature, that innocence lost long ago.”
Source: Wagner's Ring Turning the Sky Round
“At one-thirty in the deep dark morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen- lit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods.
Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell.
Grandfather, arriving home from a late evening's work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room.
As for the food? The meats were deviled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes.”
Source: Dandelion Wine
“At one time areas along the roadways [in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park] were carefully cut and trimmed, creating a lawnlike appearance. When a new superintendent was appointed, he ordered this practice stopped, which engendered a good deal of complain from visitors. The roadsides had been so attractive, they said, so neat, and now they had a rough and ungainly appearance. On this small but significant point the superintendent was adamant, however, and for exactly the right reason. Visitors to the park were reacting to a conventional, familiar, and deeply ingrained image of beauty - the trimmed and landscaped lawn. The goal should not be to stimulate that familiar response, but to confront the visitor with the less familiar setting of an unmanaged landscape. The mild shock of a scene to which there is no patterned response, and the engendering of an untutored personal response, is precisely what national park management should seek, even in such seemingly small details.”
Source: Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks
“At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.”
Source: At Home: A Short History of Private Life
“At one time, I believed the universe was conscious of itself and that we were separate from it. But gradually, I began to sense that we are not apart, we are nature. We constitute her as a whole. Perhaps the collective consciousness is nothing but nature’s consciousness itself.”
Source: Glimpses of My Worldview
“At one time, I had been the type of boy who leaned at the window, forever watching out for unexpected events to come crowding in towards him. Though I might be unable to change the world myself, I could not but hope that the world would change of its own accord. As that kind of boy, with all the accompanying anxieties, the transformation of the world was an urgent necessity for me; it nourished me from day to day; it was something without which I could not have lived. The idea of the changing of the world was as much a necessity as sleep and three meals a day. It was the womb that nourished my imagination.”
Source: Sun & Steel
“At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.”
“At one time I say to myself: "Surely not! The little prince shuts his flower under her glass globe every night, and he watches over his sheep very carefully . . ." Then I am happy. And there is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.”
Source: The Little Prince:
“At one time I smoked, but in 1959 I couldn't think of anything else to give up for Lent so I stopped - and I haven't had a cigarette since.”
Source: Merman: an autobiography
“At one time I thought that if I could really understand renunciation and bodhichitta from the depths of my heart, then, for this lifetime that would be enough.”
“At one time I thought the Editor of the Lancet would kindly publish a letter from me on the subject, but further reflection led me to doubt whether so insignificant an individual would be noticed without some special introduction.”
Source: Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public
“At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.
[Press conference, University of Virginia, May 20, 1957]”
“At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.”
“At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.”
Source: Truman Capote: Conversations
“At one time I was a nihilistic punk with a mohican and a ring in my nose. I think in the course of time I'll find a middle ground, but I also carry that sense of responsibility. I'm in a position to defeat stereotypes.”
“At one time I was praying for the salvation of sinners, and the Saviour appeared on the cross by me, and talked with me; I laid my hand on his mangled body, and looked up in his smiling face. Another time I was meditating upon the love of God in giving his only Son to die for sinners, and of the beautiful home he was preparing for those who love him, and I seemed to float away, and was set down in the Beautiful City. Oh, the glorious sight that met my view can never be expressed by mortal tongue”
Source: Signs & Wonders
“At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness.”
“At one time, I worked for a 401k retirement Plan company that handled retirement plans for Transamerica, Vanguard, and all others 401k and IRA corporations operating in America. I can tell you, first hand, that retirement plans are a scam designed to make investors money without spending a dime of their own money.”
“At one time I'd been to every park except Baltimore and Houston, but can't even keep track of who plays where these days.”