A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Above all things-read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.”
Source: Death on the Air and Other Stories
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
“Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
“Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.”
Source: Bede Griffiths: Essential Writings
“Above all, we have to remember, Marx is greedy. He wants more of everything. He is suspicious of quality unless it is simply the mark of greater quantity: even if quality could exist alone, it would always be less admirable than a quantity in continual prospect of increase.”
Source: The Ruin of Kasch
“Above all we must realize that each of us makes a difference with our life. Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place - or not to bother”
“Above all, we must stick tightly in our cluster, so we do not lose each other. Understand?”
Source: Escaping the Russian Onslaught: A Family’s Story of Fleeing the Russian Army after Hitler’s Nazi Regime
“Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.”
“Above all, we new pagans must learn to know and honor the Many as they manifest in our own time and place. While the ways of the ancestors—the Received Tradition—must always inform our thought and action, we are truest to our heritage when we think and act as natives of here and now. Our mandate is to be the pagans for our own time, our own place, our own post-modern, science-driven Western culture. This is the only kind of pagan that we can honestly be; anything else is pretense." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism”
Source: Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans
“Above all, we pray that they will make the journey from selfishness to true love. Whether together or single, this is a journey we all have to make. In a sense it is the real journey of life.”
Source: Alternative Weddings: An Essential Guide for Creating Your Own Ceremony
“Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind.”
“Above all we want people to remember that there are three values we bring to this country. Family, God and hard work.”
“Above all, we will need more public goods and more positive externalities. Star Trek teaches us that humanity’s wondrous inventions do not fully realize their potential until they are freely shared.”
Source: Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek
“Above all, wealth was no longer to be flaunted. While an ostentatious displays of money might have been de rigueur in the Golden Twenties, it was decidedly out of fashion in the desperate days of the Destitute Thirties.
The splashy parties the socialite once gave and attended in the twenties in New York and Palm Beach now dwindled to a trickle and were replaced with charity teas, and fund raisers.”
Source: American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post
“Above all, what features make you fit?
How come you know it’s time to meet?
And when you make it finally – it’s lit!”
Source: Time to Meet: Lyrics
“Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.”
Source: Selected Works of Virginia Woolf
“Above all, you taught me what it means to be happy. I don't need any plans for that.”
Source: Journal Planning Magic: Dot Journaling for Calm, Creativity, and Conquering Your Goals
“Above all, Zen discipline means complete openness to what is and the ability to be totally immersed in whatever one is doing.”
Source: The Zen Teachings of Jesus
“Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.”
Source: A Cynthia Ozick reader
“Above all, a director has to be a good captain.”
“Above all, a horse should never be chastised out of foul mood or anger, but always with complete dispassion.”
“Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.”
“Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.”
Source: Che: The Diaries of Ernesto Che Guevara
“Above all, always see Jesus in every person, and consequently treat each one not only as an equal and as a brother or sister, but also with great humility, respect and selfless generosity.”
“Above all, Alzheimer wanted the medical world to recognize that mental illnesses have an undeniable material component. There was an obvious political reason for taking such a position because it could then be established that dementia-like conditions are not part of the spiritual/theological domain, but undeniably biological in origin and therefore not attributable with moral implications.”
“Above all, anger needs to be felt so it can be talked through, understood and integrated, rather than acted out. In this way, it cleanses the self.”
“Above all, art should be fun.”
“Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums - they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.”
“Above all, as the keynote of all Democratic policy, in passing upon any question, let the controlling aim and ambition be to keep the road open for private enterprise and personal initiative.”
“Above all, ascribe no decent motives to the federal government. Always and everywhere, it is the enemy of truth.”
“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.”
Source: The Brothers Karamazov
“Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts.”
Source: The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue
“Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.”
“Above all, be suspicious of your fatherland. Nobody is more inclined to become a murderer than a fatherland.”
“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
“Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others. ... It means standing up for people who have been kept down.”
“Above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis, when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.”
“Above all, beware of compromises. I do not mean that you are to get into antagonism with anybody, but you have to hold on to your own principles in weal or woe and never adjust them to others "fads" thought the greed of getting supporters.”
Source: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
“Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).”
“Above all, cancer is a spiritual practice that teaches me about faith and resilience.”
“Above all, creators remain drawn to the age-old paradoxes that philosophy grapples with [and]...that art occasionally resolves...the problem of the one and the many; unity and variety; determinism and freedom; mechanism and vitalism; good and evil; time and eternity; the plenum and the void; moral absolutism and relativism... These are the basic problems of human existence, and as far as we possibly can we arrange things to forget them.”
“Above all, discard the irrelevant.”
Source: Practicing History: Selected Essays
“Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.”
Source: The Screwtape Letters
“Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues and in terms of the problems of history making.”
Source: C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings
“Above all, do not lie to yourself.”
Source: The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.”
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
“Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.”
“Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations.”
“Above all, don't lie to yourself.”
Source: The Brothers Karamazov (English Russian Edition illustrated): Братья Карамазовы (англо-русская редакция иллюстрированная)