B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But if I really want to produce my own work and tell stories, then I will”
“But if I simply place attributes together and mold them into a shape that pleases me then I am no better than the idol makers with their heartless and breathless images that stand along the streets and at the White Tower.”
Source: These Mortal Wings
“But if i sit here and weep
I'll be blown over by the slightest of breeze”
“But if I thought on it, I would like to be remembered as a brother who loved his people and did everything that I knew to fight for them, the liberation of our people.”
“But if I've learned anything about the world of grace, it's that failure is always a chance for a do-over.”
Source: All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir
“But if I've learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them. If we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever, and my radio conversations teach me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness, and contend openly with darkness all of their days. [...] They were flawed human beings, who wrestled with demons in themselves as in the world outside. For me, their goodness is more interesting, more genuinely inspiring because of that reality. The spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don't let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, "Yes, and …," and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly.”
Source: Speaking of Faith
“But if I was a robot, if all of us were robots, and we were told we were human--that this is what humans looked like, wouldn't my hands appear human to me, even if they weren't?”
Source: Sameness
“But, if I was never complete, I never exaggerated. Every one of those articles was an understatement, especially where the conditions were bad, and the proof thereof is that while each article seemed to astonish other cities, it disappointed the city which was its subject.... I cut twenty thousand words out of the Philadelphia article and yet I had not written half my facts. I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book.
This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.”
Source: The Shame of the Cities
“But if I was still trying to be in Guns N' Roses while I wasn't in the band... I wouldn't want to maintain an image like that.”
“But if I wasn't playing, I would drink Saturdays, then Sunday, then Monday. Then I would try and train and it was no good, then have another drink just to pass the day away.”
“But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I'd say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There's nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.”
“But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.”
“But if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has more to give.”
Source: Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. : In Three Volumes
“But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.”
“But if I'm content with a little, Enough is as good as a feast.”
Source: Lady Jane Grey. A Tragedy: 7
“But if I'm going to cause somebody else discomfort by my actions, then I should probably modify my actions toward them to make them as comfortable as possible.”
“But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.”
Source: The 5th Wave
“But if I've heard this saying once, I've heard it a thousand times- everything happens for a reason. And possibly it does. I just haven't found the reason that this all happened yet.”
“but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.”
Source: Perfect Match
“But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honor to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted.”
Source: The Philosophy of Spinoza
“But if in the pursuit of the means we should unfortunately stumble again on unfunded paper money or any similar species of fraud, we shall assuredly give a fatal stab to our national credit in its infancy. Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them. Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”
“But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.”
Source: The Prophet - Der Prophet
“But if inventions have increased man's power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities.”
Source: Principles of Economics
“But if it comes down to next year, I'll be picketing outside of Halas Hall for a new deal, a new contract, because I'm not going anyplace.”
“But if it couldn't be love and it didn't feel like lust, what was it? Like? Did he like her? Of course, he did, but that word didn't capture his feelings, either. It was a little too... vague and soft around the edges. People liked ice cream. People liked to watch television. It meant nothing, and it didn't come close to explaining why, for the first time, he felt the urge to tell someone the truth.”
“But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.”
“But if it is crazy to turn down the 100 bets, the logic of Samuelson's argument is just reversed; you should not turn down one! Shlomo and I called this phenomenon "myopic loss aversion". The only way you can ever take 100 attractive bets is by first taking the first one, and it is only thinking about the bet in isolation that fools you into turning it down.”
Source: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
“But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But if it matters to you, you'll be able to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin. The Sorting Hat takes your choice into account." "Really?" "It did for me," said Harry. He had never told any of his children that before, and he saw the wonder in Albus's face when he said it.”
“But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself.”
Source: Omphalos
“but if it’s love… when it asks you to come along, it will not ask you to leave yourself behind”
“but if it’s love,
when it asks you to come along,
it will not ask you to leave yourself behind…
love won’t ask you to be less. of. yourself.
it will invite you to become more and more of you,
to step into all of you.”
“But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.
When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals.”
“But if it was always a point of speculation, where one person insisted it was a certain way and another denied it, how would anyone ever hold on to the truth?”
“But if it's tolerable mediocrity, and you're like, 'Well, you know it could be worse. At least I'm getting paid.' Then you wind up in a job that is slowly killing your soul and you're allowing that to happen. Comfort can be a very, very dangerous thing.”
“But if it's true it's beautiful. Truth is beautiful. And so my whole work is about what amounts to a reverence for life itself.”
“But if it’s true that the only true life I had was the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that, at the end of the day, they will give it back in an unmutilated condition? Fat chance!”
“But if kids take up things like hockey and football they will go back to it.”
“But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”
Source: The End of the Affair
“But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”
“But if man, as in our society, advances only towards physical love, even though he surrounds it with deceptions and with the shallow formality of marriage, he obtains nothing but licensed vice.”
Source: The Kreutzer Sonata
“But if man genuinely produces man, it is precisely not through work and it's concrete results, not even the 'work on oneself' so widely praised in recent times, let alone through the alternatively invoked phenomena of 'interaction' or 'communication': it is through life in forms of practice. Practice is defined here as any operation that provides or improves the actor's qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as practice or not.”
Source: Du mußt dein Leben ändern
“But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.”
“But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.”
Source: Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories
“But if my life were to be a movie, it most definitely would not be a romantic comedy – more like a dramatic comedy. A dramedy.”
Source: Standing By
“But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn't it?”
Source: The Sense of an Ending
“But if not Kelso, then something else, because a free people must own the nation they live in.”
Source: Left at the post
“But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.”
“But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?”
Source: The Theological Works of Thomas Paine
“But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.”