B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But it is funny, because I saw Unbreakable recently and it's a strange movie, I didn't mind it, and it's got some interesting things going on.”
“but it is glittering now in the
gaps between things”
Source: Falling Awake
“But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it.”
Source: Lunch Poems: 50th Anniversary Edition
“But it is hard to know them from friends, they are so obsequious and full of protestations; for a wolf resembles a dog, so doth a flatterer a friend.”
Source: The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh
“But it is hard to resist the feeling that 70th was some kind of golden age.”
“But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard”
“But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoiid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries or love or peace.”
“But it is important always to keep in mind that the danger of harming humans is not connected only or even mainly with telling secrets, there can be great danger in keeping secrets.”
“But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.”
Source: And the Mountains Echoed
“But it is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually generally millions of people end up being directly punished.”
“But it is important to realize we are all trapped in mental constructs, and so we separate ourselves from reality; the whole world loses its aliveness-or, rather, we lose our ability to sense that aliveness, the sacredness of nature. When we approach nature through the conceptualizing mind, we see a forest as a commodity, a concept. We no longer see it for what it truly is, but for what we want to use it as. It is reduced. This is how it becomes possible for humans to destroy the planet without realizing what they are doing.”
“But it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, "A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby." As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates, with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love, and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born,”
“But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.”
Source: Flow: the psychology of optimal experience
“But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”
Source: The Ministry of Fear
“But it is impossible to replace a person one has loved to distraction.”
“But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.”
Source: In the Mountains
“But it is in death where we find sweet things, Mr Ryan.”
Source: Rosie: An Old Castle Novel
“But it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position. And here, with this slap - you’ll simply be crushed by the consciousness of what sort of slime you’ve been reduced to.”
“But it is in storms that God does his finest work, for it is in storms that God has our keenest attention”
“But it is infamous that they have not told you!’ declared Eustacie. ‘Je n’en reviendrai jamais!’
‘If it’s all the same to you, miss, I’d just as soon you’d talk in a Christian language,’ said Mr. Stubbs.”
Source: The Talisman Ring
“But it is. It’s something you need, and that’s a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don’t need is a man who can’t let go of the useless baggage of his memories.”
Source: The Waste Lands
“But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [*realisere*] its existence [*Existents*] and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn first to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σε αυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of the irksome, sinister traveling companion―that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito). Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Just as no one who has been taught a great deal about swimming is able to keep afloat in a storm, but only the man who is intensely convinced and has experiences that he is actually lighter than water, so a person who lacks this inward point of poise is unable to keep afloat in life's storms.―Only when a man has understood himself in this way is he able to maintain an independent existence and thus avoid surrendering his own I. How often we see (in a period when we extol that Greek historian because he knows how to appropriate an unfamiliar style so delusively like the original author's, instead of censuring him, since the first prize always goes to an author for having his own style―that is, a mode of expression and presentation qualified by his own individuality)―how often we see people who either out of mental-spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from another's table or for more egotistical reasons seek to identify themselves with others, until eventually they believe it all, just like the liar through frequent repetition of his stories.”
“But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple.”
Source: Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays
“But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”
Source: Rabbit, Run
“But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.”
Source: The Common Reader
“But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!”
“But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“But it is my happiness to be half Welsh, and that the better half.”
Source: Speeches on Questions of Public Policy
“But it is my total conviction that all the trappings of good leadership are generic and widely applicable whether you are standing in a khaki queue with your mess tins or on an automobile production line.”
“But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.”
Source: New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)
“But it is never over;
nothing ends until we want it to.
Look, in shattered midnights,
On black ice under silver trees,
We are still dancing, dancing.”
Source: Gwendolyn MacEwen
“But it is nice to know that you have other races lined up, because sometimes you can get so focused on your next marathon that it can become kind of unhealthy in some ways. So it's nice to have something else to slap you in the face and say, all right, there is life after the Olympics.”
“But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.”
Source: Naked emperors: essays of a taboo-stalker
“But it is nonetheless disturbing to find mothers actively engaged in sabotaging one another, blind to their common ground. Think about it: women against poor mothers on welfare; women against rich Zoe Baird. Women against their husbands' first wives; mothers embroiled in endless mommy wars. Working mothers aren't "doing their job" at home, while mothers at home don't have a "real" job. The net effect of all of this belittling is to obscure the larger reality that mothers as a group are performing an enormous amount of essential unpaid labor.”
Source: The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued
“But it is not always the people who say most who do most.”
Source: Death Comes as the End
“But it is not at all certain that this superiority of the many over the sound few is possible in the case of every people and every large number. There are some whom it would be impossible: otherwise the theory would apply to wild animals- and yet some men are hardly any better than wild animals.”
“But it is not at all unthinkable for anyone to tell a writer how to write. It comes with the territory.”
“But it is not conscious strategy to go for unconventional roles.”
“But it is not everything in life that has its ticket, so much. There are things that are not for sale.”
Source: Five Little Pigs
“But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.”
“But it is not given to every electrician to die in so glorious a manner as the justly envied Richmann.”
Source: The History and Present State of Electricity: With Original Experiments. Reprinted from the 3d Ed., London, 1755, with an Appendix Containing Two Additional Papers of Original Experiments by the Author, and a New Introd. by Robert E. Shofield
“But it is not just Western youth who will be destroyed due to this madness; it is Western Civilisation that will crumble as a result.
What took millennia to build and shape will be broken apart in mere decades. Traditions and cultures that were passed down from
generation to generation and have evolved and existed for thousands of years will be forgotten and lost. The rich Western
heritage, history and Western way of life will all be washed away within a century of madness.”
Source: The Fall of Western Man
“But it is not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating—unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all.”
Source: The Jungle
“But it is not our place to punish a father for his political beliefs or where he wants to raise his child. Indeed, if we were to start judging parents on the basis of their political beliefs, we would change the concept of family for the rest of time.”
“But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.”
Source: Loving in the war years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios
“But it is not reason that governs love.”
“But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.”
Source: SOUL ON ICE
“But it is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.”
“But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.”
“But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally.”