B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But Luther did more than bring out the feeling of insignificance which already pervaded the social classes to whom he preached—he offered them a solution. By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up on every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God. Luther's relationship to God was one of complete submission. In psychological terms his concept of faith means: if you completely submit, if you accept your individual insignificance, then the all-powerful God may be willing to love you and save you. If you get rid of your individual self with all its shortcomings and doubts by utmost self-effacement, you free yourself from the feeling of your own nothingness and can participate in God's glory. Thus, while Luther freed people from the authority of the Church, he made them submit to a much more tyrannical authority, that of a God who insisted on complete submission of man and annihilation of the individual self as the essential condition to his salvation. Luther's "faith" was the conviction of being loved upon the condition of surrender, a solution which has much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the "leader.”
Source: Escape from Freedom
“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
Source: The Rebecca notebook and other memories
“But lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.”
Source: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
“But Maastricht was not the end of history. It was a first step towards a Europe of growth, of employment, a social Europe. That was the vision of Francois Mitterrand. We are far from that now.”
“But mad people never die. That's a well-known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.”
Source: Phineas Redux
“But madame, does mankind ever lose anything?
The arts change about and make a tour of the world; things take a different name, and the vulgar do not follow them- that is all; but there is always the same result.”
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo
“But Madonna has a small amount of talent when it comes to movies.”
“But magic is like pizza: even when it's bad, it's pretty good.”
Source: Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography
“But magic is neither good nor evil. It is a tool, like a knife. Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil.”
“But magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses.”
Source: The First Codex
“But magic, like everything else, follows certain natural laws. Magic needs energy wherever it can find it. If no other source of energy is available, it will take the life force of the magician who created it. That is why every use of magic weakens the magician.”
Source: The First Codex
“But Magnus, he thought. You never told me. Never warned me it would be like this, that I would wake up one day and realize that I was going somewhere you couldn't follow. That we are essentially not the same. There's no "till death do us apart" for those who never die.”
Source: Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls
“But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job.”
“But mainly, to be human, it is... to be vulnerable. More importantly, to allow yourself to be vulnerable. To engulf yourself in vulnerability and to give yourself permission to drown in it. To be human... is to feel. To be human is to be conscious and aware of the role given to you, aware of what impact you need to make on this world. To be conscious and mindful of what energy you put out into this world, and the energy you allow yourself to receive. To be human is to experience. To make mistakes and learn from them, and make that same mistake again and learn from it once more. It is to obtain compassion and perspective and treat others with kindness, even when you, yourself, have not been treated the same. It is to move on, to detach, to go on with your life, meet new people, and repeat that endless cycle. It is to laugh and fill your body and every inch of your soul with laughter. It is to be around people who you love, who exert love, and who love you.”
Source: Counting Stars
“But maintaining the primacy of the individual-lifestyle focus—without being transparent about larger influences—is an affront to people living in disadvantage, as it reduces their ill health to poor “choices”and blames them, all the while contributing to the stigma and judgmental thinking that fuels their oppression, worsens their health, and expands the health divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged.”
Source: Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight
“But make no mistake about it, Jordan. When the time is right and you're ready" - he trailed his forefinger along the edge of her palm and stilled when she shivered in response - "I have every intention of getting you into bed. And sleeping will have little to do with it.”
Source: Brave the Heat
“But make no mistake, the President will find in our new majority the voice of the American people as they've expressed it tonight: standing on principle, checking Washington's power and leading the drive for a smaller, less costly, and more accountable government.”
“But make no mistake: the weeds will win: nature bats last.”
Source: Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land
“But make not more business necessary than is so; and rather lessen than augment work for thyself.”
Source: The Select Works of William Penn: In Five Volumes. ...
“But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.”
“But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us.
This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That's the problem--the awful thing is you.”
Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“But Malone was thinking now and as he watched the men lighting cigarettes for each other in the dark, having sex beneath the trees, he turned to his friend and said in a wondering voice: “Isn’t it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which either one of us is interested, it’s inevitably with some perfectly ordinary drip who for some reason we cannot define is the magic bearer, the magician, the one who brings all this to us. Why?”
Source: Dancer from the Dance
“But Mama--at first I tried to pretend she was only gone, like on a trip. And then when I couldn't do that anymore, I tried to believe she was dead.' Her nose was running, from emotion, whisky, or the heat of the tea. Roger reached for the tea towel hanging by the stove and shoved it across the tabe to her. 'She isn't, though.' She picked up the towel and wiped angrily at her nose. 'That's the trouble! I have to miss her all the time, and know that I'll never see her again, but she isn't even dead! How can I mourn for her, when I think-when I hope-she's happy where she is, when I made her go?”
“But Mamma didn’t mind being stared at. She had accepted her extraordinary beauty. Only an idiot would reject such a great gift.”
Source: He Looks So Fine: Part One
“But man as a person, the same man, gains mastery over egocentric self-confinement by disclosing a universe in himself...Personality is a universe, it is filled with universal content.”
“But man does not create...he discovers.”
“But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid.”
Source: The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse
“But man has other needs as well: emotional needs. These, too, are few, but every bit as important as his physical requirements, yet not so simple. If they aren't met, they can be as devastating as physical hunger, as uncomfortable as a lack of shelter, as incapacitating as thirst. The frustration, isolation and anxiety brought about by unmet emotional needs can, like physical privation, produce death or a degree of living death - neurosis and psychosis.”
Source: Love
“But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.”
“But man invents nothing God did not create first.”
Source: The Time Keeper
“But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.”
“But man is a frivolous and unseemly being, and perhaps, similar to a chess player, likes only the process of achieving the goal, but not the goal itself. And who knows (one cannot vouch for it), perhaps the ceaselessness of the process of achievement alone, that is to say, in life itself, and not essentially the goal, which, of course, is bound to be nothing other than two times two is four - that is, a formula; and two times two is four is not longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. At least man has always somehow feared this two times two is four, and I fear it even now. Suppose all man ever does is search for this two times two is four; he crosses oceans, he sacrifices his life in the search; but to search it out, actually to find it - by God, he’s somehow afraid. For he senses that once he finds it, there will be nothing to search for,”
“But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”
“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
Source: The house of life: Rachel Carson at work
“But man is a superficial and unseemly creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is fond only of the actual process of achieving his goal rather than the goal itself.”
“But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.”
“But man is freer than all the animals, on account of his free-will, with which he is endowed above all other animals.”
Source: Summa Theologica, Volume 2 (Part II, First Section)
“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.”
“But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it’s the common lot, even I was not immune, if that may be called an erection. It did not escape her naturally, women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away and wonder, How on earth did he spot me from there? One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably. What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.”
Source: The Expelled
“But man must light for man The fires no other can, And find in his own eye Where the strange crossroads lie.”
“But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things—science, industry, nation, money, religion, schools—which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one's interests as a human being, and, having become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind. It's almost wearisome, the way one always comes back to the same point. Wouldn't it be nice, for a change, if there were another way out of our difficulties! A short cut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some 'enemy of society' to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a dose of calomel.”
Source: Eyeless In Gaza
“But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
Source: Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
“But man's duty is to try and endeavour, success depends upon chance and environments.”
Source: Why I Am An Atheist: An Autobiographical Discourse
“But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”
Source: The Brothers Karamazov
“But man will never be gone," she said, with insidious, diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. "The world will go with him.”
Source: Women in Love
“But man's eyes are blind through sin, and he can discern no part of God's truth till the Spirit opens them. Inner illumination, leading directly as it does to a deep, inescapable conviction, is thus fundamental to the Spirit's work as a teacher.”
Source: Fundamentalism
“But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”
“But Manila was another life. It was another time. It was universes behind me. The woman who lived there, sheltered and shackled and dreaming of another place, such as this, this magical spot under the start-of-autumn sky adorned with brown leaves preparing for their eventual descent to the earth, this quiet side street near the busy, bustling Old Port in old Quebec, was no longer me.”
Source: Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
“But manly set the world on sixe and sevene; And, if thou deye a martir, go to hevene.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Illustrated)