B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.”
Source: A Thornton Wilder Trio: The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Woman of Andros
“But such people (Moderate Conservatives) aren't liberal. What they are is corporate. Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of 'change,' punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock'n'roll musuems, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist fro the Grateful Dead hail the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Coversvatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture's usual priority - profit.”
“But suddenly, Pentunia spied the Book. The firecrackers had blown it open so that the pages showed. She had never seen them before. Now she saw that there was something written inside the Book which she could not read. So she sat down and thought and thought and thought, until at last she sighed, 'Now I understand. It was not enough to carry wisdom under my wing. I must put it in my mind and in my heart. And to do that I must learn to read.”
Source: Petunia
“But suicides are mysterious, and one must respect their mystery.”
Source: The Message To The Planet
“But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.”
Source: Selected Poems of Anne Sexton
“But Sunkist forgot to mention that fruit juice is very bad for us and we can get vitamins and antioxidants in dozens of other foods that don't hurt us in the process.”
Source: Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar
“But superstition, like belief, must die.”
Source: Collected Poems
“But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?”
Source: RFK: collected speeches
“But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.”
Source: The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (20+ Books)
“But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?" "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”
“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.”
“But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?”
Source: The Irrational Bundle
“But suppose we take the noun 'truth': here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation.”
“But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.”
Source: Perelandra
“But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like? Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is. But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.”
Source: His Dark Materials: The Complete Trilogy
“But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.”
“But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?”
Source: Essential Works of Lenin:
“But sure the eye of time beholds no name,
So blest as thine in all the rolls of fame.”
Source: The Odyssey of Homer. Translated from the Greek by Alexander Pope, etc
“But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature.”
“But surely "Argh" is the sound of a sort of strangulated scream.
"Aargh" is the sound of a stabbing, or a falling off a cliff.
"Arr" is, I think, the noise you're looking for. It's the noise pirates make when they don't have anything better to do. "Arr, Jim Lad" = Pirate noise. "Aargh, Jim Lad" = sound of pirate falling off a cliff.”
“But surely Adam cannot be excused; Her fault though great, yet he was most to blame; What weakness offered, strength might have refused, Being lord of all, the greater was the shame.”
“But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.”
“But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?”
Source: The Last September
“But surely, say these good apostles, you aren't going to discredit reality in the eyes of those who already find it difficult enough to get by, and who surely have a right to reality and the fact that they exist? The same objection for the Third World: surely you aren't going to discredit affluence in the eyes of those dying of starvation? Or: surely you aren't going to run down the class struggle in the eyes of those who haven't even had their bourgeois revolution?
Or again: you aren't going to discredit feminist and egalitarian demands in the eyes of all those who haven't even heard of women's rights, etc.? You may not like reality, but don't put others off it! It's a question of democratic morality: you must not demoralize the masses. You must never demoralize anyone.
Underlying these charitable intentions is a profound contempt. First, in the fact of instating reality as a kind of life insurance or a burial plot held in perpetuity, as a kind of human right or consumer good. But, above all, in crediting people with placing their hope only in the visible proofs of their existence: by imputing this plaster-saint realism to them, one takes them for naive and feeble-minded. In their defence, it has to be said that the propagandists of reality vent that contempt on themselves first of all, reducing their own lives to an accumulation of facts and evidence, causes and effects. Well-ordered resentment always begins at home.”
Source: The Perfect Crime
“But surely the commute that defines the era was Noah's voyage aboard his eponymous ark, and to this day it remains the most epic commuting story ever told. As most people know, God felt that Earth had essentially "jumped the shark" (or "raped the angel" as they used to say back then), so rather than try to fix it, He instead decided to simply wash everyone away in a great flood and start over from scratch--just as you might do to your computer's hard drive if it has a really bad virus. So God spoke to Noah and commanded him to build an ark, aboard which he'd carry two of every animal in the world....Thus was born humankind's lust for gigantic vehicles, for God's instructions to Noah were basically the world's first car commercial, and the sales pitch was this: Large vehicles are your salvation.”
“But surely the will to create was a form of the will to live...?”
Source: Akutagawa Ryunosuke Short Story Selection vol.1 [mikan +1]
“But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
Source: White Teeth
“But surely Uncle Akbar could not be dead as they were dead? There must be something indestructible — something that remained of men who had walked and talked with one and told one stories, men whom one had loved and looked up to. But where had it gone? It was all very puzzling, and he did not understand.”
Source: The Far Pavilions
“But surely we are not allowed..." "Allowed?" I counters. "We're allowed to do anything in this world until someone says we ain't allowed and that someone can back it up.”
Source: Bloody Jack Series: The First Three Books
“But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.'”
“But surprises were nothing new to her. Like opening a can of mushroom soup and finding tomato instead; be grateful and eat it anyway.”
Source: Garden Spells
“But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.”
“But surrender also means your back's to the wall and saying, "Okay, I give up." But rather it's a joyful self-offering. When you come to the point of realizing that "I never get it right. I always make a mess of things; I can't do anything right. Let him do it." And then you ask his power to do it through you and you find suddenly that it works that way.”
“But survival means more than simply being alive.”
Source: Shantaram
“But Susan's thoughts were far removed from the political implications of Digital Fortress. She was still struggling to comprehend its existence. She'd spent her life breaking codes, firmly denying the existence of the ultimate code. Every code is breakable - the Bergofsky Principle! She felt like an atheist coming face to face with God.”
Source: Digital Fortress
“But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.
("Introduction")”
Source: Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
“But swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fracture it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward.-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to his wife Zelda.”
“But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth.”
Source: Medieval Lays and Legends of Marie de France
“But take a moment to consider the miracle... Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It's not obvious that we should be able to detect any of those things, let alone convert them into
electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle of a sunrise, or the sound of a voice, or the scent of baking bread. The senses trans-
form the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences-things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany.”
Source: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“But take comfort in that I die at peace with the world and myself - not afraid.”
Source: Journals: Captain Scott's Last Expedition
“But take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, which Moses the servant of the LORD charged you, to love the LORD your God, and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
“But take the Russia issue. You open up the convention, and you have got a report that the Democratic Party has been hacked by the Russians, e-mails, the e-mails of the Democratic Party, which is a headline and words that you don't want, if you're Hillary Clinton's campaign.And Donald Trump immediately takes the story and basically steps on the advantage he has and say, well, the Russians, who am I to tell [Vladimir] Putin? You know, the Russians ought to come in and continue to hack our - and find out where the e-mails are.”
“But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountain than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes into the sand I made contact with that larger world - an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak - there were no other people around and there still are none - but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel - is it a paradox? - that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.”
Source: Desert Solitaire
“But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.”
“But tales like this must not be taken as truth. You must remind yourself that it is hard to tell where truth ends and a lie begins. So listen all you like, but disbelieve all you hear... You are in the city of lies.”
Source: Eating Fire and Drinking Water
“But Tammy Faye calls me, and Ron Jeremy calls me, Erik Estrada sends me a Christmas card every year.”
“But teaching is like climbing a mountain.”
“But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.”
Source: Selected poems
“But tears don't bring back the dead. I learned that.”
Source: Rebel Heart
“But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble’s soul; his heart was waterproof. Like washable beaver hats that improve with rain, his nerves were rendered stouter and more vigorous, by showers of tears, which, being tokens of weakness, and so far tacit admissions of his own power, pleased and exalted him.”
Source: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist