B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But the fact is that when wine is taken in moderation, it gives rise to a large amount of breath, whose character is balanced, and whose luminosity is strong and brilliant. Hence wine disposes greatly to gladness, and the person is subject to quite trivial exciting agents. The breath now takes up the impression of agents belonging to the present time more easily than it does those which relate to the future; it responds to agents conducive to delight rather than those conducive to a sense of beauty.”
Source: The Canon of Medicine of Avicenna
“But the fact is, I'm not work-identified. I'm not a lawyer or a writer. I'm a mom, and I'm a woman, and that's the kind of people I want to see in books in the starring role.”
“But the fact is, it's illegal for the Administration to spend North west taxpayers' money to develop this rate hike proposal, just so it can turn around and raise their energy rates.”
“But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.”
“But the fact is, Mr. Chairman, for all the challenges the Postal Service of the 21st century faces, it still retains its traditional place as a key cog in how American businesses conduct their affairs and how Americans all across this land communicate.”
“But the fact is, no matter how good the teacher, how small the class, how focused on quality education the school may be none of this matters if we ignore the individual needs of our students.”
“But the fact is, nobody gets off drugs unless they really want to, and I really wanted to.”
“But the fact is, things always seem to come slowly when you are longing for them.”
Source: The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus
“But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.”
Source: Slouching towards Bethlehem
“But the fact that a man who dealt with the absolute worst of humanity every single day could still find a moment to be charitable gave me a glimmer of hope.”
Source: Where the Monsters Live
“But the fact that Christ as the bridegroom brings forth fruit through me as the bride, through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit by faith, opens the way for me as a Christian to begin to know in the present life the reality of the supernatural. This is where the Christian is to live. Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself. There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment.”
Source: True Spirituality
“But the fact that I had learnt to be tolerant to other religions did not mean that I had any living faith in God.”
Source: Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
“But the fact that most of the show you can't be prepared for, you have no idea really what's coming is initially very nerve wracking, by now, it's kind of fun.”
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
“But the fact that the word "chattel" has survived as the inclusive legal term for all movable goods, points, not merely to the great importance of cattle in primitive times, but to the importance of the notion of sale or barter in generating the institution of property.”
Source: A Short History of English Law: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Year 1919
“But the fact was, Sherrie Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn't flinch. His face was him to her now. It was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he needed to alter.”
Source: The Color Master: Stories
“But the fact was, when you lived a life, under any name, that life became entwined with others'. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you, and you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that.
Because the people you loved were part of your identity, too. Perhaps the biggest part.”
Source: Black Cake
“But the fantasy kingdom and trappings of success soon lost their luster, as I discovered that the most prestigious and remunerative of my resume's way stations was also the most tedious and unfulfilling I had ever experienced. This paradox only made me more morose about modernity. Why was I going to watch my hairline recede in front of two-thousand-line spreadsheets staring at me from cold, glowing monitors? Why was everyone in my office apparently so happy to be spending so many hours there, when the things they really cared about - people, pets, pastimes - were all relegated to a few photographs on their desks? That seemed to be the formula: spend the best years of your life in an office with photos of what you really care about.”
Source: The Doorman
“But the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Jefferson Jeffersonis that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just an orange juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became rich and powerful, he went to court, made "Jefferson" his middle name, and then changed his first name to "Dr." Capital D. Lowercase r. Period.”
Source: Paper Towns
“But the Fear (that sensation that all writers get of how the hell do words get from my puny little brain to into a book, and isn't magic somehow involved, and surely I'm not qualified to be involved in any part of that process, and I somehow managed that tomorrow, but you mean I have to do it this morning too, well how do I even start?) withdraws quite a bit when it's already light and lovely outside when I get to my desk. So I got right past that big moment today, and into the fun slide down towards the ending, yelling whee.”
“But the federal government, our collective government, has responsibilities that none of these other levels of government can fulfill; and chief among these is national defense.”
“But the feeling I have, you know, is that I'll never come close to reading all, or even a thousandth- a billionth- of the books I'd probably love if I ever got to them.”
“But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.”
“But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love.”
“But the few brave ones, both companies and individuals, who risk comfort and safety for a chance at beauty or being able to move someone — they have a potential to gain so much more.”
“But the finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.”
“But the first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim.' River could tell she recognised the title, so didn't elaborate. 'After that, well, Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham.'
'Ashenden.'
'You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday, he bought me le Carré's collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.'
They're made up. But that doesn't mean they're not true.”
Source: Slow Horses
“but the first days of loving someone are vivid; you remember them in detail because they represent all the others. They even explain why a particular love doesn’t work out.”
Source: The Swan Thieves
“But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of.”
Source: The Origins of Self-Consciousness in The Secret Doctrine
“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
Source: How to Be Alone: Essays
“But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.”
Source: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
“But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.”
Source: A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat
“But the first thing that we have to do is to say, “I walk towards the tunnel, and I’m on my own, and I’m not afraid. And I have no regrets.”
“But the first time I had to stand up and sing with them was when we did the pre-record for the movie and it was that moment where I sort of said to myself: "S**t, now I actually have to do this and I have to stand up and do my stars in your eyes moment!" Wake Up and Make Love With Me was the first song and I thought: "Here we are with Chaz and all the boys..."”
“But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their graves, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades.”
Source: The Red Parts
“But the floor retained an unparalleled measure of excellence with a decorative array of ceramic tiles precisely laid by an anonymous Muslim artisan with limitless patience, pride, or skill. He left behind an ornate work of art in a short, squat, non-descript building near the most dangerous piece of real estate on the planet. Silva often wondered how an architect so careless came to work with a craftsman so precise. Looking at that floor, she often thought that if everyone applied just a fraction of his dedication to their own work, it might cancel out the hatred driving the destruction.”
Source: Magenta
“But the flower can be no other. And in its natural state, it is fragile. It is vulnerable within a dangerous environment. However, despite its fragility and vulnerability, it continues to flourish throughout nature. Its seeds move in ways that can't be controlled and it grows fields of flowers.”
Source: Awakening: Spiritual Poems for Humanity
“But the forces of evil have not abdicated. The malevolent ghosts of hatred are resurgent with a fury and a boldness that are as astounding as they are nauseating: ethnic conflicts, religious riots, anti-Semitic incidents here, there, and everywhere. What is wrong with these morally degenerate people that they abuse their freedom, so recently won?”
Source: The Judges: A Novel
“But the forecasters and media types were clever - they never used vague words like "maybe." No, they stuck with convenient terms for which no one could be held accountable, like "probability of precipitation.”
Source: Killing Commendatore
“But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.”
Source: Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist
“But the freedom that they fought for, and the country grand they wrought for, Is their monument to-day, and for aye.”
Source: The Boy's Book of Battle-lyrics: A Collection of Verses Illustrating Some Notable Events in the History of the United States of America, from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Sectional War
“But the frightening aspect is that it's part of a larger effort from the Pentagon to tear down the wall between public affairs and propaganda, and essentially say there is no difference between information operations, public affairs and psychological operations. It's all one and the same. They have a new name for that too, it's called Information Engagement.”
“But the fruit that can fall without shaking Indeed is too mellow for me.”
“But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat.”
Source: Girl in Pieces
“But the fundamentalists, the "creationists," seize upon these vacancies in the scientific hotel to pack the conferences with their delegates. They see the opening-creativity is an absolute-and they equate that absolute with their mythic god, and they stuff this god with all the characteristics that promote their own egoic inclinations, starting with the fact that if you don't believe in this particular god, you fry in hell forever, which is not exactly a generous view of Spirit.”
Source: A Brief History of Everything
“But the funny thing is, I broke my finger not on set doing kung fu. I broke my finger when I fell down the stairs prior to going on set.”
“But the funny trick that Americans do is that they manage to convince themselves that political violence in the United States that any one of us in the counterterrorism world would call terrorism anywhere else is just violence in the United States.”
“But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.”
Source: Selected writings: poetry and criticism
“But the further you are away from it, the more war reads like arithmetic, and past that it reads like fiction, past that it’s just an annoying video on your info stream. How could they possibly imagine the anguish on the faces of the dead? How could the mob in the street demanding handouts ever know on a sensory level that when a human rots, it isn’t just the skin that stinks, but the intestines, the stomach, the liver?”
Source: Dark Age
“But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be.”
Source: The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (20+ Books)