B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.”
Source: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
“But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine's suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.”
Source: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography
“But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.”
Source: Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice
“But there is no sole person for another's heart. Souls cannot be broken and then completed by another. That's not healthy, nor wise. There are infinite possibilities as there are infinite people and some matches are better than others...Just don't say that you'll die without the other one or that you'll never love again or that you're not whole-That's the stuff of Romeo and Juliet, hasty nonsense, and you know how well that turned out...Just don't be desperate about it. That's where souls go wrong, when they think they don't have choices. The heart must make choices.”
“But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.”
“But there is no such man; for, brother, men
Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion, which before
Would give preceptial medicine to rage,
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
Charm ache with air and agony with words.”
Source: The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition: The Complete Works
“But there is no use blaming time.
For in destiny's path, time too is only a mute spectator.”
Source: I, Me And Salman - 95% Fiction
“But there is no veil like light--no adamantine armor against hurt like the truth.”
“But there is no way I am going to fuck her out of her celebrity death depression. If she came to me because her mother died, maybe, but this is ridiculous.”
Source: Hidden Bodies
“But there is no withdrawal, but with tobacco there is terrible withdrawal, it is almost impossible for a lot of people. I did , I went cold turkey, they never had any patches in those days but grass was not difficult, alcohol not difficult, but tobacco - oh my god.”
“But there is nobleness in the name of Edmund. It is a name of heroism and renown; of kings, princes, and knights; and seems to breathe the spirit of chivalry and warm affections.”
Source: Mansfield Park
“But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.”
“But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.”
“But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.”
Source: The Quotable Feynman
“But there is nothing magic about Darwinian fitness in the genetic sense. There is no law giving it priority as the fundamental quantity that is maximized. Fitness is just a way of talking about the survival of replicators, in this case genetic replicators. If another kind of entity arises, which answers to the definition of an active germ-line replicator, variants of the new replicator that work for their own survival will tend to become more numerous. To be consistent, we could invent a new kind of ‘individual fitness’, which measured the success of an individual in propagating his memes.”
Source: The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
“But there is nothing more beautiful than being desperate.
And there is nothing more risky than pretending not to care.”
“But there is nothing to be done till a horse's head is settled.”
“But there is one cool thing
about having a weirdo mother.
She works so hard at remembering
where she left herself
she doesn’t have time
to work on me.”
Source: Crazy
“But there is one part of this that hurts. The carefree, normal part. The part of me that was lost when we first moved and that I'll never get back.”
Source: The Rules for Disappearing
“But there is one person who expected the unexpected from me and the only time I noticed disappointment on his face was when I cowered like a sheep. And I had to take a moment to figure out I'm not ashamed of him. It's him who should be ashamed of me.
I've put Razor in an unfair position. He introduced me to his world. Welcomed me with open arms. Made me feel like I belonged and I've asked him to keep a secret when doing so is killing him. And I told him that we would be over...I did the exact thing to him that Clara did to me and that's not okay. No part of it is okay.”
Source: Walk the Edge
“But there is one place where a person can make choices that will lead in a small way toward greater sanity in dealing with the natural order. That place is the private garden.”
“But there is one thing most companies struggle to standardize, and ironically, it's the most important part of our efforts to gain and sustain results. It is leadership.”
Source: Results That Last: Hardwiring Behaviors That Will Take Your Company to the Top
“But there is one thing that is infinite: greed. The ability of humans and demons to want. To desire. To hunger after things that don't belong to them.”
Source: Girls of Storm and Shadow
“But there is one thing you must remember, if you forget all else. There is no good or evil, save in the way you see the world. There is no dark or light save in your own vision. All changes in the blink of an eyelid; yet all remains the same.”
Source: Daughter of the Forest: Book One of the Sevenwaters Trilogy
“But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks, no doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain heads, to the mindful wind and the watching stars. It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little ants crawling over their boots. This is the Big Tree, the Sequoia.”
Source: California, the Land of the Sun
“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest JP court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal”
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
“But there is one whom you do not deceive, and that is Christ, our Lord. He knows all. Personally, I have felt that nobody need keep much of a record about me, except what I keep myself in my mind, which is a part of my spirit. I often question in my mind, whether it is going to require very many witnesses in addition to my own wrongdoing.”
“But there is only one person I blame for getting shafted, and that's myself. I went into the deal which I thought would secure the future of Orange Aids with culpable impetuosity. I had been used to doing business on a handshake and my work of honour, and I made the error of actually believing what the men in the pin-striped suits told me.”
“But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.”
Source: Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye
“But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression”
Source: The Second Treatise of Government: And, A Letter Concerning Toleration
“But there is poetry in that rage. Don't fight it. Learn its embrace. Love both parts of yourself. The light and the dark.”
Source: The Rivener
“But there is room now in my heart for more memories, carved by a letting go that I could find only by coming home to a place I'd never been.”
Source: The Beach Trees
“But there is saying, and there is doing, and almost always people do something better than they can talk about it, as though the minded body defeats every attempt to select out only the mind part as deserving sole responsibility for the success.”
Source: An Unknown Woman
“But there is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks.”
“But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.”
“But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.”
“But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.”
Source: Prelude
“But there is something appealing about it here too, a freedom, a refusal to belong to theses arbitrary categories we've made for ourselves.”
Source: Four: A Divergent Story Collection
“But there is something else—there is God, and the love of beautiful things. I spent all day yesterday playing Bach's Passion music, and the hours passed like a dream until my sisters came in from walking and began to talk about marriage and men. It made me feel sick—it was horrible; and it is such things that make me hate life—and I do hate it; it is the way we are brought back to earth, and forced to realise how vile and degraded we are. Society seems to me no better than a pigsty; but in the beautiful convent—that we shall, alas! never see again—it was not so. There, at least, life was pure—yes, and beautiful. Do you not remember that beautiful white church with all its white pillars and statues, and the dark-robed nuns, and the white-veiled girls, their veils falling from their bent heads? They often seemed to me like angels. I am sure that Heaven must be very much like that—pure, desireless, contemplative.”
Source: A Drama In Muslin
“But there is something seductive and the character, Alfie is so charming, and does make you think like you are the most important thing in the world but he's not that nice, is he.”
“But there is something to the fact that we don't see games on the West Coast, or we don't see games on the East Coast, and stuff like that. It's so unfair, because there is a bias that takes place.”
“But there is something very strange and terrible in being awake when all the rest of the world is asleep. You are alone then with nothing but your own feeble personality to pit against the mighty principalities and powers of darkness.”
Source: Rainbow Valley
“But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.”
“But there is that about well-intentioned advice that has the opposite effect of the one intended, and causes a Spanish fly of perversity to enter into the hitherto passive soul.”
“But there is that certain something about wanting to do the will of God. If one is sincere and if one really wants to know what His will is, all one has to do is be quiet. Shut off the television and radio, and in that silence one will always hear that still small voice in one's heart telling him what to do.”
“But there is there to carry us past it”
Source: Rome: Poems
“But there is value in telling a story from the perspective of the mundane, from the real perspective that many of us are in for most of our lives.”
Source: Spiritual Entrepreneurship: Raw Reflections of a Female CEO
“But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference.”
“But there is yet time to change our ways. Give up all those old discussions, old fights about things which are meaningless, which are nonsensical in their very nature. Think of the last six hundred or seven hundred years of degradation when grown-up men by hundreds have been discussing for years whether we should drink a glass of water with the right hand or the left, whether the hand should be washed three times or four times, whether we should gargle five or six times. What can you expect from men who pass their lives in discussing such momentous questions as these and writing most learned philosophies on them! There is a danger of our religion getting into the kitchen. We are neither Vedantists, most of us now, nor Pauranics, nor Tantrics. We are just "Don't-touchists". Our religion is in the kitchen. Our God is the cooking-pot, and our religion is, "Don't touch me, I am holy". If this goes on for another century, every one of us will be in a lunatic asylum. It is a sure sign of softening of the brain when the mind cannot grasp the higher problems of life; all originality is lost, the mind has lost all its strength, its activity, and its power of thought, and just tries to go round and round the smallest curve it can find.”
Source: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 3
“But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.”