B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’
‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’
‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.
‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’
‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
Source: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
“But this is that which will dignify and exalt knowledge: if contemplation and action be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been: a conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action.”
Source: Bacon's Advancement of Learning and the New Atlantis
“But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.”
“But this is the kind of ass-clownery that stems from the fact that all philosophy looks weird when you don't have one.”
“But this is the only life I've ever known and I feel blessed to have it. I'm proud of it. I can understand that for a man like you this feels too out there, but you're running for governor and you should be everyone's governor, and being judgmental doesn't support that.”
Source: Incense and Sensibility
“But this is the point I want to make: When you talk about steroids and
you talk about what it means to the game, the three greatest home run
hitters of all time-Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, right? When
they were 39 years old, how many home runs do you think they averaged?
The three greatest home run hitters of all time averaged 18 home runs
at age 39. Now, how many home runs did Barry Bonds hit when he was 39?
He hit 73!”
“But this is the power of storytelling, isn’t it? To make sense of the things we can’t figure out ourselves. We make up gods and monsters and origin stories and archetypes and tell each other it’s all explainable so we don’t have to feel the weight of the unknown. That’s the theory anyway. The practice is that we’re all so much better at seeing the faults of others, at watching them make their mistakes and judging from afar, our social telescopes so much more powerful than the microscopes we forget to use on ourselves.”
Source: Fully Functioning: a postpartum descent into obsessive fangirling
“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?” “For him?” shouted Snape. “Expecto Patronum!” From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe. She landed on the office floor, bounded once across the office, and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. “After all this time?” “Always,” said Snape.”
“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”
“But this is what leads the heretics astray: that they look upon nature and person as the same thing”
“But this is where you get all the market research and things get in danger of becoming formulaic, and where you depend on brands and getting recognised actors. It's the thing that precludes risk very often, otherwise everyone would be avant-garde all over the place.”
“But this is who I am. It’s a blessing, not a curse.”
Source: Wicked Saints
“But this is your home'
'Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!”
Source: Eliza's Daughter
“But this is your life, and it will stretch out before you, and you are the only person who can make it whatever you want it to be.”
Source: Autoboyography
“But this isn't about the moon and sun; it's about you and me.”
Source: Sukoon
“But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography.
From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate.
We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more.
Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.”
Source: Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture
“But this isn’t their God, she decided. It’s my God. This is a God I have found through sacrificing my own life, through my flesh being cut, my skin ripped off, my blood sucked away, my nails torn, all my time and hopes and memories being stolen from me. This is not a God with a form. No white clothes, no long beard. This God has no doctrine, no scripture, no precepts. No reward, no punishment. This God doesn’t give, and doesn’t take away. There is no heaven up in the sky, no hell down below. When it’s hot, and when it’s cold, God is simply there.”
Source: 1Q84
“But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is. -Connor”
“But this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: This is like music or dancing but better than both.”
Source: Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem
“But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.”
“But this man passing by me now was nothing like my Daddy.”
Source: Scarlet Yearnings: Stories of Love and Desire
“But this mind isn't somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can't move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It's the mind that moves.”
Source: The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
“But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.”
“But this new fear was like termites in her skull, much more constant and present and squirming through all of her thoughts.”
Source: The Hive Queen
“But this night our feet must tread in thorny paths, or later, and for ever, the feet you love must walk in paths of flame!”
Source: Dracula
“But this old theory - didn’t Plato think that something survived the decline, something inner not able to decay? The ancient dualism: body separated from soul. The body ending as Wendy did, and the soul - out of its nest the bird, flown elsewhere. Maybe so, he thought. To be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says. It really is true. Christ, I hope so. Because in that case we all can meet again. In, as in Winnie-the-Pooh, another part of the forest, where a boy and his bear will always be playing... a category, he thought, imperishable. Like all of us. We will all wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.”
Source: Ubik
“But this part of me...' Mor wiped at her tears with her free hand. 'It didn't matter as much, when my family disowned me. When they called me a whore and a piece of trash. When they hurt me. Because those things... they weren't part of me. Weren't true, and weren't... intrinsic. They couldn't break me because... because they never touched that innermost part of me. They never even guessed. But I hid it... I've hidden it because...' She tilted back her head, looking skyward. 'Because I live in terror of my family finding out- and shaming me, hurting me about this one thing that has remained wholly mine. This one part of me. I won't let them... won't let them destroy it. Or try to.”
Source: A Court of Wings and Ruin
“But this passion for letters is senseless. Isn't one letter enough, isn't one knowing enough? Of course it is, but nevertheless I am tilting my head way back, drinking the letters, aware only that I don't want to stop drinking.”
Source: Letters to Milena
“but this payment goes well beyond my generosity."
"don't say that again. Life might be listening and give you less the next time.”
Source: The Alchemist
“But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.”
Source: The portable Nietzsche: selected and translated, with an introd., pref. and notes
“But this plan of yous!' Tawaret shuddered, causing a tsunami of jiggling hippo flesh.”
“But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.”
Source: The Interestings
“But this question of love... this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had that not, after all, been love?”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“But this result [that light would travel faster towards a moving observer] comes into conflict with the principle of relativity [the laws of physics are the same for all observers]", Einstein added. "For, like every other general law of nature, the law of the transmission of light must, according to the principle of relativity, be the same when the railway carriage is the reference body as it is when the enbamkment is the refernece body". [...]
There should be no experiment you can do, including measuring the speed of light, to distinguish which inertial frame of refence is "at rest" and which is moving at a constant velocity.”
Source: Einstein: His Life and Universe
“But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.”
Source: Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame
“But this road doesn't go anywhere,” I told him. “That doesn't matter.” “What does?” I asked, after a little while. “Just that we're on it, dude,” he said.”
“But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
Source: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
“But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.”
Source: Our Modern Idol, Mathematical Science
“But this Scroll too has magical properties. From the moment I first saw it, the paper warmed to my touch. I know it came alive as I held it. Did you know there’s a serpent on the back? Some say it’s a dragon. It winked at me. Its lashes are gold.”
Source: The Alchemy Fire Murder
“But this thing can go wrong in so many ways for so many reasons I can’t count them all.”
Source: Betrayal In Blue
“But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.
Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”
Source: East of Eden
“but this… this is something more, it’s some sort of holy thing, a sacred thing …this love.”
“But this... this was something else, and it burned so deeply that Ely felt it too, the hurt welling up, dark
and heavy and suffocating.
It felt like his grief from the dragon tunnel, but it was
ancient, like the Old Hall, a darkness forged under years of pressure until it had hardened into something sharp, rock- hard, weighted with a feeling of sad, lonely eternity. Stars, it was crushing. He felt it pressing against his heart and it was a vice, a crippling despair that he had to break.”
Source: A Vision in Smoke
“But this time I cross the street without a hand holding me back”
Source: They Both Die at the End
“But this time I felt a sense of immediate clarity: in that instant, I just knew, even as the words escaped my lips, that this was the essential path for me. What made me so sure I was on the right path was how the clarity disappeared when I even thought of applying elsewhere. Several times I started the application process for other programs but always stopped after a few minutes. It just didn’t feel right. So I concentrated my efforts only on that single application. As I waited to hear back from the university, many other opportunities, some quite tempting, presented themselves. I said no to all of them. But despite the uncertainty of not yet knowing whether I had been accepted, I didn’t feel anxious or nervous. Instead, I felt calm, focused, and in control.”
Source: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
“But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.”
Source: Delphi Collected Works of E. M. Forster (Illustrated)
“But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.”
Source: The Argonauts
“But this too is for us the voice of Christ, for we have been taught that He who was without sin became sin for our sakes, plumbed the depth of that worst suffering which comes to evil men who at last know their own evil.”
Source: Reflections on the Psalms