B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But Violet Antrim, who had also been staying with the Peacocks, had arrived home full of importance. She walked in on Stephen one afternoon to announce her engagement to young Alec Peacock. She was so much engaged and so haughty about it that Stephen, whose nerves were already on edge, was very soon literally itching to slap her. Violet was now able to look down on Stephen from the height of her newly gained knowledge of men—knowing Alec she felt that she knew the whole species.
'It's a terrible pity you dress as you do, my dear,' she remarked, with the manner of sixty, 'a young girl's so much more attractive when she's soft—don't you think you could soften your clothes just a little? I mean you do want to get married, don't you! No woman's complete until she is married. After all, no woman can really stand alone, she always needs a man to protect her.'
Stephen said: 'I'm all right—getting on nicely, thank you!'
'Oh, no, but you can't be!' Violet insisted. 'I was talking to Alec and Roger about you, and Roger was saying it's an awful mistake for women to get false ideas into their heads. He thinks you've got rather a bee in your bonnet; he told Alec that you'd be quite a womanly woman if you'd only stop trying to ape what you're not.”
Source: The Well Of Loneliness
“But virtue never will be mov'd,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven.”
Source: The plays and poems of William Shakspeare
“But virtue too, as well as vice, is clad in flesh and blood.”
Source: The poetical works of Edmund Waller and sir John Denham, with mem. and critical dissertation by G. Gilfillan
“But Voltaire, even at his best, really began that modern mood that has blighted all the humanitarianism he honestly supported. He started the horrible habit of helping human beings only through pitying them, and never through respecting them. Through him the oppression of the poor became a sort of cruelty to animals, and the loss of all that mystical sense that to wrong the image of God is to insult the ambassador of a King.”
Source: As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader
“But wait,“ he said in the robotic voice of a bad infomercial host, “You ignored someone in a school that small!”
“But wait - where did the gods come from 100,000 years ago? Early Homo Sapiens certainly had conversations with other early Homo Sapiens regarding what they thought of one another, and what they thought about a third early Homo Sapiens who had insulted them, and why they were no longer on speaking terms with the other person, ad finitum, just as happens today. But you cannot have such conversations about the gods or with the gods unless you have gods.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. You didn't think you would!”
“But waiting for 'eventually' to prove the alarmists wrong is not the wisest course of action. Unfullfillable ambitions to stifle growth will devastate a world trying to deal with the complexities of economics, stability, and the environment. Quality of life depends on access to energy. Noble intentions about 'C02-free' sources of energy are not sufficient, if their agenda of eliminating coal as a source, and turning their back on nuclear, are allowed to be part of our near-term policies.”
“But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.”
Source: A Philosophy of Walking
“But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.”
Source: The Secret History
“But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.”
“But Walt and him shared the same kind of optimism. Walt believed in himself, and he was optimistic about what he wanted to do. He just knew it will be okay, and Dali was the same way. They had a great deal in common that way.”
“But wanderlust is like a pretty girl - you wake up one morning, find she's grown old and decide that either you're going to commit your life or you're going to walk away.”
Source: Detroit: An American Autopsy
“But war had a taming effect”
Source: When the Moon is Low
“But war was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey, of endless drifting. War was a world without real men, without real women, without feeling.”
Source: The Sorrow of War
“But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at. Nations would do well To extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.”
“But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of it?”
Source: ANNE OF GREEN GABLES - Complete Collection: ALL 14 Books in One Volume (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Rainbow Valley, The Story Girl, Chronicles of Avonlea and more): Including Letters and Autobiography of Lucy Maud Montgomery
“But...was he flirting?
Hmm.
Not sure what I thought of that. A nice office flirt did make the day go faster, but Adam was my boss, not to mention an annoying one, and I was nothing if not professional.
Snort. Yeah. That made me laugh too.”
Source: Armed and Fabulous
“But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?”
“But was it snobbery to feel that someone's world was too different from yours to ever meld, despite what he had felt back among the light and chatter? Was it prejudiced to acknowledge that skin colour did make a difference, simply because it did matter to so many?”
Source: To Love a Sunburnt Country
“But was it wrong to put yourself first? That’s called survival, right? If you’re running for your life, you don’t get the luxury of being nice. They were going to learn that. It’s fine to wave the pompoms for teamwork—all for one and one for all—but when push came to shove, these guys wouldn’t be risking their lives for Chloe, maybe not even for each other. I was sure of it. Once things got worse, it would be every kid for himself. It always is.”
“but was she making a true difference? Or just striving to check an invisible I'm a Good Person box somewhere in her mind?”
Source: Adelaide
“But was that freedom worth it? Are we really supposed to be free? Why do people who are all entangled so happy? Why do people constantly crib about their jobs, yet sleep peacefully in the night? Is it exhaustion that they seek? As it prevents them from thinking nonsense? Why do we all want to fasten ourselves to something? Why these entrapments don’t feel suffocating?”
Source: The World's Most Frustrated Man
“But was the woman's death the tragedy, or her life?”
Source: Stars Above
“But was there any harm in wishing that, among the many thousands whose souls would certainly be required of them before the year was over, this wretched mortal might be one? I thought not; and therefore I wished with all my heart that it might please Heaven to remove him to a better world, or if that might not be, still, to take him out of this...”
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
“But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?”
“But wasn't that always the way. It's never something huge that changes everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you're busy focusing on the big picture.”
Source: Lock and Key
“But wasn't that progress too, that the elephants were killed off like the mastodon and giant rhino before them, like all other wildlife and wild places? 'We can't stop time,' MacAdam said. 'But you can change the way it goes,' Nehemiah insisted.”
Source: The Last Savanna
“But wasn't there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn't seem fair.”
Source: Out of The Easy
“But we agree with the NTSB that if we eliminated the thrust- reverser calculation, it would be an extra margin of safety. Airport capacity and airline efficiency are important, but safety is the most important thing.”
“But we all had an agreement to let each other get away with everything! That's Capitalism!”
“But we all make mistakes. It’s how we fix them that makes us who we are.”
“But we all must be true to our own nature. Acting as anyone other than yourself merely brings you pain and makes you appear ashamed of who and what you are. Others will feed off that shame, and soon it will be all that you are.”
Source: The Darkest Kiss
“But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.”
“But we all suffer. For we all prize and love; and in this present existence of ours, prizing and loving yield suffering. Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving. This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.”
Source: Lament for a Son
“But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”
“But we also think that we've got more quite alot more support than any new format has ever had.”
“But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.”
Source: Nobody Is Ever Missing
“But we are all finally tricked and slapped to death.”
“But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.”
Source: The Fall of Rome
“But we are all insane, anyway ... The suicides seem to be the only sane people.”
“But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“But we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.”
Source: Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution
“But we are almost certainly going to miss our [global warming] deadline. We cannot get the 10 lost years back, and by the time a new global agreement to replace the Kyoto accord is negotiated and put into effect, there will probably not be enough time left to stop the warming short of the point where we must not go.”
“But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.”
Source: Other Voices, Other Rooms
“But we are always running out of time. There is never enough time. That is the sad predicament of life: To never have enough time. To start dying the second you are born…”
Source: 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)
“But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.”
“But we are born to be happy, to be abundantly supplied with every good thing, to have fun in living, to consciously unite with the Divine Power that is around us and within us, and to grow and expand forever.”
“But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.”
“But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up.”
Source: Fear and Trembling