O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one’s body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty.”
Source: The Petting Zoo: A Novel
“On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,
And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
“On a windswept hill by a billowing sea, my destiny sits and waits for me.”
“On a winter night I hear the Easter bell:
I knock on graves and quicken the dead,
Until at last in a grave I see — myself.
(Winter Sonnets: XI)”
Source: Silver Age of Russian Culture
“On a winter’s day when a person’s spirits may be low and to behold thirty to one-hundred Evening Grosbeaks busily gorging themselves on bird seed and perched in a stand of pines with all of them creating a cacophony of sparrow like chirps, this is real therapy for me. It is an act of contagious optimism. It is at such times I realize that a bird can do more for me than a shrink.”
Source: TEACHERS IN THE FOREST: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
“On a withered branch
A crow has alighted:
Nightfall in autumn.”
“On a writer’s path there are always some level of pain and solitude, life and death, love and hate, longing and fullness of soul, romance and separation, contemplation and adventure. And each one of them is constantly walking side by side in my lifetime. Always reachable by a thought.”
“On abortion: We are talking about ambiguous issues of a complicated kind where you have to balance conflicting interests and concerns.”
“On accepting adversity in our lives: Always it is initiated by an act of will on our part; we set ourselves to believe in the overruling goodness, providence, and sovereignty of God and refuse to turn aside no matter what may come, no matter how we may feel. I mistakenly thought I could not trust God unless I felt like trusting Him. Now I am learning that trusting God is first of all a matter of the will. I choose to trust in God, and my feelings eventually follow.”
“On accident, I stuff a pill bug into his mouth.
To this day, he refuses to eat food with raisins.”
Source: DELETE2
“On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.”
Source: Will Rogers Speaks: Over 1,000 Timeless Quotations for Public Speakers (writers, Politicians, Comedians, Browsers ...)
“On account of their puny size and disappointing taste, in France wild pears are known as "poires d'angoisse" or pears of anguish. In Versailles, though, in the kitchen garden, pears are bred for pleasure. Of the five hundred pear trees, the best usually fruit in January--- the royal favorite, a type called "Bon Chrétien d'Hiver," or "Good Christian of Winter." Each pear is very large--- the blossom end engorged, the eye deeply sunk--- whilst the skin is a finely grained pale yellow, with a red blush on the side that has been touched by the sunlight. It is known for its brittle, lightly scented, almost translucent flesh that drips with a sugary juice; that soaks your mouth when your teeth sink into it. The gardener here, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, says that when a pear is ripe its neck yields to the touch and smells slightly of wet roses.
This winter they have not ripened, though, but have frozen to solid gold. Murders of crows sit on the branches of the pear trees, pecking at the rime of them. They have become fairy fruit; those dangling impossibilities. What would you give to taste one?
Spring always comes, though. Is it not magic? The world's deep magic.
March brings the vast respite of thaw, that huge unburdening, that gentling--- all winter's knives and jaws turning soft and blunt; little chunks of ice riding off on their own giddy melt; everything dripping and plipping and making little streams and rivulets; tender pellucid fingers feeling their way towards the sea; all the tiny busywork.
And with the returning sun, too, sex. Tulips, first found as wild flowers in Central Asia--- named for the Persian word "tulipan," for turban--- thrust and bow in the warm soil of Versailles, their variegated "broken" petals licked with carmine flames. The early worm-catchers begin their chorus, skylarks and song thrushes courting at dawn. Catkins dangle like soft, tiny pairs of elven stockings. Fairy-sized wigs appear on the pussy willows. Hawthorn and sloe put on their powder and patches, to catch a bee's eye.”
Source: The Modern Fairies
“On Achtung Baby U2 took conventional tracks and radicalized them; on this material U2 is taking radical tracks and covering them with a veneer of convention.”
Source: U2 at the End of the World
“On acoustic guitar I tend to stay in the key of D for some reason. On electric guitar I keep basic: C, G, D, and A. The key of D minor is also real good for me.”
“On acting to daughter Isabella Rossellini: Keep it simple. Make a blank face and the music and the story will fill it in.”
“On ACTION: "Stop talking;start DO-ing.”
“On activism and influencing people:
"You approach such people by first accepting they don’t want the world you want. Their vision is different.”
“On adultery: "Why fool around with hamburger when you have steak at home?”
“On Adventure - Adventure is just another word for trouble.”
“On Adventure – “Adventure” is the word we give life-threatening, perilous situations when we’re sitting by the fire afterwards recounting them to our friends, family and skeptical strangers.”
“On Adventure - Adventure stories usually start by someone breaking the rules.”
“On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can't be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.”
“On Ain't No Telling I came up with the bass solo.”
“On Alex Rodriguez's difficulty performing in clutch situations, Joe Torre writes, "In key situations, he can't get himself to concern himself with getting the job done instead of how it looks. There's a certain freefall you go through when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it's always going to be good. There's a trust and commitment thing that has to allow yourself fail, allow yourself to be embarrassed, allow yourself to be vulnerable”
Source: The Yankee Years
“On Algebra - "We're a month into it, and I'm planning to start a real protest movement, one to have X and Y removed from the alphabet. Z is also suspect as far as I'm concerned...Damn it! They put a man on the moon; can't they find some way to end the scourge of Algebra?”
Source: My Life as a Myth
“On all basic points our policies have proved correct from the very beginning.”
“On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”
“On all levels primary, and secondary and undergraduate - mathematics is taught as an isolated subject with few, if any, ties to the real world. To students, mathematics appears to deal almost entirely with things whlch are of no concern at all to man.”
“On all levels, evolution occurs in response to a crisis situation, not infrequently a life-threatening one, when the old structures, inner or outer, are breaking down or are not working anymore. On a personal level, this often means the experience of loss of one kind or another: the death of a loved one, the end of a close relationship, loss of possessions, your home, status, or a breakdown of the external structures of your life that provided a sense of security.”
“On all occasions there are better solutions waiting us to be found if we do subtle analysis with sharp- witted minds.”
“On all of us was forced life; and, on almost all of us, the desire to remain alive.”
“On all sides of us, spread out below, are little white lights and black pockets of trees. Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I hate to admit it, but it’s beautiful.”
Source: All the Bright Places
“On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.”
Source: The Discovery of the Orgone
“On all the peaks lies peace.”
“On all the walls, wherever walls exist, I will inscribe this eternal indictment of Christianity--I have letters to make even blindmen see.... I call Christianity the single great curse, the single great innermost depravity, the single great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, secretive, subterranean, small enough--I call it mankind's single immortal blemish.... And we reckon time from the dies nefastus with which this calamity arose--following Christianity's first day!--Why not following its last day, instead?--Following today?--Transvaluation of all values!”
“On all these grounds it is excellent that after the Heart of Jesus there is nothing among corporeal things either in Heaven or on earth that can be compared in excellence with the Heart of Mary - nothing holier, nothing more precious, nothing nobler, nothing greater, nothing sweeter, nothing more pleasing to God.
And if we now go on to consider this admirable Heart in relation to men, to whom it is presented as an object of devotion, where shall we find anything sweeter or more tenderly than this virginal Heart? For it is the Heart of our heavenly mistress, our good Mother, our advocate, our consolation, our refuge; the source and seat of the charity, compassion, mercy and tender love of the Blessed Virgin for us; the centre of those unmeasured sorrows that our Blessed Mother suffered on the occasion of our redemption; finally, the model according to which we should form our hearts, the model of humility, purity, meekness, charity, love, and all other virtues.”
Source: The Adorable Heart of Jesus
“On all things created remaineth the half-effaced signature of God, Somewhat of fair and good, though blotted by the finger of corruption.”
“On all vital measures, measures necessary to protect you, the Democrats in Washington follow a simple philosophy: Just say no.”
“On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.”
“On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.”
“On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.”
Source: The Wild Places
“On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.”
“On ambition, goal setting and competition - it doesn't matter if you lose, but you can't win if you don't play the game.”
“On an airplane, you are always told to put on your own oxygen mask first. The same way in life, you need to take care of your health first. If you are not happy and healthy, you cannot make anyone else happy and healthy.”
“On an altar of prejudice we crucify our own, yet the blood of all children is the color of God.”
“On an animated movie, I'm learning as I go. There are so many details in animation. Doing the voices was the easy-part. Doing live-action, you have to be on the set, every day.”
“On an appropriated quilt on the lawn gazing into the infinite, I wanted to say something profound but could not shape any observation that didn’t ring trite. These moments are given to silence or jokes to fend off the minuteness one feels if one understands the slightest thing about astronomical distances.”
Source: Holidays with Bigfoot
“On an average day 7 minutes of news happens. Yet there are currently three full-time, 24-hour news networks.”
“On an average day, I have two things to read in my purse: a book and a play.”
“On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.”
Source: The Best of Mary Schmich: Selected Writings by the Chicago Tribune's Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary