O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“On the supply side, for innovation, you'd say, go look at those R&D budgets, and they haven't moved in the last 20 years. In the case of the US - which is the majority of R&D funding across every category you can name: health, energy, whatever - it's been about $5 billion a year from the Department of Energy.”
“On the surface, all may seem calm, but things move forward exactly as they should, in tandem with an unseen natural rhythm.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go-getter. But my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fear-scape. I was neither mature nor emotionally secure, and I wasn’t yet ready for the demands of adulthood. Hidden beneath all my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child constantly asking, “Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe? Where do I belong?” And thus I began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home.”
Source: All the Way to the River
“On the surface I look fragile and insecure; you have to know me very well.”
“On the surface, I seem to be glad of new people;
But doomed to leave old friends behind me,
I cry out from my heart for Shin-Fêng wine
To melt away my thousand woes.”
“On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...
Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
Source: Solaris
“On the surface I'm a mild mannered person, that's until you scratch the animal inside.”
“On the surface, it seems absurd that an animal as big as a horse would be afraid of anything, let alone a fluttering piece of paper. Yet most horses are real scaredy-cats, easily frightened by objects they can’t readily identify, especially if these things are moving.”
Source: Why Do Horses Sleep Standing Up?: 101 of the Most Perplexing Questions Answered About Equine Enigmas, Medical Mysteries, and Befuddling Behaviors
“On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.”
Source: Stillness Speaks
“On the surface, my novel The Vorbing is about vampires terrorising the village of Nocturne every night. The German Blitz on London in World War II. I was the real inspiration. I was fascinated by the idea of normality by day and then this evil, destructive power coming by night, and then the cycle repeating. I wanted to explore the kind of siege mentality that would create in a fantasy setting.”
“On the surface of Life, you walk, talk, act, play but you live only when truly in contact with your Souls, you live only when truly sad, only when truly happy. Sadness and happiness are different faces of the same coin, different ways of understanding the same truth. The sadness though, also brings the self-destruction, it tortures minds, carrying diseases and sometimes darkness.”
Source: A-Ma Alchemy of Love
“On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man”
“On the surface, reality may appear the same each day, but in essence, we are new every moment of our lives. The potential for change and growth is unlimited if we allow ourselves to surrender to the flow.”
“On the surface," said the deep voice of Andrew Ryan booming from hidden speakers, "The farmer tills the soil, trading the strength off his arm for a land of his own. But the parasites say, 'No! What is yours is ours! We are the state; we are God; we demand our share!”
Source: BioShock: Rapture
“On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work.”
“On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.”
“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”
“On the surface, humans appear to hate conflict, but in reality, they seek it.”
“On the surface, it's really easy to dismiss certain characters, but sometimes you find that the most interesting parts are disappointingly shallow. It's your job as an actress to pull that person apart, and work out why they act the way that they do.”
“On the surface, rock and roll changes at an amazing pace. The influence of a figure like the Maharishi can appear and disappear in a matter of months. Talk about old fashioned rock and roll finds itself dead before it begins.”
“On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.”
Source: My Sister's Keeper - Movie Tie-In: A Novel
“On the surface, Wonder Boys seemed like such a departure from L.A. Confidential - it's funny, it's contemporary, and so on - and yet at a certain point, I had a feeling that reminded me how I felt when I was shooting L.A. Confidential. I analyzed it for a while, and thought about how emotionally involved I was with the characters. Then I realized that in both movies, there are three main male characters and one female, and all of them are struggling to figure out what they're doing with their lives, independent of each other.”
“On the table behind the built-in bar stood opened bottles of gin, bourbon, scotch, soda, and other various mixers. The bar itself was covered with little delicacies of all descriptions: chips, dips, and little crackers and squares of bread laced with the usual dabs of egg salad and sardine paste. There was a platter of delicious fried chicken wings and a pan of potato-and-egg salad dressed with vinegar. Bowls of lives and pickles surrounded the main dishes, along with trays of red crabapples and little sweet onions on toothpicks. But the centerpiece of the whole table was a huge platter of succulent and thinly sliced roast beef set into an underpan of cracked ice. Upon the beige platter each slice of rare meat had been lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex. The pink-brown folded meat around the pale cream-yellow dot formed suggestive sculptures that made a great hit with all the women present. Petey– at whose house the party was being given and the creator of the meat sculptures– smilingly acknowledged the many compliments on her platter with a long-necked graceful nod of her elegant dancer’s head.”
Source: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
“On the table in the center of the room stood a fake Christmas tree, and as she chose a seat in the corner so she could plug in her phone, she remembered it was Maggie Woodwell who'd hoped Ned would make it through Christmas for the sake of their kids. She didn't want his passing to ruin the holiday forever, a fear Kitzi understood, but, cruel as it was, maybe because she'd almost lost Martin, she'd come to accept that death shadowed every day. She'd once thought she'd never get used to it, yet how many times had she waited like this while her friends said their final goodbyes? It was her specialty, it seemed.”
Source: Evensong
“On the table is a pot of tea Jasper doesn’t recall making, the core of an apple he doesn’t recall eating, and a page of staves, notes, and lyrics he knows he wrote.”
Source: Utopia Avenue
“On the table of consciousness, don't pick up the sugar-coated or well-seasoned lies by mistake. The truth has natural flavors.”
“On the table, Donald Trump: I'm gonna let Obamacare fail. I am going to let it fail. I am not gonna own this. This is an utter failure, utter disaster. I've tried. I worked with people. Obviously we don't have enough Republicans who want to vote this way. We need more Republicans in 2018, but I'm gonna let it fail 'cause I am not owning this baby. So failure, which is Obamacare, stays in place with all of its problems, expenses, failures versus repealing it. I'm telling you, the most painful choice here is leaving Obamacare in place.”
“On the tawny sands and shelves trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.”
Source: Complete Shorter Poems
“On the television planet, where men make up the tribe, the law of the caveman rules. So, for a woman coming from another world, without experience or cunning, to succeed gradually in gaining control over what is to be taped, what goes out over the air, what is said without censorship, is an epic feat.”
“On the television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup," said George.
He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.”
Source: Harrison Bergeron
“On the terrace of the Pepiniere, the 150 pupils of the Institut Chemique talk chemistry as they leave the auditoria and the laboratory. The echoes of the magnificent public garden of the city of Nancy make the words reverberate; coupling, condensation, grignardization. Moreover, their clothes stay impregnated with strong and characteristic odours; we follow the initiates of Hermes by their scent. In such an environment, how is it possible not to be productive?”
“On the The AIDS Epidemic: This is a war. It has killed more people than has been the case in all previous wars and in all previous natural disasters ... We must not continue to be debating, to be arguing, when people are dying.”
“On the theft of his material by Denis Leary: "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did."”
“On the theoretical side, I was concerned with stochastic resonance.”
“On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.”
Source: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
“On the theory of the soul's mortality, the inferiority of women's capacity is easily accounted for: Their domestic life requires no higher faculties either of mind or body. This circumstance vanishes and becomes absolutely insignificant, on the religious theory: The one sex has an equal task to perform as the other: Their powers of reason and resolution ought also to have been equal, and both of them infinitely greater than at present.”
Source: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Second Edition)
“On the third day after Jesus' own death, He came out of the grave to give the world a sign it cannot deny. For a man to predict His own death and resurrection was something only God could do.”
“On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.”
Source: The Joy Luck Club
“On the third day God created the beautiful Earth, and on the fourth day his favorite and dearest of all, your gorgeous smile.”
“On the third day in India, I realized people were not suffering as much as I thought.”
“On the third day, it hit me what he was doing. He was taking his time. Allowing me to chat with townsfolk, window shop, smell the flowers, taste the foods and drink in the landscape. He was giving me his world.”
Source: Fantastical
“On the third day, she smelled the fruit as soon as she came in. She followed the scent to the kitchen, and the peach was radiant, dusky rose and gold, its skin so plush she thought her fingertip might bruise it. This was the day, the very hour to eat- and she had come prepared, but she didn't want Concepcion to see her. She waited until the housekeeper shouldered her leather-handled canvas bag and left.
Then Jess unwrapped the organic peach she'd bought that morning. Slightly smaller, slightly harder, but decently rosy, the peach listed left- just the right direction- when she set it on the table.
Leaving this changeling for George, she washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she'd ever known, that what was sweet could also be so complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other.”
Source: The Cookbook Collector
“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.”
“On the third Friday of each month, I go to the Andy Griffith Museum. I get to meet hundreds of fans who stand in long lines for hours to meet me. Some months I don't feel too good and I think maybe I won't go, but then when I go and get to be there with so many wonderful people it always lifts my spirits and makes me feel better. I wouldn't stand in line for hours to meet me, but I'm so glad my fans do.”
“On the three pigs he and his wife own: "We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn’t want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.”
“On the Threshold by Professor Pezhman Mosleh is an artistic treasure for a treasured human being (Dr. Irvin Yalom).”
“On the Threshold is beautiful and very touching and a moving tribute to my friend, colleague and mentor Irvin Yalom.”
“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”
Source: JULIAN
“On the throne, the remaining flowers turn the same inky black as Cardan's eyes. Then the black bleeds down his face. He turns to me, opening his mouth, but his jaw is changing. His whole body is changing- elongating and ululating.
...
The monstrous thing seems to have swallowed up everything of Cardan. His mouth opens wide and then jaw-crackingly wide as long fangs sprout. Scales shroud his skin. Dread has rooted me in place.
...
In the place where the High King was, there is a massive serpent, covered in black scales and curved fangs. A golden sheen runs down the coils of the enormous body. I look in to his black eyes, hoping to see recognition there, but they are cold and empty.
'It will poison the land,' cries the smith. 'No true love's kiss will stop it. No riddle will fix it. Only death.”
Source: The Queen of Nothing
“On the throne, one has many worries; and remorse is the one that weighs the least.”