O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“One could argue that time is the most valuable thing we have or “own.” We even seem to have a cultural and societal agreement on this, materializing in sayings like “time flies,” “life is short,” “our children are only on loan,” etc. It therefore seems odd that time is one of the “things” that we easily give away. We sell our time for money that we spend on new consumer goods instead of limiting our consumption in order to make it possible to sell less of our time. We engage in “ought to” events and arrangements that we don’t really want to attend in order to fit in. We waste our time on insignificant series and movies that are provided to us by endless streaming services in order to feel ready for another day of selling our time. This vicious circle is unsustainable.”
Source: Anti-trend, Resilient Design and the Art of Sustainable Living
“One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”
“One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. . . . He is beyond human forgiveness.”
“One could come from less than humble beginnings, to become a winner from within.”
“One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).”
Source: Papers and Journals
“One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work.”
Source: Oppression and Liberty
“One could dismiss the zombie trend as merely feeding a mass public that craves the strange and bizarre. Such an explanation would be only skin-deep. Popular culture often provides a window into the subliminal or unstated fears of citizens, and zombies are no exception. Some cultural commentators argue that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are a primary cause for renewed interest in the living dead, and the numbers appear to back up this assertion.”
“One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.”
Source: Last letters to a friend, 1952-1958
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
“One could draw up all different kinds of adversity depending on what your weakness is.”
“One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.”
“one could drown in irrelevance.”
“One could even argue that we have a duty to create and pass on stories about choice because once a person knows such stories, they can't be taken away from him. He may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains the ability to practice choice.”
“One could fill an entire world with all the things we did not know.”
Source: Isle of Blood and Stone
“One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long.”
“One could go on for ever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man.”
Source: Lee Krasner
“One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.”
“One could imagine a period like Japan13 years ago, however, in which indexing over time wouldn't work.”
“One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.”
“One could imagine that a group of anthropologists and scientists sent off to study a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe today might be bound by similar strictures [not to reproduce with natives]. But suppose some of them disagreed? Suppose some of them "went native"--as used to be said of colonialists in the days of the British Empire who allowed themselves to get too close to indigenous populations they interacted with.
Is that perhaps what happened to the troop of two hundred "Watchers" on Mount Hermon? Somewhere around 10,900 BC, did they break the commandments of their own culture and "go native" among the hunter-gatherers of the Near East? And were the first chance encounters with the fragments of a giant comet a century later in 10,800 BC--encounters that devastated the world--somehow blamed upon their moral lapse?”
Source: Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
“One could judge the degree of civilization of a country by the social and political position of its women”
“One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.”
Source: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence
“One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?”
“One could make a nice link between imagination and spirit. To make that link, all we need is some inspiration. Essentially, imagination has the innate potential to compel or inspire and to set in motion causation. That’s why it exists.”
Source: Re:
“One could make money and get a career going with a low-budget horror film about killers attacking on holidays. It is always flattering to have somebody copy you.”
“One could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing, it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.”
Source: Peter Pan: Top 100 Classic Novels
“One could never judge a man without seeing him close, for oneself.”
Source: Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky's Collections
“One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.”
Source: The Shadow Lines
“One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.”
“One could not always put safety up front as the prime goal. Do that, and who would ever achieve anything of note?”
Source: Chindi
“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
Source: The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns
“One could not live without delicacy, but when / I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking / hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob.”
Source: Near changes: poems
“One could not see the Greek, the Celt, the Roman, the man of the Renaissance, not even the Victorian on a white face, for Western civilisation had moved too fast to leave any telltale signs of the past on the European skin. She thought: the white face is without history: too familiar, too unremarkable – always modern. But a look at an Indian face sends the mind travelling back a thousand years. The Olmec, the Maya, the Toltec, the Mexica were still there in the coppery skin, the prominent nose, the high cheekbones, the epicanthic fold, the brown eyes staring back from the deep well of time.”
Source: The Fugitives
“One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.”
“One could only learn from the past and move on through the present to make a better future.”
Source: The Diary of Audrey Malone Frayer
“One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”
“One could pick apart love, examine every filament of attraction, and still it would never be fully explained. It simply was.”
Source: Love in the Afternoon
“One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.”
“One could safely say that David Lifton took folly to an unprecedented level. And considering the monumental foolishness of his colleagues in the conspiracy community, that's saying something.”
“One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?”
“One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.”
Source: Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology
“One could say that everybody in this world has a spiritual teacher. For most people, their losses and disasters represent the teacher; their suffering is the teacher.”
“One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, 'Chance left free toact falls into an order.”
Source: The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins
“One could say that in case of need, every normal and healthy woman is able to hold a position. And there is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman.”
Source: Edith Stein Essays on Woman
“One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown”
“One could say that the courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.”
Source: The Courage To Be
“One could say that what differentiates ancient from modern philosophy is the fact that, in ancient philosophy, it was not only Chrysippus or Epicurus who, just because they had developed a philosophical discourse, were considered philosophers. Rather, every person who lived according to the precepts of Chrysippus or Epicurus was every bit as much a philosopher as they.”
“One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.”