O Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.”
“One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.”
“One often forgets that even if art is a very successful field in contemporary culture, there are still a lot of people alienated by it. Even if people don't fully understand where my work is coming from, at least there's somebody who looks kind of sane standing in front of you and politely engaging with you. People react.”
“One often has need of one inferior to himself.”
“One often has to do what they have to do in order to do what they want to do; however if you only do what you want to do then you will never do what you have to do!”
Source: From Failure to Promise: An Uncommon Path to Professoriate
“One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.”
Source: The Cutting of an Agate
“One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.”
Source: Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others
“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.”
Source: Notebooks, 1914-1916
“One often makes music to supplement one's world.”
“One often reads about the art of conversation-how it's dying or what's needed to make it flourish, or how rare good ones are. But wouldn't you agree that the infinitely more valuable rara avis [rare bird] is a good listener.”
“One often reads of elite athletes for whom their chosen sport is their life. Not simply a livelihood or a hobby, but an obsession that informs every aspect of their mental, physical, emotional and philosophical being.
I am similarly consumed with sex. Far from just the act of sex, it is its possibilities that dictate my thoughts and motives. Sex is the distillation of my own essence, it is the prism through which my life is processed.”
“One often reads that the 1950s was the golden age of Cuban music, but it was really one long phase, from 1937 to 1958, each year with its own splendour.”
Source: Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo
“One often sees a call only in retrospect. This too is God's design. God often reinforces our faith after we trust him, not before.”
“One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.”
“One often thinks that using 2 different things like visual and sound lead to 2 different conclusions - to a different content - but in in my case it is all one.”
“One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.”
“One omen is best, to fight in defense of one's country.”
“One on God's side is a majority.”
“One on the battlefield, one of the hill,
Eyes closing for the final time,
Tear drenched cheeks turn as pale as the moon, I lost what was meant to be mine.”
Source: Strings of Fate
“One only "right" we have to assert in common with mankind--and that is as much in our hands as theirs--is the right of having something to do.”
“One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present itself again.”
Source: Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not)
“One only gets to the top rung on the ladder by steadily climbing up one at a time, and suddenly, all sorts of powers, all sorts of abilities which you thought never belonged to you - suddenly become within your own possibility and you think, 'Well, I'll have a go, too.'”
“One only has an adventure when one makes a mistake, but [as] my grandmother used to say: "You don't have to get out of trouble if you don't get into trouble."”
“One only has to look at the performance of the economy to understand how it shapes the perspective of America's youth about military service.”
“One only has to watch aging siblings scrap over the worthless pots and pans and scuffed furniture of a deceased parent's estate- like toddlers over toys- to see how desperate is the need to wrest some last, pathetic, tangible measure of their parent's devotion.”
Source: Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life
“One only hope my heart can cheer, -
The hope to meet again.”
“One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.”
Source: Selected Stories
“One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it's measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.”
“One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.”
Source: Les miserables. Pt. 1
“One only passes from the darkness of ignorance to the enlightenment of science if one re-reads with ever-increasing love the works of the ancients. Let the dogs bark, let the pigs grunt! I will nonetheless be a disciple of the ancients. All my care will be for them and the dawn will see me studying them.”
“One only really loves from a feminine position.”
“One only really sees with the heart.”
“One only says it is one's duty when one has something disagreeable to do.”
Source: Delphi Works of Margaret Oliphant with Complete Stories of the Seen and Unseen
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have
no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the
shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so
men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me. . .”
Source: The Little Prince
“One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander's last meal.”
“One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne (Illustrated)
“One open, one closed. It was no wonder that the first image that came to mind when I thought of either of my sisters was a door. With Kirsten, it was the front one to our house, through which she was always coming in or out, usually in mid-sentence, a gaggle of friends trailing behind her. Whitney’s was the one to her bedroom, which she preferred to keep shut between her and the rest of us, always.”
Source: The Truth About Forever
“One opens oneself to reality (O) not because the latter is good or bad--it may be both and neither--but because it is. It is the only O we have and are, and we'd best learn to become partners with ourselves, with it.”
Source: The Sensitive Self
“One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all.”
“One operates on the mind with the mind. What else is there, after all?”
Source: Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India
“One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.”
“One opinion can make a fool out of a once wise person”
“One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of status nullifies its fundamental aims; therefore at the center of my own adherence to to this ranginess in taste is that it doesn't add up to membership in a private club. The differences choose me. There are so many approaches, so many innovative moves, so many oddly shaped ears in the field; may they never sing in unison.”
“One opponent’s ostensible generosity might a few moves later guarantee the other’s downfall. Thus, collaboration tended to come at a price. The analogy to real life was impossible to miss. But Granny was not given to moralizing. Ostensibly, we played only for amusement. We never mentioned parallels with the ins and outs of family affairs”
Source: Providence Point
“One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you're in the room...
Another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you're not.
The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.”
“One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.”
“One or the other of us said 'I can't,' and if it was me I don't know why because I wanted to. Maybe I'm just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.”
Source: White Is for Witching
“One or two bad teachers is a problem with the teachers. A school with many bad teachers is a problem of leadership.”
“One or two of my friends set longevity records for people who had AIDS. What they did, incredibly hard though it was, was to practice meditation, positive thinking and they worked out physically quite a bit.”