P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Perhaps it is even more important to know what one should not think about than what one should think about.”
Source: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Se
“Perhaps it is God's will to lead the people of South Africa through defeat and humiliation to a better future and a brighter day.”
“Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind, but an even greater gift is to discover a beautiful heart.”
“Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.”
Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace: The classic text on the Treaty of Versailles and post war Europe
“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”
“Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”
Source: Nausea
“Perhaps it is in silence that the real music of the cosmos reveals itself.”
Source: Random Cosmos
“Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.”
“Perhaps it is music that will save the world.”
Source: Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education
“Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death”
Source: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
“Perhaps it is no overstatement to say, therefore, that Moby Dick’s main character is, not Ahab; nor the albino sperm whale; nor Nature, or the ocean; but rather the very ability to conscientiously tell a story well.”
Source: The underrated narrator: The important role Ishmael plays in Moby Dick
“Perhaps it is not her, but my eyes, that are changed.”
Source: Wild Dark Shore
“Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance; for it seems to me I once learned that belief was sort of an impression made on our mind, and that the softer it is the less resistant t.”
“Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.”
Source: Swann's Way
“Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.”
Source: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
“Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.”
“Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.”
Source: CliffsNotes on Balzac's Pere Goriot
“Perhaps it is only someone who has experienced first-hand what family can and should mean who can be so ruthless when they write about those who fall short of producing the ideal for their offspring.”
Source: Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl's Most Famous Creation.
“Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.”
“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”
“Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another.”
“Perhaps it is our obligation to be noble before it is our obligation to be happy.”
Source: The Poet Prince
“Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It's not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.”
“Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.”
Source: The Dovekeepers
“Perhaps it is thanks to the energy saved on unnecessary walks that the Portuguese ensured their longevity.”
“Perhaps it is the expediency in the political eye that blinds it.”
Source: A Matter of Life and Death
“Perhaps it is the greatest grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
“Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.”
“Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault.”
“Perhaps, it is the words, and in turn, the many meanings that divide us. Neither the body nor the mind; Neither the distance nor the time, just words.”
Source: Buddha's House of Mirrors
“Perhaps it is this attitude, this mental turning away, or perhaps the combination of all these responses to calamity brought upon others, that one of Saul Bellow's characters, Artur Sammler, a survivor of the shooting pits in Poland, has in mind when he says: 'I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door”
Source: The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust
“Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.”
Source: The Moon and Sixpence
“Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.”
Source: Working
“Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.”
“Perhaps it is time to be more careful what we ask government to do, and where we allow it to become part of our lives.”
“Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in "real" African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.”
“Perhaps it is time to question goals that run counter to near-universal behavior. There may be lessons for us in the failure of Soviet-style Communism. It is our era's foremost example of a system that made mesmerizing promises of an earthly paradise but betrayed those promises. Millions of people were inspired by an ideology that would do away with capitalist exploitation. Marxists believed that the working class would seize the means of production, the state would wither away, selfishness would disappear, and man would live 'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.' In the name of this ideology millions gave their lives and took the lives of millions of others.
Communism failed. It failed for many reasons, not least because it was a misreading of human nature. Selfishness cannot be abolished. People do not work just as hard on collective farms as they do on their own land. The almost universal rejection of Communism today marks the acceptance of people as they are, not as Communism wished them to be.
Is it possible that our racial ideals assume that people should become something they cannot? If most people prefer the company of people like themselves, what do we achieve by insisting that they deny that preference? If diversity is a weakness rather than a strength, why work to increase diversity?”
Source: White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
“Perhaps it is to prepare to hear some day the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower.”
Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
“Perhaps it is true that, by some definitions, Satan is more religious than God. Many of the particularly proud sinners are deceived into thinking that Satan is anti-religious, that he likes seeing people do immoral things simply because he likes immoral things. Doubtful; Satan likes for people to do immoral things so that he can blame them for doing immoral things. The Father of Lies laughs not with his teammates, but at them.”
Source: Healology
“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”
Source: On Love: A Novel
“Perhaps it is while drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure.”
Source: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
“Perhaps it’ll give me an idea for the perfect main course. What do you think of roasted goat?”
“After witnessing its beheading or before?” she asked, looking like she was moments away from vomiting. “You do know that’s what cookbooks are for, correct? Inspiration without the labor. Or carnage. I swear you miss being surrounded by death.”
Source: Capturing the Devil
“Perhaps it matters little whether the international community chooses to celebrate crop diversity, but it profoundly matters that the international community takes action to conserve it.”
“Perhaps it never went away.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“perhaps it only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty”
“Perhaps it's a honey-ache. That's the result of eating too much of what isn't yours."
"But your friend offered it. So she might not have explicitly said, 'Derrick, please eat all of the honey in my kitchen,' but it was implied by the mere fact that she has a kitchen.”
Source: The Falconer
“Perhaps it's a terrible thing to write to you. You are just a lone moon hanging over the sky. You don't even have your own light. Your scars remind me of my hollow nightmares. They are so deep and hideous that you have to hide and decorate yourself twice a month. There is a darkness that sleeps in the other part of you. Your whole existence sickens me.
Yet, when I look at you, I'm reminded more of myself than I see of you. The brightness reflects shades of imperfections, battles I have lost, and an unending desire to cling to someone every night, despite the millions of miles distance between my heart and hers.”
Source: Dark little corners
“Perhaps it’s a tinge of selfishness on my part, a desire for a more exclusive claim on the person who belongs to everyone else just as much as she belongs to me.”
Source: Chani's Stone and A Prince of Netherus
“Perhaps it's an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly, or maybe we expect so little of men their transgressions don't register the same.”
Source: How to Read a Book
“Perhaps it's human nature: We want to shield our children from pain, and what we get instead is life and heartache and lessons that bring us to our knees. Sooner or later we are handed the brute, necessary curriculum of surrender, we have no choice, then but to bow our heads and learn. We struggle to accept that our children's destinies are not ours to write, their battles not ours to fight, their bruises not ours to bear, nor their victories ours to take credit for. We learn humility and how to ask for help. We learn to let go even when every fiber of our being yearns to hold on even tighter.”