P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.”
“Perhaps the biggest obstacle in destroying white supremacy is the hatred and hostility that Africans have for each other.”
“Perhaps the biggest obstacle to loving yourself and living your Spirit is the belief that you can only do so when all your problems are solved, all your worries are alleviated, and all your concerns and fears have disappeared. The truth is, this will never happen. We're not here to get over our humanness, but rather to accept and make peace with it... and remember our Divine nature”
“Perhaps the biggest problem in journalism is the cult divide between journalists and corporate owners.”
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.”
Source: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.”
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
“Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.”
“Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.”
“Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.”
“Perhaps the central reason that Ahmadinejad's message, and the hundreds of thousands of voices echoing his call throughout the world, are so dangerous is because the Free World is making precious little effort to assert its own message.”
“Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.”
“Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority.”
Source: The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments
“Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.”
“Perhaps the choice is a negative one, in that I was trying to avoid everything that touched on well-known issues - or any issues at all, whether painterly, social or aesthetic. I tried to find nothing too explicit, hence all the banal subjects; and then, again, I tried to avoid letting the banal turn into my issue and my trademark. So it's all evasive action, in a way.”
Source: Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
“Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of an-other, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire . . . Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always chang-ing to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears?”
“Perhaps the clearest and deepest meaning of brotherhood is the ability to imagine yourself in the other person's position, and then treat that person as if you were him or her. This form of brotherhood takes a lot of imagination, a great deal of sympathy, and a tremendous amount of understanding.”
“Perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead.”
Source: The Christmas Mystery
“Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.”
“Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.”
Source: In Search of a Character: Two African Journals
“Perhaps the compulsion to lay a woman’s life before me and slowly explore each layer started in the dissection room; so many of our most steadfast patterns are begun in those years between childhood and adulthood.”
Source: A Ghost in the Throat
“Perhaps the core of strength a person needed to thrive in this world was made of chalk. Perhaps it could be washed away, broken apart, crumbled under a cruel maternal hand. Or perhaps it was granite. Perhaps it needed only to be carefully mined and polished.”
Source: Motion of Intervals
“Perhaps the couple got married at 25 and now they're 45 and this is an option. And if a couple is still together, or perhaps finds its way back together, I like to say that it's forever. They belong together, it's a good fit, it's the right pairing. It almost gives me goose bumps.”
“Perhaps the Creator of this strange place knows us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps humanity was meant to eternally ponder the purpose and importance of our own existence. If we were assured of either, we’d be intolerable creatures.”
“Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt at being told that it is a fragment awaiting perfection.”
Source: Poems
“Perhaps the crime situation would be improved if we could get more cops off television and onto the streets.”
“Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.”
Source: My Generation: Collected Nonfiction
“Perhaps the cruelest thing ever said of Hubert Humphrey was that he had the soul of a vice president.”
Source: Love of Country: Discovering confidence in humanity, law and politics
“Perhaps the cultural Christianity needs to become full-on no-excuses Christianity. You need light to fight the dark. It's the oldest story in the book.”
Source: Southern Dust
“Perhaps the day may come when we shall remember these sufferings with joy.”
“Perhaps the day will come where the validity of one's spirituality will be judged not by the correctness of one's theology but by the authenticity of one's spiritual life. When that day comes, an authentically spiritual Buddhist and an authentically spiritual Christian may find that they have more in common with each other than they do with those in their respective religions who have failed to develop their spirituality. (Beyond Religion, p. 98)”
“Perhaps the deeper meaning of this commandment is that we should never use the name of God for political interests, economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds. People hate somebody and say "God hates him." People covet a piece of land and say "God wants it." The world would be a better place if we followed the third commandment more devotedly. You want to wage war on your neighbors and steal their land? Leave God out of it and find yourself some other excuse.”
Source: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit card ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?”
Source: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller: Revised and Updated Edition
“Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”
Source: Contact
“Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity.
The secret form of the Other is what has to be reconstituted, as in anamorphosis, starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture.”
Source: The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
“Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.”
“Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.”
Source: The art of listening
“Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.”
Source: Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting
“Perhaps the dull ache I'm feeling comes from letting go, the realization that some memories should be left as just that, a moment in time when the fruits of life are at their sweetest.”
Source: The Brightest Star
“Perhaps the dumbest of these story lines is that [Pope] Francis has re-opened conversation and debate in a Church that had been closed and claustrophobic for 35 years under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I defy anyone who, over the last 35 years, has spent time on the campuses of Notre Dame or Georgetown, or who has read the National Catholic Reporter, or who has gone to a meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, to make that claim without experiencing a twinge of conscience that says, "I should wash my mouth out with soap."”
“Perhaps the earliest memories I have are of being a stubborn, determined child. Through the years my mother has told me that it was fortunate that I chose to do acceptable things, for if I had chosen otherwise no one could have deflected me from my path. ... The Chairman of the Physics Department, looking at this record, could only say 'That A- confirms that women do not do well at laboratory work'. But I was no longer a stubborn, determined child, but rather a stubborn, determined graduate student. The hard work and subtle discrimination were of no moment.”
“Perhaps the early grave Which men weep over may be meant to save.”
Source: DON JUAN
“Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive”
“Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.”
Source: On Love: A Novel
“Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.”
Source: The Plague
“Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.”
Source: Prose works 1892
“Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice.”
“Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice. If they knew its charms, the dignity that accompanies it, how much a free man feels like a king, the perpetual inner light that is produced by decorous self-awareness and realization, perhaps there would be no greater friends of freedom than those who are its worst enemies.”
“Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.
We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind.”
“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
Source: Perelandra