S Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with S. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“straightway like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas”
“Strain every nerve to gain your point.”
“Strain your brain more than your eye.”
Source: Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History
“Strain your brain more than your eye... You can copy a thing to a certain limit. Then you must use intellect.”
“Strain your ears to be sure I’m here. Say my name and I disappear.”
“Strained Relations by Stewart Stafford
Brother, you have flown from me,
Too often and to that blinding maze,
As capricious as the wind that blows,
No visible shared blood between us.
Are you not my mother's and father's son?
If the fault lies with me, then tell me so,
Or let the bloodied bandage fall from you,
So the wound heals without reinfection.
You picked prized strangers over family,
More damaging self-flagellation as hubris,
They let you down as parents an infant,
Still, you chose a messy path of pain.
The only glimmer of light in the next life,
Is we two reuniting together again, brother,
Or shall you flee to fellow astral travellers?
A last dagger thrust in the permafrost cold?
© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
“Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law schools.”
“Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth.”
Source: Delirium
“Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.”
Source: A Separate Peace
“Stranding passengers thousands of miles away from their final destinations is a feature of budget airlines.”
“Strang thing! How does it happen that the presence of a woman overwhelms us so? Is it the power of her grace which enfolds us? Is it the seduction of her beauty and youth, which intoxicates one like wine?”
Source: The Wreck
“Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!”
“Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!”
“Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything — all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know if its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time?”
Source: Flowers for Algernon
“Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed.”
Source: Flowers for Algernon
“Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything - all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time?”
Source: Flowers for Algernon
“Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.”
Source: Collected Prose
“Strange an astrologer should die, without one wonder in the sky.”
Source: The works of Jonathan Swift ...: with copious notes and additions, and a memoir of the author
“Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it--thus!”
Source: Frankenstein
“Strange and humbling, what loneliness could do.”
Source: For the Throne
“Strange and marvelous things will happen with constant regularity as you alter your life and begin living in harmony with the laws of the universe.”
“Strange and mysterious name to give to the spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish souls? Doubt it not!”
Source: Morals and Dogma
“Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!”
Source: She: A History of Adventure
“Strange are the ways of democracy; everyone disagrees with everyone else and such dissent is considered a good thing. Stranger are the ways of dictators; once they have coerced all their subjects to agree with them, they spread their evil wings across their borders to secure the nod of the rest of the humanity. That is how dictatorships usually end. If a dictator does not aspire to be a world hegemon, he could be forever, limited only by the fact that even dictators are mortal.”
“Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.”
“Strange are the ways of Men, Legolas! Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Caves, they say! Caves! Holes to fly to in time of war, to store fodder in! My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!’
‘And I would give gold to be excused,’ said Legolas; ‘and double to be let out, if I strayed in!’
‘You have not seen, so I forgive your jest,’ said Gimli. ‘But you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped in their making long ago? They are but hovels compared with the caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight.
‘And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities. such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in
his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains’ heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm’s Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them.’
‘Then I will wish you this fortune for your comfort, Gimli,’ said the Elf, ‘that you may come safe from war and return to see them again. But do not tell all your kindred! There seems little left for them to do, from your account. Maybe the men of this land are wise to say little: one family of busy dwarves with hammer and chisel might mar more than they made.’
‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the spring-time for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazaddûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.”
“Strange as it may seem — and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy — the dollar glut is what finances America’s global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire. The result is a new form of taxation without representation. Keeping international reserves in dollars means recycling dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills — U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military spending that has been a driving force in the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit since the Korean War broke out in 1950.
[...] “China National Offshore Oil Corporation go home” is the motto when foreign governments try to use their sovereign wealth funds (central bank departments trying to figure out what to do with their dollar glut) to make direct investments in American industry, as happened when China’s national oil company sought to buy Unocal in 2005.[...]
So Europeans and Asians see U.S. companies pumping more dollars into their economies not only to buy their exports (in excess of providing them with goods and services in return), not only to buy their companies and commanding heights of privatized public enterprises (without giving them reciprocal rights to buy important U.S. companies), and not only to buy foreign stocks, bonds and real estate. The U.S. media neglect to mention that the U.S. Government spends hundreds of billions of dollars abroad — not only in the Near East for direct combat, but to build military bases to encircle the rest of the world, and to install radar systems, guided missile systems and other forms of military coercion, including the “color revolutions” that have been funded all around the former Soviet Union.”
Source: The Bubble and Beyond
“Strange as it may seem—or perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.”
Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“Strange as it may seem, the association of eggs and bunnies at Easter time are actually connected and, to discover more, we must once again turn our attention to the Saxon fertility Goddess, Eostre.”
Source: Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year
“Strange as it may seem, horror loses its power to frighten when repeated too often.”
“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
“Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story”
“Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.”
Source: Truth and Lies in Literature: Essays and Reviews
“Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.”
Source: The Works of William Cowper: Life and works of Cowper, by R. Southey
“Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.”
“Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.”
Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything
“Strange as it may sound, it is more difficult to maintain a faith walk when we begin to see our dreams come true. When hopes become realities it is easy to shift our faith onto the thing we have dreamed of and off of the One who was the source of our provision.”
Source: Visioneering: Your Guide for Discovering and Maintaining Personal Vision
“Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.”
Source: Popular Scientific Lectures
“Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, second edition
“Strange bent over these things, with a concentration to rival Minervois's own, questioning, criticizing and proposing. Strange and the two engravers spoke French to each other. To Strange's surprize Childermass understood perfectly and even addressed one or twoquestions to Minervois in his own language. Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.”
Source: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
“STRANGE BIRD; FAMILIAR WINGS!”
“Strange bits of scarlet dreams drifted back to her. Thrilling sensations aroused by the most indecent liberties, and dear me, she thought with a flutter in the pit of her belly, the gorgeous firelit image of a naked man like a demigod coming towards her.”
Source: My Dangerous Duke
“Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.”
Source: Lying
“Strange but true: those who have loved God most have loved men least.”
“Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Strange clothes you wear, Child of the Dragon. Has the Wheel turned so far? Do the People of the Dragon return to the first Covenant? But you wear a sword. That is neither now nor then.”
Source: The Eye of the World: Book One of 'The Wheel of Time'
“Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.”
“Strange country that gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery!”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“Strange customs do not thrive in foreign soil.”
“Strange dreams are better than no dreams at all.”