T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”
Source: The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
“The trouble is that we have a very wrong notion of humility; we associate it with timidity, self-effacement and lowliness in its worst sense!”
“The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?”
Source: Sexing the Cherry
“The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.”
“The trouble is that you think you have time.”
Source: Buddha's Little Instruction Book
“The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas - your own and those offered by others...”
“The trouble is the kind of guy I want to go out with doesn't even exist... Like a rugged, chain-smoking, intellectual, adventurer guy who's really serious, but also really funny and mean.”
“The trouble is, this is trouble that you welcome. You realize there is a reason clichés exist, and you would happily have your breath taken away, three seconds at a time, maybe more, by this woman.”
Source: Open Water
“The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.”
“The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual and his rights as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.”
“The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.”
Source: O Pioneers!
“The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.”
Source: Wintersmith: (Discworld Novel 35)
“The trouble is you can't play many matches when you lose them.”
“The trouble is, you think something is everything and fail to realize that everything is something.”
“The trouble is you think you have time.”
“The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.”
“The trouble is, I know too much about how to cook to be satisfied with a cook.”
“The trouble is, I'm a terrible PR person.”
“The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".”
“The trouble is, most people are not so generous. Everybody wants love for themselves. I hear this all the time from the women I work with. I hear them say, "I want, I want." I never hear them saying what they want to give.”
“The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.”
“The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.”
“The trouble is, SMers are allowing themselves to be defined by what they are not. We think, "Oh, so many people believe that we're all murderers and rapists, and we have to explain that we're not!" Uh so, a slogan for the gay civil rights movement should be "Normal, Non-threatening and Not After Your Children"?”
“The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.”
Source: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.”
“The trouble is, walking in Venice becomes compulsive once you start. Just over the next bridge, you say, and then the next one beckons.”
Source: Don't look now
“The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!”
“The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.”
“The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.”
Source: The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing
“The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.”
“The trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.”
“The trouble, old chap, is that no one ever owns up to their mistakes. Worse still, they paint themselves as the victim of everything that has happened—and everything that ever will.”
“The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don't really seem to know any more about the game than the old ones did.”
Source: A History of Golf
“The trouble today is that many Christians live in a kind of bubble of assumptions about what their Christianity means, especially if it places them comfortably among "the good guys," - assumptions that are likely to be drawn as much from folk-Christianity, surrounding political culture, popular pulp-books about the "End Times," or their favourite guru writer or therapist, than from sober and comprehensive reading of the Bible as a whole. Prophets and preachers have the unwelcome task of pricking that bubble with the sharpness of actual texts and teachings of the Bible itself.”
“The trouble today is that we have too many laws.”
“The trouble was, Elizabeth thought, they did not tell the children of colonial families not to love these foreign lands, not to fall in love with their birthplaces. While parents dreamt of retiring in peace to another place called ‘home’, their children soaked up knowledge of the only world they knew: its different peoples, its spicy food, its birdsong, the way warm rain fell like a curtain through the palm trees. Their souls would be forever torn.”
Source: Zanzibar Uhuru: revolution, two women and the challenge of survival
“The trouble was, her beauty was addictive. One look wasn’t enough. Now that he’d taken in her sweet-natured face, that dusting of freckles, and the light gray-blue eyes, he only wanted more.”
Source: Wait for Me
“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own silly letters.”
Source: the bell jar
“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance.”
“The trouble was, no one thought about the victims any more. It was all about human rights for the criminal. Injustice was the name of the game now.”
Source: Into the Darkness
“The trouble was that eventually Nora began to lose any sense of who she was. Like a whispered word passed around from ear to ear, even her name began to sound like just a noise, signifying nothing.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.”
“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
Source: the bell jar
“The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.”
Source: Lord of the Flies
“The trouble was, my feelings for Patch weren't harmless.”
Source: The Complete Hush, Hush Saga: includes Hush, Hush; Crescendo; Silence and Finale
“The trouble when you die is that everyone says you were nice. I would like to be thought of as genuinely nice. I would like there to be people who can honestly say: "Len! Oh yeah, there was more good than bad in him.”
“The trouble when you have a job like mine is it's your social life as well, so I need to actually [find] something to do in my downtime when my kids are at school.”
“The trouble with "sacrifices as symbolic acts" is that the immediate impact on those for whom the sacrifice is made quickly fades, while the impact on those who actually make the sacrifice can go on and on.”
“The trouble with 'a place for everything and everything in its place' is that there's always more everything than places.”