W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“What greater weakness can there be than not to know what is the source of one's being, of one's life, of one's senses, of one's knowledge, and what is to be their end? What can be more deeply disheartening than to wonder whether one's soul is, perhaps, a material thing, like a stone or a reptile, corruptible like these base creatures? Is there not more strength and greatness of mind in admitting the idea of a being superior to all other beings, who has made them all and to whom all owe their existence; of a being supremely perfect, who is pure, who had no beginning and can have no ending, of whom our soul is the image and, so to speak, a portion, being a spiritual and immortal thing?”
“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.”
Source: Ayn Rand Novel Collection
“What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?”
“What greater wound is there than a false friend?”
“What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space.”
“What grieves me most in my past offenses, O my loving God, is not so much the punishment I have deserved, as the displeasure I have given You, Who are worthy of infinite love.”
Source: How to Converse with God
“What grinds me the most is that we’re sending kids out into the world who don’t know how to balance a checkbook, don’t know how to apply for a loan, don’t even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world?”
“What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world`
With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)??
And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering.
Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time.
Get my point?”
Source: Struck by Lightning: The Carson Phillips Journal
“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“What guided Chaplin was the proper protection of self-interest (or craziness). So Chapling, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mark Pickford, with DW Griffith and William S Hart, made an alliance, called United Artists, whereby they would own a distribution company that would market their pictures, allowing them a greater return than if they leased the movies to some outside distributor.”
“What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and acquired from it”
“What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.”
“What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.”
Source: Speeches, Lectures, and Letters
“What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.”
Source: Speeches, Lectures, and Letters
“What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: “One hand, one million dollars, no tears.”
Source: Liar's Poker
“What Habitat does is much more than just sheltering people. It’s what it does for people on the inside. It’s that intangible quality of hope. Many people without decent housing consider themselves life’s losers. This is the first victory they may have ever had. And it changes them. We see Habitat homeowners go back to school and get their GEDs, enter college, do all kinds of things they never believed they could do before they moved into their house. By their own initiative, through their own pride and hope, they change.”
Source: Simple Decent Place to Live: The Building Realization of Habitat for Humanity
“What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness.”
“What had become of his usually quiet and firm manner and the carelessly calm expression of his face? Every time he turned toward Anna he slightly bowed his head as if he wished to fall down before her, and in his eyes there was an expression of submission and fear. 'I do not wish to offend,' his every look seemed to say, 'I only wish to save myself, but I do not know how.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t.
***
An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous.
Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin.
***
Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.”
Source: Lost Illusion
“What had been became what was and a story only works when you know the ending. When the people in it don’t seem like pretend. When you can think about that girl and how she was once upon a time, and see her. When you don’t already know the story is a lie.”
Source: Living Dead Girl
“What had been in my head for so long would now be out in the real world, no longer afloat in my foreverland of ambiguities.”
Source: Call Me by Your Name
“What had been made clear in the last two days (which seemed like months) was how far I had been right in thinking that there was only one real love in my life. It was as if I had in some spiritual sense actually married Hartley long ago and was simply not free to look elsewhere. Of course I had really known this all along. But on seeing her again the sense of absolute belongingness had been overwhelming; in the teeth of our fates' most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.”
Source: The Sea, The Sea
“What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.”
Source: Elroy Nights
“What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.”
Source: Vortex
“What had been so funny? But you can never remember what you were laughing about, and even if you could, it seems doubtful that it would still be funny.”
Source: The Girls from Corona del Mar
“What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. I was a very public failure.”
“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
Source: Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
“What had begun as treachery had morphed into something else. She had been through fire and was stronger for it. Forged in the flame of a New York summer.
And what have I learned? she asked herself.
That no one friend could give you everything.
That complex friends came with complex agendas.
That liars tell the best stories”
Source: Friends Like These
“What had brought him to this outpost of hell? Ferreira wondered while following Garces into the rain: fate or his own decisions?”
Source: Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun
“What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'”
“What had caused my sudden change of heart?
Then, I realized that I was not just mourning her.
There was a shift, a change, and it was all that Klenard needed. With no one to contest me, a new era was born. The kingdom can grow.
It was hope and I was frightened by it.”
Source: The Circle is Broken
“what HAD come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, forever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous.”
Source: The Wings of the Dove
“What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.”
Source: The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
“What had happened this side of the mountains?”
Source: The Goblin Mirror
“What had happened to our love? Somehow it had faded, or worn out, or simply withered away.”
Source: Doomed Queen Anne: A Young Royals Book
“What had happened to the body I held in my arms that night last spring?”
Source: Norwegian Wood
“What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.”
“What had his life meant? All his success, all the tournaments he'd won...they were like dust and ashes. Meaningless. Without Gisela, his life was meaningless.”
Source: The Captive Maiden
“What had Hitler achieved with his gospel of racial superiority and the hellish hatred it generated? How many millions of people lost their lives to that hatred? So that the Aryan race will retain its purity? What was the final outcome? Hitler had to die like a rat in its hole. He had to fire a bullet into his own temple in order to escape the ignominy that his friend, Mussolini, met with in the end.”
Source: Black Hole
“What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?”
Source: Salt to the Sea
“What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.”
Source: Living Out Loud
“What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.”
Source: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut
“What had passed between them had been real and true and lived. Not like the silly infatuation she had felt for [him] when she was 16, or the foolish attraction she’d felt. Theirs had been a true love. Forged and built and earned.”
Source: The Twelfth Enchantment
“What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
“What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. HE was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed! -- bright and sunny, and full of the smell of the garden...”
Source: This Side of Paradise
“What had seemed easy in imagination was rather hard in reality.”
Source: Anne of Green Gables Collection: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of the Island, and More Anne Shirley Books
“What had seemed like love was betrayal”
“What had set the fae world off? I`d never seen one. Now you couldn`t throw a trowel without hitting a fairy.”
Source: Dead and Gone: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel