W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.”
“What is a great life? It is the dreams of youth realised in old age.”
“What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.”
“What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.”
“What is a great success? You haven’t hurt anyone? That is a great success! You haven’t ignored any person? That is a great success! You haven’t lied? That is a great success! You haven’t deceived a person? That’s a great success! And now you see how very difficult to have a real success!”
“What is a habit? It’s just a shackle for ourselves.”
“What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?”
Source: The utterly ultimate 'My word!' collection
“What is a heart but a broken masterwork pieced together from desire, envy, regret, nostalgia, pity, tenderness and hope? What is a heart but a way of muscling your way onward? What is a heart but a fist?”
Source: Unearthing
“What is a hero? The one who has the last word. Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?”
Source: A lover's discourse: fragments
“What is a hero without love for mankind.”
“What is a highway to one is a disaster to the other.”
“What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.”
“What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.
This, however, is serious: Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry–lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
“What is a holy person? The one who is aware of others' suffering.”
“What is a home if not a place where the stories sound familiar?”
Source: Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story
“What is a home if not the first place you learn to run from?”
“What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?”
Source: An American Childhood
“What is a human but a choice maker? Choices are powerful. Choices change history. Choices change the world. Remember your power!”
Source: Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
“What is a human without empathy - not a human.”
“What is a human without humanity!
What is a heart without love!
What is a hand that doesn't help!
What is a mind that doesn't expand!
No need to answer. Just think.”
Source: Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz
“What is a human-like droid that operates from a place of free will and has been designed to have a soul? That's fascinating stuff that you just can't quite comprehend quickly. It's not like playing a fireman with a wife and kid. You can gauge where that's going to go and what's going to happen, and you can talk to other people who have done it.”
“What is a husband? He is the one who, with a touch, can bring back the starlight and glow of years long ago. At least he hopes he can - don't disappoint him.”
“What is a just society? For the purposes of this book, I propose the following imperfect definition. A just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. A just society organizes socioeconomic relations, property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth in such a way as to allow its least advantaged members to enjoy the highest possible life conditions. A just society in no way requires absolute uniformity or equality. To the extent that income and wealth inequalities are the result of different aspirations and distinct life choices or permit improvement of the standard of living and expansion of the opportunities available to the disadvantaged, they may be considered just. But this must be demonstrated, not assumed, and this argument cannot be invoked to justify any degree of inequality whatsoever, as it too often is.”
Source: Capital and Ideology
“What is a king without a crown? That’s a riddle, but one to which we all know the answer: no king at all.”
Source: The Cruel Prince
“What is a kiss? Alacke! at worst,
A single Dropp to quenche a Thirst,
Tho' oft it prooves, in happie Hour,
The first swete Dropp of our long Showre.”
“What is a kiss? Why this, as some approve: the sure, sweet cement, glue, and lime of love.”
Source: Hesperides; or, Works both human and divine
“What is a labour victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory.”
“What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun?”
“What is a little mine?" [mind]
"It is something which makes your body move, as the spring made the wheels go in my watch when I showed it to you."
"Open me; I want to see it go wound."
"I can't do that any more than you could open the watch. God winds you up, and you can go till He stops you."
"Does I?" and Demi's brown eyes grew big and bright as he took in the new thought. "Is I wounded up like the watch?"
"Yes; but I can't show you how; for it is done when we don't see."
Demi felt of his back, as if expecting to find it like that of the watch, and then gravely remarked,-
"I dess Dod does it when I's asleep.”
“What is a living reality without experience? If there is anything about which we feel to be true, it is that the world we endure is authentic. We can see, touch and hear it. Our conscious existence of presence is an exhibition within the mind, but in many other occurrences, some of us rarely accept that we create our own realities.”
Source: Liberian Son
“What is a logical mind?... It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified.”
Source: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne: A Novel
“What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law.”
“What is a loss of freedom when you have everything else?”
Source: A Patchwork Of Moonlight And Shadow
“What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn't harden itself to any persons or things.”
Source: Awareness: Conversations with the Masters
“What is a magazine? A small body of Literature entirely surrounded by advertisements.”
Source: The Carolyn Wells Year Book of Old Favorites and New Fancies for 1909
“What is a man, asked Nietzsche, without his powers of defense and attack? He is a nullity. As our civilization has long labored under a one-sided idea of goodness, we now see a false ideal of “the good” dictating a policy of unilateral disarmament, the appeasement of mortal enemies, and the nullification of the U.S. border. Those who object to this “suicide of the west” are racists and Islamophobes. They are cast in the image of Hitler. Here we have adopted an idealism which makes “man amputate those instincts which enable him to be an enemy, to be harmful, to be angry and to insist upon revenge,” wrote Nietzsche. “This method of valuing thus believes itself to be ‘idealistic’; it never doubts that in its concept of the ‘good man’ it has found the highest desideratum.”
“What is a man but another man's memory”
“What is a man but something between a demon and an angel?”
Source: In Limbo
“What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?”
Source: Gandhi on Non-violence
“What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th'event -
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward - I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do',
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength and means
To do't.”
Source: Hamlet
“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul I suppose this depends somewhat upon the size of the soul. I think there are cases where the trade would do.”
“What is a man’s life worth?” Dalinar asked softly.
“The slavemasters say one is worth about two emerald broams,” Kaladin said, frowning.
“And what do you say?”
“A life is priceless,” he said immediately, quoting his father.
Dalinar smiled, wrinkle lines extending from the corners of his eyes. “Coincidentally, that is the exact value of a Shardblade. So today, you and your men sacrificed to buy me twenty-six hundred priceless lives. And all I had to repay you with was a single priceless sword. I call that a bargain.”
“You really think it was a good trade, don’t you?” Kaladin said, amazed.
Dalinar smiled in a way that seemed strikingly paternal. "For my honor? Unquestionably.”
Source: The Way of Kings By Sanderson Brandon
“What is a man's life but a prelude to his death? And what is death but a long sleep, a most welcome forgetfulness.”
“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.”
“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.”
“What is a man? What is a woman? And why do we have to be one or the other?”
“What is a man? What is a woman? Why are men and women attracted to each other? Why do they desire each other? Love...what is it?”
“What is a master but a master student? And if that's true, then there's a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.”
“What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.”