W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is.”
Source: The Remains of the Day
“We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.”
“We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.”
“We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the 'wisecrack'. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be 'got up' as if it were a 'subject'. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, 'pinned down'. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.”
Source: Reflections on the Psalms
“We may observe that, in displaying the praises of any humane, beneficent man, there is one circumstance which never fails to be amply insisted on, namely, the happiness and satisfaction, derived to society from his intercourse and good offices.”
Source: And the human understanding. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. Appendix. The natural history of religion
“We may often do as we please - but we cannot please as we please.”
“We may only ever have one great, passionate love, but sometimes it’s best to leave that kind of love in the past. A love like that can’t last forever.”
Source: The Way We Fall
“We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion
“We may outrun By violent swiftness And lose by over-running.”
“We may overcompensate for our feelings of powerlessness by attempting to control and manipulate other people and our environment. Or we may eventually burst forth with uncontrolled rage that is highly exaggerated and distorted by its long suppression.”
Source: The Shakti Gawain Essentials: 3 Books in 1: Creative Visualization, Living in the Light & Developing Intuition
“We may owe more than we are aware of to the witch.”
“We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.”
“We may perceive circumstances at hand to be more that can be bared. Remain steadfast in the face of struggle.”
“We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.”
Source: The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin ...: Comprising a Series of Letters on Miscellaneous, Literary, and Political Subjects, Written Between the Years 1753 and 1790, Illustrating the Memoirs of His Public and Private Life, and Developing the Secret History of His Political Transactions and Negociations
“We may place blame, give reasons, and even have excuses; but in the end, it is an act of cowardice to not follow your dreams.”
“We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise, not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls.”
Source: Papers of John Adams
“we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born”
Source: On the Art of Writing
“We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.”
Source: The human animal: a personal view of the human species
“We may pretend we are basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
“We may print, but not stereotype, our opinions.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
“We may produce at will, from a sending station. an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed.”
Source: My Inventions: And Other Writings
“We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.”
Source: The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
“We may propose many plans, let's but remember that God can dispose our plans, propose a new and better ones and impose them on us!”
“We may put too high a premium on speech from platform and pulpit, at the bar and in the legislative hall, and pay dear for the whistle of our endless harangues. England and especially Germany, are less loquacious, and attend more to business. We let the eagle, and perhaps too often the peacock, scream.”
“We may readily set aside the pleasures of today and invest all efforts in our futures.”
“We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish.”
Source: Imaginary conversations of Greeks and Romans
“We may reconcile ourselves to the world at our peril, but it will never reconcile itself to us. . . . This unwillingness to die, doth actually impeach us of high treason against the Lord : is it not a choosing of earth before him ; and taking these present things for our happiness, and consequently asking them our very God (469)?”
Source: The Saints' Everlasting Rest
“We may regard certain days as free days. Free days are however fee days. We will pay later”
Source: The Untapped Wonderer In You: dare to do the undone
“We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer).”
“We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? no. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty.”
“We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.”
“We may repeatedly try to get our need for sex or our need for communication met by our partner. If our attempts are met with rejection over and over again, we may eventually stop asking. We tend to give up rather than keep setting ourselves up for regular rejection.”
Source: The Bimbo Has Brains: And Other Freaky Facts
“We may rest assured that God would never have suffered any infants to be slain except those who were already damned and predestined for eternal death.”
“We may restrict the expression of worship for a season, just as we may briefly hold our breath, but there is an inward craving for worship that cannot be permanently stilled”
Source: Elements of Worship
“We may run into Kevin,” Lucy said gloomily. “She’s hoping to run into Kevin,” Zoë assured her. Justine smiled grimly. “Preferably with my car.”
Source: Rainshadow Road
“We may run, walk, stumble, drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight of the reason for the journey or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way.”
“We may say, ‘God works all things together or good.’ But if we are not waiting with expectation for our ashes to turn to beauty, this remains head knowledge—not a reflection of our faith in a God who works the impossible on our behalf, simply because He loves us.”
Source: Who Do You Say I Am?: Overcoming the Spirit of Identity Theft
“We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it consists in a symmetry of which we know not the rules, and a secret conformity of the features to each other, as also to the air and complexion of the person.”
“We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it is a symmetry whose rules are unknown.”
“We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.”
“We may say simply that in the sight of God we are judged not so much by what we do as by our reasons for doing it.”
“We may say that a basic substance is one which has a lone pair of electrons which may be used to complete the stable group of another atom, and that an acid is one which can employ a lone pair from another molecule in completing the stable group of one of its own atoms.”
“We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.”
Source: Dangerous Ages
“We may say that feelings have two kinds of intensity. One is the intensity of the feeling itself, by which loud sounds are distinguished from faint ones, luminous colors from dark ones, highly chromatic colors from almost neutral tints, etc. The other is the intensity of consciousness that lays hold of the feeling, which makes the ticking of a watch actually heard infinitely more vivid than a cannon shot remembered to have been heard a few minutes ago.”
“We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.”
Source: Totem and Taboo
“We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same basic mechanism used in producing those striking structures that are crystals, with their beautiful plane faces.”
“We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.”
“We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion.”
“We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion. There have been victories all over the world, but wherever we look for the victor we expect to find him with his heel upon the neck of the vanquished. The wonder of Good Friday is that the victor lies vanquished by the vanquished one. We have to look deeper into the very heart and essence of things before we can see how real the victory is that thus hides itself under the guise of defeat.”
“We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense that they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an eternal protest against the vulgarity of utilitarianism.”
Source: As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader