Top 252 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Biographers - Page 5

If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.

War is just what we do. Yet, of course, the effects of it are repeatedly deeper, then deeper, then deeper.

You cannot stay the shell in its flight; after it has left the mortar, it goes on to its mark, and there explodes, dealing destruction all around. Just as little can you stay the consequences of a sin after it has been committed. You may repent of it, you may even be forgiven for it, but still it goes on its deadly and desolating way. It has passed entirely beyond your reach; once done, it cannot be undone.

Life is impermanent and in the face of that impermanence, cavort! Look death in the eye, tell him you’re as cute as a button, flash a little deviant guile his way, and tell him to go feast on somebody’s else’s sweet flesh.

Despite his [Artie Shaw's] affectations of reclusiveness, he never tired of talking about himself, as countless long interviews reveal. I do not recall an anecdote he ever told me that was not in some way intended to convey a sense of his own superiority to everyone. . One wonders how a person of his character could produce such beauty.

How close the sexes sometimes come to one another. It is as much a matter of behaviour and the spere in which they move that separates the masculine part of humanity from the feminine.

Incorporating an awareness of style in the paintings gives them a kind of electricity and holds them together. It can plug you into the moment at which they were made.

There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried

How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people.

Before I can effectively discipline students, I have to earn their friendship and respect.

Consuming is an endless treadmill.

There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.