Top 53 Benches Quotes & Sayings

The opposition occupies the benches in front of you, but the enemy sits behind you

My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.

In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow, uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks placed on legs like milking-stools.

Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.

She went, however, and they sauntered about together many a half hour in Mr. Grant's shrubbery, the weather being unusually mild for the time of year, and venturing sometimes even to sit down on one of the benches now comparatively unsheltered, remaining there perhaps till, in the midst of some tender ejaculation of Fanny's on the sweets of so protracted an autumn, they were forced by the sudden swell of a cold gust shaking down the last few yellow leaves about them, to jump up and walk for warmth.

Cats are the slipperiest of domestic animals. Thousands of years of genetic coding has taught them to melt into azaleas, lie motionless behind garden gnomes, glide along fence tops, and slink under benches.

One thing that changed when I moved upstate was that I became interested in different materials. I started making the stone benches because I was seeing rocks.

What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf, mute - and still eagerly sanding benches.

Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise.

My parents had come from Mexico, a short road in my imagination. I felt myself as coming from a caramelized planet, an upside-down planet, pineapple-cratered. Though I was born here, I came from the other side of the looking glass, as did Alice, though not alone like Alice. Downtown I saw lots of brown people. Old men on benches. Winks from Filipinos. Sikhs who worked in the fields were the most mysterious brown men, their heads wrapped in turbans. They were the rose men. They looked like roses.

Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armoured cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and cheques written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police.

When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.

It's good to remember the unburied dead and the uncollected rubbish. Most of it can now be seen on the Labour benches in the House of Commons.

It gladdens me to know that Baldr’s father [Odin] makes ready the benches for a banquet. Soon we shall be drinking ale from the curved horns. The champion who comes into Odin’s dwelling [Valhalla] does not lament his death. I shall not enter his hall with words of fear upon my lips. The Æsir will welcome me. Death comes without lamenting… Eager am I to depart. The Dísir summon me home, those whom Odin sends for me [Valkyries] from the halls of the Lord of Hosts. Gladly shall I drink ale in the high-seat with the Æsir. The days of my life are ended. I laugh as I die.

The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.

The very provision of benches by the council or the corporation acknowledges the human need to be private in public, to be conspicuously idle, to have nothing better to do.

On the back benches, you can have your say but no power to do anything.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

As I followed Margo's directions through the maze of one-way streets, we saw a few people sleeping on the sidewalk or sitting on benches, but nobody was moving. Margo rolled down the window, and I felt the thick air blow across my face, warmer than night ought to be. I glanced over and saw strands of her hair blowing all around her face. Even though I could see her there, I felt entirely alone among these big and empty buildings, like I'd survived the apocalypse and the world had been given to me, this whole and amazing and endless world, mine for the exploring.

[The papists] ought to have sympathy with us weak, poor Christians, and not condemn us or make fun of us because we are learning so childishly to toddle along the benches, nay, to creep in the mire, and cannot skip and dance, on such light feet and legs, over and outside of God's commandments, as they do, the strong heroes and giants ... God forbid that we should!

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.

The Marianne Vos Route goes through the seven villages of Aalburg, where I grew up, and celebrates my World and Olympic titles with a number of benches along the route, where you can stop and rest your legs. You'll see the white windmill in Meeuwen and, in Babylonienbroek, a statue of the silver bike I rode to celebrate my Olympic track win.

Mathura railway station should be a blend of heritage look with modernisation like escalator and better waiting rooms for general class passengers. Instead of taking rest on the ground, the passengers in general waiting rooms should be provided benches.

Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.

When I was growing in the Callope project, we had an oval parkway. Pavement ran around this whole thing. We'd skate or ride bicycles. There were benches and trees out there. It was paradise to us. They finished building it the same year I was born.

Eloquence wins its great and enduring fame quite as much from the benches of our opponents as from those of our friends.

The best brains of the nation may be found on the last benches of the classroom.

Ladies who were no better than they should be, whose dresses were too tight, too bright and too all the things Magnus liked most, lounged on velvet-covered benches along the walls.

When someone who's been homeless and actually had to take meals on the handout or steal purses on the backs of park benches to be able to eat, not that that was right. My head was definitely not in the right place when I was out there using but when you share your greatest weaknesses and the most intimate parts of your story, I think it makes a real impact on people. I think what comes from the heart reaches the heart.

And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.

I remember borrowing my mum's Instamatic 110 camera as a kid and doing still lifes of tennis balls and benches and thinking they were going to be something really amazing. They ended up being really bad.

I don't like to think of goals I set at the new year as resolutions. I like to think of them as summits on my personal mountain. Each year gets me closer to the dreams I want to achieve, and the goals are those benches to sit and enjoy the view along the way.

Benches and books have things in common beyond the fact that they're generally to do with sitting. Both are forms of public privacy, intimate spaces widely shared.

And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

I grew up in my father's laboratory and played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

I can't get enough of London! I love all the picnic benches, the old-school phone booths and parks in the middle of the city.

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop . . . To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden.

This is the third time that, in the course of six years, during which I have had the lead of the Opposition in the House of Commons, I have stormed the Treasury Benches: twice, fruitlessly, the third time with a tin kettle to my tail which rendered the race hopeless. You cannot, therefore, be surprised, that I am a little wearied of these barren victories, which like Alma, Inkerman, and Balaclava, may be glorious but are certainly nothing more.

Silly gardeners! We buy pretty, comfortable benches and position them oh so carefully. But does the gardener ever sit? No! We perch momentarily and then jump up to do that next thing we see.

Most of the hotel gym's are not adequate. I mean you might be able to train your arms, but you aren't going to be able to train legs, back, or even chest if they don't have dumbbells and benches.

Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us.

I am pleased to see from the laughter on the Ministerial benches that there is no implication on their part to take Sir Oswald Mosley too seriously. It can easily be seen to-day that this idea of a dictator is gradually falling down.

An American should be able choose to work in a place where he is with his kind of people and not find that at the counters, desk or benches they will be forced to work, side by side, with all types of people of all races; that in the lunchrooms, rest rooms, recreation rooms, they will be compelled by law to mingle with persons and races which all their lives they have by free choice, avoided in social and business intercourse.

There are some in black robes sitting on federal benches all across this country. They're Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and even conservatives that pervert the Constitution.

I starved and slept on park benches. I wrapped myself in the pages of my manuscript to keep warm. For two and a half years I took odd jobs; nothing was going to deter me.

At one of the games I broadcast at Florida State a few years back, the mercury soared to 105 degrees, and you try attempting to look composed and professional, providing insight from the benches, while sweat pours into your eyes.

In my seaside town, there is a plethora of benches, each one bearing a little brass plate commemorating a deceased occupant. You sit with ghosts.

Okay, you're right about that. But this whole ghost thing's irritating." "Park benches are irritating to you in some moods." "Depends on whether or not I want to sit down.

From the directives that govern the way we do business to the chilling effect of the eurozone crisis on our exports, the European Union pervades our daily lives like never before. Like many of my colleagues on the Tory benches, I believe that renegotiating the terms of our membership is vital for this country's long-term prosperity.

Anyone who's tuned in to the House of Commons TV coverage knows the benches are often empty. I like that. I'm a big fan of political transparency. It's good for us to know which debates the MPs consider important enough to show up for, and which not.

None of us want to live in a society where people are forced to sleep in shop doorways, on park benches or in dangerous, run-down buildings.