Top 1200 Old English Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.

Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it.

I try to squeeze in a workout whenever I can, even if it's doing squats with my 7-month-old in the kitchen or jumping on the trampoline with my 5-year-old.

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning

One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain.

The fear of old age is something that one feels when they're younger. Once you get to being old, you're already there, so you don't even think about it anymore.

you boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.

I love old moons. There is something humanized about them; they are dulled a little, and rich in color. One can stare all night at an old moon.

A French observer is surprised to hear how often an English or an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; ... This abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the English and American lawyer, this servitude of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more conservative inclinations in England and America than in France.

I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

Don't go to eighth grade...don't talk about something old...don't bring up old memories that have nothing to do with who we are now. THIS is all that matters! TODAY.

I think there's an interesting contradiction of having a young face and an old soul. There's something funny about it, and it also allows you to reinvent being old.

I've got cheekier with age. You can get away with murder when you're 71 years old. People just think I'm a silly old fool.

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

What else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That’s the reality of getting old, and I guess that’s really the crux of the matter. I’m not ready to be old yet.

The early Church had nothing but the Old Testament. The New Testament lies hidden in the Old; the Old Testament lies open in the New.

In fact, I was too dumb to save any of the old comic books or the old artwork. I used to give them away.

My highest compliment is when someone comes up to me to say, "My 14-year-old daughter, or my 12-year-old son read your book and loved it." I cannot conceive of a greater compliment than that - to write something that as an adult I find satisfying, but also that manages to reach a curious 13- or 14-year-old.

I have one car that works; it's fast and safe: an Audi 5. And I have two old cars that never work: an old Peugeot convertible, and an Alfa Romeo Giulia.

My son now is 22 months old, he's been playing since he was 12 months old and he gets standing ovations on the drums. He's been with us since he was 10 weeks old, he's been on the drums. He's got blisters on his fingers before he can even talk.

There are old people in San Francisco because my parents still live there. The young tech bros don't see old people or children. The Mission district, where they live and work, they don't see children or old people. That statement revealed, to me, the blinders that the techies are wearing.

There's still this idea that women are over by the time they are 40, so that they can't play the love interest opposite a 50-year-old man. George Clooney is 52, but he's always on the arm of a thirt-something actress. He gets Vera Farmiga. You don't get a 50-year-old woman on the arm of a 30-year-old guy.

I was way behind in my maturity. I was a 30-year-old acting like a 23-year-old. So when I was 21, I was probably acting like a 15-year-old.

Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

I am an old-fashioned preacher of the old-time religion, that has warmed this cold world's heart for two thousand years.

There's an old Southern saying that if you're worried about your weight, clothes, or getting old, then you don't have any real problems.

I grow old, I grow old, the center will not fold. In youth I had hardening of the categories and looked for the father and the mother in every lover. Then I cracked. Then I fragmented. Then the old man in my soul found the god in herself, not in some Jungian fairy tale but in the flesh that fell from the bones and the words that came into my mouth when the look went out of their eyes.

I enjoy the old-fashioned idea of, like, His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, those old movies.

I was 28 years old playing a 16-year-old. I just kept my mouth shut. I never talked about it.

My doctor tells me I should start slowing it down - but there are more old drunks than there are old doctors so let's all have another round.

I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.

While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy.

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat." I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.

I used to be a good party boy. I'm old. I'm an old man. You pay the consequences. I'm just fine with a couple of drinks, no more than that.

I'm damn near 37 years old, and I'm jumping up and down on the bed like my 10-year-old. I was a wild man

I'd like to see a return to old-school values, classic service and the old-world glamour of what dining - going out - is supposed to be.

Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

I am just pitifully nostalgic. I can't help but roll my eyes at myself frequently. I mean, I still shoot black-and-white film. And I am constantly reminiscing about the 'good old days.' I'm 28 years old. There haven't even been that many 'good old days.' But still, I love to look back.

Burns from dropped matches, Ms. Lane? Matches one might have dropped while flirting with a pernicious Fae, Ms. Lane? Have you any idea the value of this rug?” I didn’t think his nostrils could flare any wider. His eyes were black flame. “Pernicious? Good grief, is English your second language? Third?” Only someone who’d learned English from a dictionary would use such a word. “Fifth,” he snarled. “Answer me.

In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

When you're on a movie and the production department says, "We need old photographs of you - your character - when you were 20-years-old." I usually tell them it's in storage or I had a fire. I go back to these old photos and there's never a good photo or they're of times that I'm so glad I'm out of. They have nothing to do with the character that you're playing, so it feels false. That's one of the hardest things for me in terms of looking back.

On tight money: It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom - the old trickle-down theory.

The Autumn is old; The sere leaves are flying; He hath gather'd up gold, And now he is dying;- Old age, begin sighing!

Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

Sometimes I feel that old desire. Then my body tells me it is 50 years old. I take the easy way instead.

Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.

I enjoy the old-fashioned idea of, like, 'His Girl Friday' and 'Bringing Up Baby', those old movies.

Appreciating old wine is like making love to a very old lady. It is possible. It can even be enjoyable. But it requires a bit of imagination.

There are more old drunkards than old doctors.

I was always Armie. There couldn't be a 90-year-old Armand and a 9-day-old one. And I heard enough jokes about baking soda.

perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.

Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself.

I don't know what the big deal is about old age. Old people who shine from the inside look 10 to 20 years younger.