“Think of the country mouse and of the town mouse, and of the alarm and trepidation of the town mouse.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 924 of 4756
“Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast: but of the things which thou hast, select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not. At the same time, however, take care that thou dost not, through being so pleased with them, accustom thyself to overvalue them, so as to be disturbed if ever thou shouldst not have them.”
“You know, I think when I reflect on it, I think there's certainly a sense of history. When you have ambitions to play this game, you want to be one of the best ever, and you want to play so well and be so effective that you want people to remember your name 100 years from now.”
“Where Miles Davis can make you feel things.That's what I'm looking for from young guys. I'm looking for somebody who not just has a command of the instrument, but can actually say something to make you feel something, make you think about something.”
“Vivere est cogitare. (To think is to live)”
“This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.”
“Let us assume that entertainment is the sole end of reading; even so I think you would hold that no mental employment is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding. Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. Through the night-watches, on all our journeyings, and in our hours of ease, it is our unfailing companion.”
“Who can love the man he fears. or by who he thinks he is himself feared?”
“There is no one so old as to not think they may live a day longer.”
“I have never yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.”
“In fact the whole passion ordinarily termed love (and heaven help me if I can think of any other term to apply to it) is of such exceeding triviality that I see nothing that I think comparable with it.”
“Countries should think of Haiti not as a place where to do charity but a place where to invest and do business. And doing business in Haiti means poverty reduction.”
“I had to be careful. A mistake I made when I submitted ideas initially was that one of them was too much like Elephant and Piggie, thinking that was what it needed to be. That's not what Mo was looking for. But I did definitely keep them in the back of my mind. It was tricky. Like Mo Willems was saying, it had to be something that Elephant and Piggie would like to read, yet we shouldn't make anything that was too much like Elephant and Piggie, because why would you want to do that?”
“My questions did surprise some people. Others didn't bat an eye. That happens with all my books - I'll read them in a certain mood and think, "Gosh, what was I thinking that day? This is really kind of odd." But on other days it seems totally normal to me.”
“I think the work ethic that was established in my family was something very important. If you plant the seed, if you sow sparingly and reap sparingly. If you sow in abundance you'll reap in abundance.”
“I don't listen to a lot of music at all. I think that's very bizarre too, because it was such a comfort zone for me. But I don't know if I had my fill, but I don't listen to a lot of music, because I'm creating it.”
“I think for much of the middle classes, nothing could be more fantastic than to have a contact with fame. But once you have that contact with fame and find out how vacuous it is, that it doesn't answer anything or supply any ultimate revelation to cosmic dilemmas and you're still left with yourself, then it's back to the drawing room with fading light and one light bulb out in the very expensive chandelier that no one has bothered to replace.”
“I do think it's interesting when people are born into families that at one point had huge amounts of money and that money has kind of vanished over the generations and they're sort of the last vestiges. You see that these people live really quite modestly and yet, somehow the way the clothes fit them, they still have some kind of strange genetic advantage over the rest of us. There's always these weird things in which you detect the legacy. There's a pair of cufflinks that you look at and go, "Oh, my God! These had to come from the Romanovs."”
“Freedom is a messy affair, and sometimes people get their feelings hurt but we think the trade-off is worth the aggravation.”
“We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”