Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself. ' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.
I use the verb 'to torment,' as I observed to be your own method, instead of 'to instruct,' supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.
Remember this-that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.
One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.
If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.
Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.
Containment is a strategy for losers! But as General George S. Patton famously observed, Americans play to win all the time. Americans don't play to lose.
When people are temperate in their behavior, in their lives, someone who is addictive or extreme or obsessive can't understand how people can just go through their lives in the middle, and people who are rational and balanced can't understand the opposite. I'm one who's in the extreme camp in almost every area of my life and I always have been. I've observed that I'm in a minority, but I never understand people who are measured.
Aunt Jane observed, the second time She tumbled off a bus, 'The step is short from the Sublime To the Ridiculous.
Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.
It is the theory that decides what can be observed.
The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.
But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.
I've observed a few things about the few really great people I've had a chance to meet and cover. . . They need to be around people. You and I require sleep. They require people.
Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.
In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property.
The thing is I never want to be an observer, it's only in retrospect that I wish I had observed.
Nothing is real unless it is observed
We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.
I have often observed that extremely violent noise and activity go with good-fellowship and heightened spirits.
