Peculiar famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.
-- Agatha Christie -
Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
The good must merit God's peculiar care; But who but God can tell us who they are?
-- Alexander Pope -
Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate and rot.
-- Alexander Pope -
Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.
-- Alice Walker -
My works are all expressly my own - pleasingly peculiar, not a borrowed stroke in one of them. I write as I feel and as I don't feel.
-- Amanda McKittrick Ros -
Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.
-- Angelina Grimke -
All the more recent work on alkaptonuria has... strengthened the belief that the homogentisic acid excreted is derived from tyrosin, but why alkaptonuric individuals pass the benzene ring of their tyrosin unbroken and how and where the peculiar chemical change from tyrosin to homogentisic acid is brought about, remain unsolved problems.
-- Archibald Garrod -
To be a housewife is to be a member of a very peculiar occupation, one with characteristics like no other. The nature of the duties to be performed, the method of payment, the form of supervision, the tenure system, the market in which the workers find jobs, and the physical hazzards are all very different from the way things are in other occupations.
-- Barbara Bergmann -
Ramses had always been fond of Helen, in his peculiar fashion, but if he had looked at me as he was looking at her, I would have sent for a constable.
-- Barbara Mertz -
Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto... has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.
-- Ben Shahn -
Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.
-- Bette Davis -
If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No.'
-- Brad Leithauser -
Happy Ending I did with Paul Winfield. There was a play- within- the- play and I was his mother - which is a peculiar bit of casting, to say the least.
-- Brett Somers -
The most distinctive characteristic which differentiates mathematics from the various branches of empirical science, and which accounts for its fame as the queen of the sciences, is no doubt the peculiar certainty and necessity of its results.
-- Carl Gustav Hempel -
I try to get to those peculiar and particular things that you never think of to say.
-- Carly Simon -
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.
-- Charles Darwin -
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
-- Charles Darwin -
Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.
-- Charles Sanders Peirce -
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
-- Chinua Achebe -
It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.
-- Christopher Lasch -
It was a peculiar marriage of interests- Lord Averill and Captain Byrne and Lord Bayar and Han Alister agreeing on anything was as rare as gold in Ragmarket.
-- Cinda Williams Chima -
I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.
-- Claire Messud -
The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.
-- Clive Bell -
All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.
-- Clive Bell -
The people of western Missouri are, in some respects, very peculiar. We will take Jackson county where I was born for instance. In that section the people seemed to be born fighters, the instinct being inherited from a long line of ancestors.
-- Cole Younger -
That's one of the peculiar things about bad moods - we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true.
-- David D. Burns -
Life has a peculiar habit -- once established, it stays. Sometimes it even thrives.
-- David Gerrold -
The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin.
-- David Harvey -
Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.
-- David Pilbeam -
One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
-- Djuna Barnes -
Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.
-- Edgar Allan Poe -
The peculiar characteristic of classical music is that it is really better than it sounds.
-- Edgar Wilson Nye -
But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.
-- Edwin Percy Whipple -
Humans were peculiar. They were by turns squeamish and appallingly violent.
-- Eileen Wilks -
Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.
-- Elbert Hubbard -
Art itself has become an extraordinary thing - the activity of peculiar people - people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.
-- Eric Gill -
War is such a peculiar thing - inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning - even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops
-- Errol Morris -
You don't have to be peculiar to find God,
-- Evelyn Underhill -
The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.
-- Fay Weldon -
The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.
-- Frank Rich -
I have this peculiar ability to be able to anticipate mouth movements on screen and fill them with words or sound.
-- Frank Welker -
The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic - just one of those unfortunate things.
-- G. Gordon Liddy -
Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.
-- G. Stanley Hall -
None of that is necessary. It's not as if we're in a situation where it is us or them.There's something peculiar about talking about the moral status of animals, when we are killing and eating them for no reason whatsoever.
-- Gary L. Francione -
My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.
-- George A. Romero -
Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.
-- George Eliot -
At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being.
-- Giovanni Pico della Mirandola -
I'm less confident now than I've ever been. In this peculiar craft, confidence is something you spend a lifetime losing. I used to be frightened only one night a week but now I'm frightened of every performance. I mean really frightened.
-- Glenda Jackson -
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
-- Grace Paley -
The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante -
Whatever kind of seed is sown in a field, prepared in due season, a plant of that same kind, marked with the peculiar qualities of the seed, springs up in it.
-- Guru Nanak -
But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.
-- Gustav Mahler -
I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.
-- Hans Blix -
We Americans are a peculiar people. We are for the underdog, no matter how much of a dog he is.
-- Happy Chandler -
I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.
-- Harper Lee -
Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery.
-- Helen Bosanquet -
That indescribable expression peculiar to people who hope they have not been asleep, but know they have.
-- Helen Hunt Jackson -
The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.
-- Henri Matisse -
Bacteria and parasites cannot cause disease processes unless they find their own peculiar morbid soil in which to grow and multiply.
-- Henry Lindlahr -
This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
-- Hilary Mantel -
There is a peculiar pathos in the extinction of a nation.
-- Homer Hulbert -
Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
-- Honore de Balzac -
I've got a very peculiar sort of fame, based on being on the telly. It doesn't mean you have the lifestyle people expect.
-- Ian Hislop -
The advertising agency, as it stands today, is a peculiar manifestation of American business life of the twentieth century - glossy, brash, and insecure.
-- Ilka Chase -
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
-- Jack Kerouac -
I'm writing out of desperation. I felt compelled to write to make sense of it to myself - so I don't end up saying peculiar things like 'I'm black and I'm proud.' I write so I don't end up as a set of slogans and clichés.
-- Jamaica Kincaid -
Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.
-- James Bryce -
Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.
-- James Dickey -
I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know.
-- James Randi -
Taoism ... is the Religion of the Tao, a term meaning Path or Way, but denoting in this peculiar case the way, course or movement of the Universe, her processes and methods. In other words, Taoism is the Religion of Heaven and Earth, of the Cosmos, of the World or Nature in the broadest sense of these words. Hence we may call it Naturism.
-- Jan Jakob Maria de Groot -
The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a peculiar flavor, like none other.
-- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin -
In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.
-- Jelly Roll Morton -
My sister is a very peculiar lady. When we were young, I wasn't allowed to talk to her friends. Now I'm not allowed to talk to her children, nor are they permitted to see me. This is the nature of the lady. Doesn't bother me at all.
-- Joan Fontaine -
People have a peculiar pleasure in making converts, that is, in causing others to enjoy what they enjoy, thus finding their own likeness represented and reflected back to them.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
-- John Dewey -
Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.
-- John Dryden -
I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.
-- John Hurt -
It is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society; the application of those rules to individuals in society would seem to be the duty of other departments.
-- John Marshall -
The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional.
-- John Marshall -
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
-- John McGahern -
Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
-- John Ruskin -
All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.
-- John Ruskin -
In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.
-- Jonathan Swift -
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind
-- Joseph Campbell -
I am willing to admit that if the agriculturists are oppressed by peculiar burdens, they ought to be relieved from them, or be allowed a fair and just protection equivalent to all such peculiar burdens.
-- Joseph Hume -
No art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil.
-- Joshua Reynolds -
The city has become a serious menace to our civilization It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.
-- Josiah Strong -
I think there's something peculiar about me that I haven't died. It doesn't make sense but I refuse to die.
-- Judy Garland -
It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.
-- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel -
She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.
-- Kate Chopin -
All my life I have studies the peculiar powers of music. It has a force of its own that few would deny.
-- Katherine Neville -
The existence of God is not logically necessary, and yet, on the basis of some profound peculiar empirical order in the universe, it seems that He exists as the ultimate uncreated Being, implying a paradox, as no logically unnecessary entity can be uncreated. This paradox is the ultimate question asked by God, who is nothing but the ultimate questioner.
-- Kedar Joshi -
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory -is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation - both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.
-- L. Harrison Matthews -
The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.
-- Lewis H. Lapham -
I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.
-- Louise Brown -
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
-- Lytton Strachey
