Quotes by Author

Quotes by Authors - F

Clifton Fadiman

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

Faith and the Muse

...mad love is religion enough for my heart.

Oriana Fallaci

I sat at the typewriter for the first time and fell in love with the words that emerged like drops, one by one, and remained on the white sheet of paper ... every drop became something that if spoken would have flown away, but on the sheets as words, became solidified, whether they were good or bad.

There's plenty of sun in the lands of Islam: a sun that is white, violent, blidning. But Moslem women never see it - there eyes are conditioned to gloom like the eyes of moles. From the darkness of the mother's womb they pass into the darkness of the tomb. And in all this darkness nobody takes any notice of them.

James T. Farrell

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

William Faulkner

(from Light in August) Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

William Feather

No man is a failure who enjoys life.

Vicki Feaver

Coat
Sometimes I have wanted
to throw you off
like a heavy coat.

Sometimes I have said
you would not let me
breathe or move.

But now that I am free
to choose light clothes
or none at all

I feel the cold
and all the time I think
how warm it used to be.

Jules Feiffer

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

Francois FeNelon

If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.

Fermat

(from Fermat's last theorem) On the other hand, it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as a sum of two fourth powers or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Richard P. Feynman

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things...

Edgar R. Fiedler

Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard).

Julia Allen Field

(from Reflections on the Death of an Elephant) We cannot glimpse the essential life of a caged animal, only the shadow of [her] former beauty.

Henry Fielding

(from Amelia) It hath often been said that it is not death but dying that is terrible.

Eugene Fields

Wynken, Blynken and Nod
Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,-
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three,
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song
As the rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea-
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish,-
Never afeared are we!"
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,-
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:
'Twas all so preety a sail it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:-
Wynken, Blynken and Nod.

W. C. Fields

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.

"Hey! Who took the cork off my lunch??!"

Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child -- if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.

I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes.

If at first you don't succeed, try again - if you still fail, give up - no sense being a damn fool about it.

Karen Finley

Americans are not intuitive enough. We have to be feminized. The national identity is an erect penis. The national ideology is to go for it, no matter what. We rape women and other countries. The way we treat the earth is the way we treat women. We have no cultural experiences, no place for the imagination.

That's one reason there's so much drug abuse: people are not shown other ways to alter their consciousness. All we have is the mall and the video rental shop; that's our cultural experience, our museums.

Joseph Fischer

Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you wont either.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

Gustave Flaubert

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.

(from a letter to Madame Louise Colet, October, 1846) One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, in the same way a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Jean de la Fontaine

Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.

Malcolm S. Forbes

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Henry Ford

Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

E. M. Forster

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

(from A Room With a View) This desire to govern a woman - it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together before they shall enter the garden. But I do love you... I want you to have your own thoughts, even when I hold you in my arms.

John Fowles

(from The Magus, 1965) Night fell again. There was war to the south, but our sector was quiet. The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

Redd Foxx

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Anatole France

The whole art of teaching is only the act of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.

Anne Frank

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Viktor E. Frankl

(from Man's Search for Meaning) We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances -- to choose one's own way.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and feature in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love.

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?" "Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" Whereupon I replied, "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared for her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering -- to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death.

...the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.

The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheaf, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy."

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess master: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds true for human existance.

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

...every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

What is to give light must endure burning.

Benjamin Franklin

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.

In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it away from him. An investment of knowledge always pays the best interest.

Paulo Freire

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Clement Freud

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.

Sigmund Freud

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Max Frisch

(from Homo Faber) Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Robert Frost

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

I am not a teacher but an awakener.

You're searching, Joe, for things that don't exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings -- there are not such things.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Anyone with an active mind lives on tentatives rather than tenets.

Lewis B. Frumkes How to Raise your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children
Athol Fugard

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

R. Buckminster Fuller

God is not a noun; God is a verb.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Thomas Fuller, (1608 - 1661)

The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir.

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.

If you run after two hares, you will catch neither.

It is always darkest just before the day dawneth.