Norman Douglas (George Norman Douglas) Quotes
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.
Quotes to Explore
-
I don't mind talking about 'what might have been,' but I am not one to doubt or regret most of my decisions.
-
Listen to the Bee Gees and you can learn to be a great writer.
-
Polo is the most inviting sport I've ever seen.
-
But eventually it is a game of cricket.
-
Eddie Haas talked a lot about not hitting the ball in the air.
-
I'm someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.
-
The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.
-
I was just the perfect person to play the Mini-Me character.
-
It's better to be skinny than to be fat.
-
The people who used to hold the purse strings were a select group of white, middle-aged men, but that's changing, and the more it continues to change, the more we'll see inclusive stories get told.
-
Protecting eagles from the threat of extinction is a conservation success story that we must prudently safeguard for future generations to come.
-
Everybody in my family cooks, so growing up and being around it... if I was going to spend time with everybody, it was helping them in the kitchen.
-
I love Michelle Williams. I think she's extraordinary. I was such a fan of 'Blue Valentine,' and I heard stories about how Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams worked on that. They lived together for a period of time as rehearsal. From nine in the morning to five at night, living in a space together. The work is really awe-inspiring.
-
I feel increasingly like age is very irrelevant. Quite often, cynicism is confused with wisdom, and my scorn is confused with a knowing, which I don't have.
-
What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.
-
I get so disenfranchised reading the news, because global borders and lines we've created are completely unnecessary. That's just another person on the other side, and it's his bad luck that he was born there and it's my good fortune that I was born here. It's all kind of illogical.
-
Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.
-
P. 27.
-
My French is terrible, and my Spanish is even worse. I find Spanish really difficult. They speak so quickly, whereas in German, it's very clear what they're saying. It's easier to repeat.
-
I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish.
-
Everyone in New York is fluid and thinking and inspiring each other.
-
The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.
-
I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.
-
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.
