Iain Banks Quotes
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
Quotes to Explore
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That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.
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The scramble to get into college is going to be so terrible in the next few years that students are going to put up with almost anything, even an education.
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Fitness, defending, the mental stuff - those were all weaknesses of mine. And I turned those into strengths.
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Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.
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Someone told me, 'When you go see Pearl Jam, it's going to be a spiritual experience,' and it was. It was my first time seeing them live, and I've been a lifelong fan. Eddie Vedder's voice is a million times better live, and I couldn't believe the passion he put into every single song.
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Leaving all the glamour and air-kissing aside, at the end of the day, fashion is about operations and getting things done. The best way to be successful, therefore, is to learn from the people who do it best.
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I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.
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The West has become the world model; developing countries are dreaming of living like us, which is impossible. They should reject our model, because it is not sustainable. Developing countries should even give us the example, but unfortunately that's not what happens.
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I think we all carry the seeds of our own destruction. You really have to be aware that just because something is good, it doesn't mean it's not going to trigger a self-destructive impulse.
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As a girl who was raised on the idea that we should give back to our community as much as possible, I believe that we have more power than we think when it comes to making change.
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Glamour is about feeling good in your own skin.
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One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
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There has been no persecution I have not tasted, no oppression I have not suffered. I neither care for Paradise nor fear Hell. If I see my nation's belief secured, I will not even care about burning in Hell, for while my body is burning, my heart will be as if in a rose garden.
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I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
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My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I've had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm's way until they could be their own guides.
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I was actually not some sort of a child prodigy by any stretch.
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Custom adapts itself to expediency.
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No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
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One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
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In a crazy way, writing is a lot like any kind of very complex game - like chess, where you have the knowledge as you're composing all of the ramifications of each move, of each choice you make.
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Snatam Kaur is a yogini, and I find her music deeply spiritual. I feel more love and I feel more peace when I listen to her music.
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If people want to know the truth, why don't they just come to me and ask?
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We've got a very difficult situation created by this embrace of the so-called Arab Spring. And that's not getting better. It's getting worse. The carnage for the people of Syria is horrific, and it's quite frankly too little, too late to reverse a lot of that.
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I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
