Biographies Quotes - Page 6

• For me too, the periodic table was a passion. ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.

  Freeman Dyson

  Passion, Science, Thinking

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• In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.

  Steve Pavlina

  Strong, Reading, Successful

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• I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'

  Alexandra Roach

  Daughter, Mother, Months

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• I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

  Walter Isaacson

  Abundance, Subjects, Materials

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• His [Erwin Schrödinger's] private life seemed strange to bourgeois people like ourselves. But all this does not matter. He was a most lovable person, independent, amusing, temperamental, kind and generous, and he had a most perfect and efficient brain.

  Max Born

  Independent, Science, People

  Max Born (2014). “My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate”, p.270, Routledge

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• I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

  Pierre Boulez

  Firsts, Composer

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• Biographies of British pop celebrities are terrible.

  Mick Jagger

  British, Pops, Terrible

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• My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.

  Abigail Spencer

  Father, Reading, Vanity

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I would recommend you watch the movie 'Jobs' starring Ashton Kutcher, if you don't have time to read Jobs's biography.

  Gene Simmons

  Inspirational, Jobs, Watches

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• A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

  Blake Bailey

  Men, Giving, Touching

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• If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Spring, Real, Book

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• I feel I have to live a little longer before I write a sequel to my auto biography which covers my experiences up until October 1991.

  Holly Johnson

  Writing, Littles, October

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• I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

  Robert Caro

  Zero, Book, Writing

  "Robert Caro: a life with LBJ and the pursuit of power" by Chris McGreal, www.theguardian.com. June 09, 2012.

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• I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

  Robert Caro

  Believe, Writing, Trying

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• The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

  William James

  Order, Space, Revolution

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism and the Conception of Thruth”, p.50, William James

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• My price is five dollars for a miniature on ivory, and I have engaged three or four at that price. My price for profiles is one dollar, and everybody is willing to engage me at that price

  Samuel Morse

  Science, Ivory, Dollars

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• As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It’s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

  Scott Lynch

  Decision, Maps, Ruins

  Scott Lynch (2015). “The Gentleman Bastard Series 3-Book Bundle: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, The Republic of Thieves”, p.801, Del Rey

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• I built the solenoid and with great expectations late one evening I pressed the switch which sent a current of 40 amperes through the coil. The result was spectacular-a deafening explosion, the apparatus disappeared, all windows were blown in or out, a wall caved in, and thus ended my pioneering experiment on liquid hydrogen cooled coils!

  Nicholas Kurti

  Wall, Science, Expectations

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• This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Oxygen, Claims

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• One of the grandest figures that ever frequented Eastern Yorkshire was William Smith, the distinguished Father of English Geology. My boyish reminiscence of the old engineer, as he sketched a triangle on the flags of our yard, and taught me how to measure it, is very vivid. The drab knee-breeches and grey worsted stockings, the deep waistcoat, with its pockets well furnished with snuff-of which ample quantities continually disappeared within the finely chiselled nostril-and the dark coat with its rounded outline and somewhat quakerish cut, are all clearly present to my memory.

  William Crawford Williamson

  Memories, Father, Science

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• In trying to evaluate Hopkins' unique contribution to biochemistry it may perhaps be said that he alone amongst his contemporaries succeeded in formulating the subject. Among others whose several achievements in their own fields may have surpassed his, no one has ever attempted to unify and correlate biochemical knowledge so as to form a comprehensible picture of the cell and its relation to life, reproduction and function.

  Marjory Stephenson

  Science, Unique, Cells

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• ...learning chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up and fix one's thought, as to possess it entirely for some time; but when that amusement is over, nature will return, and be where it was, being rather diverted than overcome by such speculations.

  Gilbert Burnet

  Science, Overcoming, Amusement

  Gilbert Burnet (1745). “An Exposition of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England”, p.176

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• A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “Hyperion”, p.57, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

  David Maraniss

  Writing, People, Perspective

  Interview with Carlos J. Queirós, www.aarp.org. April, 2006.

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• Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Book, Writing, Curiosity

  "A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography". Book by Evelyn Waugh, 1964.

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