Odd Quotes - Page 32

• ... Waiter! raw beef-steak for the gentleman's eye,-nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient-damned odd standing in the open street half-an-hour, with your eye against a lamp.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Eye

  Charles Dickens (2015). “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Volume 1 (of 2) (Illustrations)”, p.10, E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

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• Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

  Jane Smiley

  Avid, Names, Poetry

  Jane Smiley (2008). “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel”, p.97, Anchor

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• The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

  Theodore Zeldin

  Laughter, Order, People

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• I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.

  Nancy Friday

  Men, Ducks, Feminist

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• What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.

  Bertrand Russell

  Balance, Atheism, Unhappy

  Bertrand Russell (1944). “The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery”

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• I've probably done the odd thing. I've probably done more than I would have done and some things you don't say no to. You don't say no to working with "The Simpsons"... the greatest comedy show on television. You mustn't. Even though going to my bad judgment, I remember saying that all I can do is make this show slightly worse.

  Ricky Gervais

  Odd Things, Done, Television

  Source: www.hitfix.com

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• I have this odd tendency to be really sarcastic when I'm uncomfortable and I don't really know why but it just comes out and it's come out since I was a child.

  Mila Kunis

  Sarcastic, Children, Tendencies

  Source: movies.about.com

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• In my first stand-up acts there wasn't material even. You know, I'd go on stage and cry and read a Dear John letter or gut fish on stage. I could be odd - and it's what interested me as a comedian.

  Bobcat Goldthwait

  Comedian, Goes On, Letters

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Philosophy is an odd thing... There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

  Stephen Fry

  Philosophy, Live Your Life, Odd Things

  "Big Think Interview With Stephen Fry". bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• The Bible is forbidding when you start to read it. The language is odd. The stories start and stop herkily-jerkily. The characters behave in inexplicable ways. It takes a little bit of time to get into the rhythm of the book. I found reading the first 15 chapters of Genesis very very difficult. Once I got past there, I loved reading, and found it very easy. When you get used to the Bible, it becomes thrilling to read (like any great book - I just had exactly the same experience with the Odyssey).

  David Plotz

  Book, Reading, Character

  "Biblically Speaking". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

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• Every time I finish a record, it's sort of feels like, "I can't believe that I'm hanging out and having a conversation, and people are gonna listen to this." It's an odd thing, but it's really cool.

  Chris Hardwick

  Believe, People, Odd Things

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Simple, Mind Love

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• When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  God, Father, Philosophy

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• Odd how often blood is shed to obtain freedom from those in power. Oppressors must be the most insecure people in the world.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Leadership, Wisdom, Spring

  Twitter post from Dec 08, 2013

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• Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

  Samuel Johnson

  Long, Literature, Lasts

  In James Boswell 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' (1791) vol. 2, p. 449 (20 March 1776)

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• It is an odd fact that what we now know of the mental and emotional life of infants surpasses what we comprehend about adolescents. . . . That they do not confide in us is hardly surprising. They use wise discretion in disguising themselves with the caricatures we design for them. And unfortunately for us, as for them, too often adolescents retain the caricatured personalities they had merely meant to try on for size.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Wise, Emotional, Design

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• Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.

  Northrop Frye

  Fall, Together, Special

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.412, University of Toronto Press

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• In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.

  Franz Grillparzer

  World, Fossils, Bones

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• Look, this is an odd question, but you're kind of cute and you're pretty nice to me. Are you drunk? It's OK if you are.

  Drew Carey

  Cute, Nice, Drunk

  "The Drew Carey Show". www.imdb.com. 1995-2004.

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• it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes--
  I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
  And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible

  Gregory Corso

  Love, Girl, Mother

  "Marriage" l. 100 (1960)

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• Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method.... I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

  Ian Hacking

  Science, Technology, Reality

  Ian Hacking (1983). “Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science”, p.135, Cambridge University Press

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• Yul Brynner's performance in "The King and I," . . . can no longer be regarded as a feat of acting or even endurance. After 30-odd . . . Mr Brynner is, quite simply, The King.

  Frank Rich

  Kings, Acting, Endurance

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• The end of despots is always odd?exhilarating to those who suffered their tyrannies, and to those who hold despotism in contempt, and anti-climatic at the same time, the discovery that these tyrants were petty, frightened men after all.

  Fouad Ajami

  Spring, Men, Discovery

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• It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

  Michael Shannon

  Couple, Play, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've been able to read people my entire life, because I've interviewed people now for 20-some-odd years. So you can read people that way.

  Sean Hannity

  Years, People, Able

  "Medium John Edward Explains Ability". "The Hannity Show", www.foxnews.com. June 17, 2009.

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