Peculiar Quotes - Page 24

• A thing that has always baffled me about women is that they will saturate themselves with a pint of perfume, a pound of sachet powder, an evil-smelling lip rouge, a peculiar-smelling hair ointment and a half-dozen varieties of body oils, and then have the effrontery to complain of the aroma of a fine dollar cigar.

  Groucho Marx

  Women, Hair, Oil

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• The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic - just one of those unfortunate things.

  G. Gordon Liddy

  Uncles, Unfortunate Things, Attics

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• SARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body placed in it.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Kindness, Greek, Coffins

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.208, University of Georgia Press

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• The city has become a serious menace to our civilization It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.

  Josiah Strong

  Civilization, Cities, Serious

  Josiah Strong (1963). “Our Country”

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• I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, — who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, — and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes — each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs — quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words.

  Laurence Sterne

  Book, Thinking, Ideas

  Laurence Sterne, James P. Browne (1873). “The Works of Lawrence Sterne: In Four Volumes, with a Life of the Author, Written by Himself”, p.333

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• Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not akin to what we know on Earth as life? It is in this that lies the peculiar interest of Mars.

  Percival Lowell

  Lying, Mars, Earth

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• If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants.

  Sidney Lanier

  Strong, Men, Branches

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• Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

  Jonathan Raban

  Art, Real, Men

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• I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.

  Louise Brown

  Abnormal, Normal And Abnormal

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• The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses.

  Johannes Peter Muller

  Philosophy, Medicine, Perception

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• To me, the whole idea of fame and I think it can be a real test of somebody, of who they are. You know, 'cause some strange things happen. I've seen some peculiar things as far as a person just living their life.

  Tobey Maguire

  Real, Thinking, Ideas

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• I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

  Kevin Powers

  War, Yellow, Bird

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• The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Writing, Mean, Desire

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• You could say I'm a character actress. Or maybe a character actress who does peculiar, interesting lead roles. Does that make sense?

  Imelda Staunton

  Character, Interesting, Doe

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• There are countless dimensions filled with beings of other orders. Now this may sound peculiar to some people, but it was only several hundred years ago that we invented something called the microscope. Since then worlds whose existence we did not suspect have become commonplace

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Order, Years

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• Belief is a very peculiar thing: we tend to put more store in a belief we like than a fact we hate.

  Stephen Tobolowsky

  Hate, Facts, Belief

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• What I do believe is theatre is a medium with a peculiar ability to air vital issues.

  Samuel West

  Believe, Air, Issues

  "The Guardian profile: Sam West" by Michael Billington, www.theguardian.com. September 16, 2005.

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• Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

  William Eggleston

  Drawing, Might, Photographer

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• My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

  F. H. Bradley

  Fall, Self, Circles

  "Only a great writer can share the suffering of Auschwitz" by Andrew Brown, www.theguardian.com. June 9, 2014.

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• The tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive.It is the taking by the community for the use of the community of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by nature be attained.

  Henry George

  Fall, Taken, Land

  Henry George (2006). “Progress and Poverty”, p.299, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

  Character, Literature, Difficult

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• I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn't even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

  Fred Frith

  Football, Laughing So Hard, France

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• The Americans are extremely gadget minded people and American gadgets have a peculiar characteristic: they work.

  George Mikes

  Funny, Humorous, America

  George Mikes (1959). “How to scrape skies: the United States explored, rediscovered and explained”

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• It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

  Christopher Lasch

  Bourgeoisie, Horror, Attractive

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• I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.

  Naguib Mahfouz

  Order, Political, Suffering

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