John Quotes

To be able to bear provocation is an argument of great reason, and to forgive it of a great mind.

Fear is that passion which hath the greatest power over us, and by which God and His laws take the surest hold of us.

No man's body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.

Truth is the shortest and nearest way to our end, carrying us thither in a straight line.

Some things will not bear much zeal; and the more earnest we are about them, the less we recommend ourselves to the approbation of sober and considerate men.

There is one way whereby we may secure our riches, and make sure friends to ourselves of them,--by laying them out in charity.

If our souls be immortal, this makes amends for the frailties of life and the sufferings of this state.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

Of all parts of wisdom, the practice is the best. Socrates was esteemed the wisest man of his time because he turned his acquired knowledge into morality, and aimed at goodness more than greatness.

Surely modesty never hurt any cause; and the confidence of man seems to me to be much like the wrath of man.

When a man has once forfeited the reputation of his integrity, he is set fast, and nothing will then serve his turn, neither truth nor falsehood.

The gospel chargeth us with piety towards God, and justice and charity to men, and temperance and chastity in reference to ourselves.

Religion in a magistrate strengthens his authority, because it procures veneration, and gains a reputation to it. In all the affairs of this world, so much reputation is in reality so much power.

Whether religion be true or false, it must be necessarily granted to be the only wise principle and safe hypothesis for a man to live and die by.

It is hard to personate and act a part long; for where Truth is not the bottom, Nature will always be endeavoring to return, and will peep and betray herself one time or other.

Do not practise excessive humility.

Ask me a question. Don't say talk about it, ask me a question. I'm not going to talk about it if it isn't a question.

My God, to read without joy is stupid.

There was a perception that the emerging-market problems aren't over and concern that may Brazil devalue.

Not in rewards, but in the strength to strive, the blessing lies.

For me the diamond dawns are set In rings of beauty.

There are unwanted emotions and pain that goes along with any birth.

I think, for sure, 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Pulp Fiction' were kind of bookends for - or the pillars of - my career.

We use our intelligence, our creative intelligence, because we create with intelligence.

The past has to inform the present...

I play chess badly and I've been beaten by my 10-year old son

You think of stars as ambitious or aggressive or self-oriented.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Women are an alien race set down among us.

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

I pour into the world the eternal streams Wan prophets tent beside, and dream their dreams.