Colin > Colin's Quotes

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Strange as it may seem, the Air Force, except in the air, is the least mobile of all the services. A squadron can reach its destination in a few hours, but its establishments, depots, fuel, spare parts, and workshops take many weeks, and even months, to develop.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour

“Anticipate leveling off to end up at the desired altitude without busting through it. Use the 10 percent rule of thumb. If climbing at 500 feet per minute, start to level off when 50 feet below the desired altitude. If climbing 1,000 feet per minute, start to level off 100 feet below the desired altitude. If climbing 5,000 feet per minute, you’re not flying a helicopter.   Ease”
― R. Padfield, Learning to Fly Helicopters

“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence--one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Fate does not take sides. It is fair-minded and generally prefers to maintain some balance between the likelihood of success and failure in all our endeavors.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self, and vying against other isolated selves. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? “Dust to dust” isn’t just something they say at funerals, it’s the truth. You can no more disconnect from the universe and its inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
― André Gide

“One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Death takes all of us when it wills. While my life is mine, I choose to live it, not to live in fear of losing it.”
― Melissa McPhail, Cephrael's Hand