Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

If one is not half mad how can one give birth to a dancing star?;"Nietzsche

On Fathers Day, we again wish you all happy birthday.

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

The most powerful ties are the ones to the people who gave us birth ... it hardly seems to matter how many years have passed, how many betrayals there may have been, how much misery in the family We remain connected, even against our wills.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

I'm very happy. I'd like to say hello to my daughter who's birthday it was yesterday, but this is for our team member Tony who's sadly not with us any more.

A father gave his teen-age daughter an untrained pedigreed pup for her birthday. An hour later, when wandered through the house, he found her looking at a puddle in the center of the kitchen. "My pup," she murmured sadly, "runneth over.

Beauty is the still birth of suffering, every woman knows that.

From birth to age 18, a girl needs good parents, from 18 to 35 she needs good looks, from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality, and from 55 on she needs cash.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents. From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks. From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality. From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initiated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature's heart of Darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

A diplomat is man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never her age.

A theory can be proved by experiment but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.

Last week the candle factory burned down. Everyone just stood around and sang Happy Birthday.

Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. ''New art,'' it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ''ism.'')

Someone receives a promotion, gets an important assignment, makes a major discovery, or moves into the president's office. ''He's lucky,'' an envious person remarks. ''He gets the breaks; they're always in his favor.'' In reality, luck or the breaks of life had little or nothing to do with it. So-called ''luck'' usually is found at the exact point where preparation meets opportunity. For a time, an individual may get ahead by ''pull,'' but eventually someone with push will displace him. Success is not due to a fortuitous concourse of stars at our birth, but to a steady trail of sparks from the grindstone of hard work each day.

There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

ACHIEVEMENT, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.

Wonderful! Is it a colt or a filly?;"Jennifer, an equestrienne, after hearing of news of a human friend's giving birth.

Nicky: The Virgin Mary was born on THAT day. She was the product of a virgin birth too. Me: Immaculate conception is not genetic.

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing 'Happy Birthday-Steven Wright

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and comet from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother.

When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.

The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.

The Father is the Giver of Life; but the Mother is the Giver of Death, because her womb is the gate of ingress to matter, and through her life is ensouled to form, and no form can be either infinite or eternal. Death is implicit in birth.

Happy Birthday, and tell Mom and Dylan and Mark I love them and stuff. Hopefully we'll get to see them again.

I can't describe our happiness in words. This is a new birth for the whole family.

Mr. Goldenberg (teacher): Well, today's my thirty-first birthday... Danielle (student): Really? What's it like to be old? Mr. Goldenberg: I'll tell you when I get there. What's it like to be stupid?

I just want to take this opportunity to wish a Happy Birthday to all of you out there celebrating your 100th birthday today.

A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth --look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

The birthplace of success for each person is in his Inner-Consciousness. The Inner-Consciousness will use whatever it is given. If constructive thoughts are planted positive outcomes will be the result. Plant the seeds of failure and failure will follow. And since the only real freedom a person has is the choice of what thoughts he will feed to his Inner-Consciousness he is totally responsible for the outcomes he gets.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

Men are equal it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

No heroine can create a hero through love of one, but she can give birth to one.

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.