Odd Quotes - Page 4

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.

The idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

A queen keeps a court that is spoken about. A goddess keeps a court that is never forgotten.

I have always been a critic of government policy. I was in government for more than five years. Before that I was a critic. Within the government I was a critic, pushing for reform and always at odds with power brokers within the party.

I'm fascinated by America...it's so odd.

No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

Amateurs look for challenges; professionals look for easy trades. Losers get high from the action; the pros look for the best odds.

We should never shy away from the challenges that face us out of fear of failure or an unwillingness to battle the odds. We should confront our problems head on and make no excuses.

So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.

Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

The Goddess does not shower her gifts on those who reject them.

Forgiveness is an embrace, across all barriers, against all odds, in defiance of all that is mean and petty and vindictive and cruel in this life.

The longer you wait to do something you should do now, the greater the odds that you will never actually do it.

Every girl is a goddess.

A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.

All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one Initiator.

You need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success.