Collyer Quotes

#1. My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy.

Hamish Bowles

#2. Old age is the repose of life; the rest that precedes the rest that remains.

Robert Collyer

#3. I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'

Ridley Scott

#4. I am strangely addicted to the writing of long letters, which, I am afraid, tire you; and for the future, I believe, I must be less communicative, in order to be less troublesome.

Mary Collyer

#5. How tedious is time, when his wings are loaded with expectation!

Mary Collyer

#6. The most savage and voracious animal never kills to increase his wealth, or open a way to grandeur. It slays to satisfy his hunger, or in a natural defense of his own life, or of those whom he is prompted by instinct to preserve.

Mary Collyer

#7. When you take a book away from a child, you are taking a child away from a stepping stone.

C.L. Collyer

#8. Those, who from an immoderate and false self-love, study to keep their humanity under, always take care, for their own sakes, to represent poverty to themselves, as something ridiculous, mean, and contemptible.

Mary Collyer

#9. Virtue is the music of the soul, the harmony of the passions.

Mary Collyer

#10. Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future.

Robert Collyer

#11. If you hear enough applause and laughter at a young enough age, you are doomed to become an actor.

John Lithgow

#12. Every medium has its advantages and weaknesses and there are many things I can put down on paper that I might not be able to put into film or into a stage performance. In each form, one can communicate powerfully in different ways.

Lawrence Wright

#13. God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best.

Robert Collyer

#14. A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

Ludwig Von Mises

#15. If we've considered all the worst possibilities and one turns out to be true, we won't be completely unprepared for it.

Ransom Riggs

#16. So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

Anna Letitia Barbauld

#17. Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.

Augustine Birrell

#18. Swearing is, as I have said, learning to the ignorant, eloquence to the blockhead, vivacity to the stupid, and wit to the coxcomb.

Mary Collyer

#19. Avarice, with all its black attendants, is confessedly a crime of old age, and seldom arrives at maturity till accompanied with gray hairs.

Mary Collyer

#20. Atheism can never be an institution ... it can never be more than a destitution.

Robert Collyer

#21. Prayer must be, in its own nature, absurd and impertinent.

Mary Collyer

#22. The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.

Wendell Berry

#23. Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.

Henry Ward Beecher

#24. A man's best friends are his ten fingers.

Robert Collyer

#25. Oaths and curses are a proof of a most heroic courage, at least in appearance, which answers the same end.

Mary Collyer

#26. The things we do at Christmas are touched with a certain extravagance, as beautiful, in some of its aspects, as the extravagance of nature in June.

Robert Collyer