Pattison Quotes

#1. There's a funnel up his arse and a breeze between his ears. All the same I suppose his guess is as good as ours y'know? All he knows is 'shut up and keep going'. I mean, I for one, I can't make any philosophical advance on that. I mean, honestly - can you?

Ian Pattison

#2. I'm reading a book on infinity - I can' wait to see how it ends!

Iain Pattison

#3. Cancer gets a bad press but, fair do's, it's a truly egalitarian illness, unlike those stuck-up bastards ME and motor neurone.

Ian Pattison

#4. She couldn't believe all their happiness had nearly been taken away from them.

Vicky Pattison

#5. What is the character trying to say? Why? Be as specific as you can, using sense images that evoke something about the character. Try using the character's senses, even if the character is you.

Pat Pattison

#6. I think he [Heidegger] sets the question up in a useful way and, despite appearances, he's not 'against' technology. He just wants us to have a questioning and thoughtful relation to it. This must be relevant to any approach.

George Pattison

#7. Who's to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change and it changed.

Eliot Pattison

#8. Ultimately, we live in the face of an irresolvable mystery about our origin and, for that matter, about our end. And what Schleiermacher would have us do is (a) acknowledge that this is the case and (b) accept it as something positive, a point of departure for a life of trusting joy.

George Pattison

#9. I probably fly twice a week, within Canada and the States.

Jim Pattison

#10. Interpretation is a task that we repeatedly have to take up and start again from the beginning, Sisyphus-like. But, as Camus said, we must always imagine Sisyphus happy, and this is not so difficult when it's a matter of texts that reveal important truths about being human.

George Pattison

#11. I've made more mistakes than anyone I know. Sometimes I learned something, and sometimes I just find myself doing it again. It makes me mad when I wasn't smart enough to learn the first time. You just think it's going to be different the next time, and it's not, as it turns out.

Jim Pattison

#12. Correct me if I'm wrong. But it was you stuck the head on the policehorse?
It deserved it didn't it. Standin' there whinnying at me in that bloody Kelvinside accent.

Ian Pattison

#13. Strategy doesn't change when hard times arrive. Consumers' willingness to try, and to stay loyal, remains, the goal. Winners know this; their brand focus and strategy remains consistent.

Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison

#14. We all fail - I have failed so many times, but it never discourages me. I just pick up and go.

Jim Pattison

#15. Breathes life into a vital but oft-neglected chapter of our history. Amy Belding Brown has turned an authentic drama of Indian captivity into a compelling, emotionally gripping tale that is at once wrenching and soulful.

Eliot Pattison

#16. In the Sixties, conglomerates were all the rage.

Jim Pattison

#17. Never let reality get in the way of truth

Pat Pattison

#18. I still read a lot about teenage angst! Of course, any kind of mourning CAN become pathological and then it 'has to stop', but to move through life untouched by the loss of hopes, beliefs and aspirations once cherished is also questionable.

George Pattison

#19. I've got a lot of respect for tuba players, just carrying that thing around.

Jim Pattison

#20. Although in fairness he flirted with everyone and everything - dogs, pot plants, a packet of chocolate digestives.

Vicky Pattison

#21. In my job, I have many operations, so I tend to use time in my car to think. I get in the car after work and drive all night -11 hours, Vancouver to Banff.

Jim Pattison

#22. What I like most about an aquarium is that all ages, from toddlers to pre-schoolers to retired grandparents, can really enjoy the wonders of the sea.

Jim Pattison

#23. When a scumball turns on Songs of Praise he sees three hundred quantity surveyors warbling about 'My Lord in heaven', and he knows his name's not on the guest list.

Ian Pattison

#24. I've always believed that competition is good for consumers and good for businesses.

Jim Pattison

#25. And perhaps this has to do with what I sense is a turning away from the idea of religion as being about conserving a certain heritage from the past towards religion as having to do with how we orientate ourselves to the future, to all we truly long for, to hope.

George Pattison

#26. Once you realise you're never going to be a somebody, you have to kid yourself that being a nobody can still be interesting.

Ian Pattison

#27. The fear was visible on their faces and in their trembling voices. Neither of them had wanted to think about what life would be like without the man who made them feel safe.

Vicky Pattison

#28. See the bints? They might be soft on the outside, but see on the inside? They've got hearts on them like Hygena worktops.

Ian Pattison

#29. And this is also what he takes Christian doctrine, in all its complexity, to be centrally about, that is, teaching an attitude rather than a set of propositions. Call it joyous openness to life. What's not relevant about that?

George Pattison

#30. But my point is that 'the death of God' is not something like the Battle of Waterloo or Magna Charta. It's not a historic event of that kind. For many people it hasn't happened yet. Others - to recur to an earlier question - are still in the phase of intense shock.

George Pattison

#31. But, inevitably, as he [Kierkegaard] approaches what wemight call his Christocentric climax many readers drop off. Many scholars just leave that part of his authorship alone.

George Pattison

#32. Ethics arises in the recognition of our obligation to care for others as beings, like us, exposed to mortality - that is, beings who need our help. Buddhism, not wrongly, extends this to 'all sentient beings'.

George Pattison

#33. Songs are your best teachers. I try to learn something from every song I hear

Pat Pattison

#34. It had been a wake-up call and now all she wanted was to keep her dad in sight and make sure he didn't eat too many Mars Bars or drink too much beer.

Vicky Pattison

#35. I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

George Pattison

#36. In a sense these are questions that most people ask themselves to some extent. They become philosophical when asked with a persistence and rigour that pushes past conventional or evasive answers. It's nothing to do with acquiring a technical facility in an academic discipline.

George Pattison

#37. Investigations, meditations, careers, relationships were much the same, he mused. They failed because no one thought to ask the right question.

Eliot Pattison

#38. Schleiermacher, however, starts by attempting to find what he takes to be a basic element of the human condition as such, namely, that we did not invent ourselves but find ourselves born into a life and a world that precedes us in manifold ways.

George Pattison

#39. In the fifties there were no paedophiles. There were only simple honest-to-goodness child molesters.

Ian Pattison

#40. People in the high-tech sector are living with change every hour. They can get up in the morning and find themselves behind already.

Jim Pattison

#41. YOU CAN'T TELL UNLESS YOU SHOW FIRST ... Showing makes the telling more powerful because your senses and your mind are both engaged.

Pat Pattison

#42. He said you must always step forward from where you stand.

Eliot Pattison

#43. Some burglars are vermin, they're no better than, well, investment bankers - there, I've said it.

Ian Pattison

#44. Do you want to buy a bloody flower or don't ye?
Aye. As a matter of fact I'll take the whole soddin' bunch.
Aye well, good. It's time you treated m'Ma better.
Oh, they're not for your Ma, son. These are for you.See because I'm gonnae ram them doon y'delicate bloody Karma hole!

Ian Pattison

#45. Don't be afraid to write crap - it makes the best fertilizer. The more you write the better your chances of growing something wonderful.

Pat Pattison

#46. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing ... metaphors support lyrics like bones.

Pat Pattison

#47. When I came out of high school, my objective in life was to get a job selling used cars, but after trying for two weeks, nobody would hire me.

Jim Pattison

#48. During school, I'd advertise cars in the University of British Columbia newspaper.

Jim Pattison

#49. Time also was said to be an accident: it "exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.

Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir

#50. If you are not careful your soul will wear out long before your body.

Eliot Pattison

#51. I went into radio in 1965 when I got a license for CJOR 600 AM. It was my second business.

Jim Pattison

#52. This is what you get in life. Wee flannel-arsed naebodies sittin' behind a desk tryin' to make you sweat in your stool. And see when they do? Y'can feel the wind-up key take another turn in your back.

Ian Pattison

#53. It's quite normal to hear of a change and see it as a problem, but it's probably an opportunity, depending on how quickly you can adjust.

Jim Pattison

#54. It is a mistake to think of courage as something you show to others. True courage is only something you show to yourself.

Eliot Pattison

#55. Today, public companies don't like the idea of conglomerates. People want to buy something in which they know where they are putting their money - into the food business or the oil and gas business. They don't want to put their money into a hodge-podge as a general rule.

Jim Pattison

#56. No one of these bloody jobs exist do they? Christ, y'just stick them up there to take the bare look off the walls.

Ian Pattison

#57. When you live in Vancouver, you realize most of the population is in eastern North America.

Jim Pattison

#58. But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.

George Pattison

#59. It wasn't normal, it was quite far from normal, but they were hers and she loved everything about them.

Vicky Pattison

#60. You need to let the spirits have their way Shan

Eliot Pattison

#61. And one thing the void certainly can teach us is how to wait, how to become truly patient, and how to let go of superfluous intellectual baggage - all of which is a good lesson for hyper-agitated multi-tasking goal-focussed contemporary human beings.

George Pattison

#62. Rab: Like a wee chip, Burney son?
Burney: Stick your chips up your arse!
Mary: Heeey, hey, hey, hey - manners.
Burney: Please.

Ian Pattison

#63. There are kinds of unity other than those of the explicit and systematic unity that Poole is attacking. There are kinds of movement - in music or athletics, for example - that present themselves as having a certain unity about them. In some sphere we might talk about 'style'.

George Pattison

#64. I tell them that the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you.

Eliot Pattison

#65. hundred years. The end of a place Shan had come

Eliot Pattison

#66. When I was 8 years old, I sold garden seeds.

Jim Pattison

#67. I come to work, and I have a good time. I have no reason to change anything that I do.

Jim Pattison

#68. Now you lady, you can go an' run your arse up a cheesegrater

Ian Pattison

#69. One of the most violent attacks on the Church in the Soviet Union was under Kruschev when, during a period of economic and political liberalization, he attacked the Church to demonstrate to old Party members that he hadn't lost it.

George Pattison

#70. Barth's approach tears up any possibility of dialogue between faith and unfaith or between theology and other human sciences. Theology just says what it says on the basis of scripture, and that's that.

George Pattison

#71. Radio had been very good to me as a car dealer. It's flexible, and it's fast - you can get on the air in an hour and change your message - and compared to other types of media, it's very good value.

Jim Pattison

#72. Y'cannae see can ye? Y'know who christened you lot the 'underclass'? The same sinister bastards that changed Windscale to Sellafield...they're nuthin' but a lot of jumped-up fascist bastards!

Ian Pattison

#73. Our life is the instrument we use to experiment with the truth.

Eliot Pattison

#74. Christmas carols? Oozy, squeezy, treacly middle-class propaganda crap!

Ian Pattison

#75. Listen you here to me boy. The only way this book is gonnae turn you intae a tall, Aryan god, is if you stand on the bloody thing.

Ian Pattison

#76. My dad made a huge impact on me in terms of right and wrong.

Jim Pattison

#77. Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.

George Pattison

#78. Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it's rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations.

George Pattison

#79. I track some long hours.

Jim Pattison

#80. Our demons, they have a way of becoming self-fulfilling.

Eliot Pattison

#81. The more one understands the world ... the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood. Dakpo to Shan

Eliot Pattison

#82. My grade 3 teacher put on a kids' Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.

Jim Pattison

#83. No matter what business you are in, there is change, and it's happening pretty quickly.

Jim Pattison

#84. In Canada, things are very honest.

Jim Pattison

#85. Her mum was talking like the Queen. Well, the Queen's slightly rougher sister from Salford.

Vicky Pattison

#86. I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.

Pat Pattison