Top 100 Perhaps The Quotes
#1. To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.
C.S. Lewis
#2. God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe.
Isaac Newton
#3. Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
Bertrand Russell
#4. His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?"
But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.
Lois Lowry
#5. Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn.
Thomas Mann
#6. I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.
Anne Frank
#7. If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body
Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,
Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,
And known to captains as esprit de corps.
Anthony Hecht
#8. For years, even before 9/11, I've been trying to warn that the threat from amateur biolabs will ultimately turn out to be far more troublesome than leakage from military labs - perhaps even more costly and deadly than nuclear terrorism.
Greg Bear
#9. The 'Artful Tommy' will never change - and perhaps shouldn't.
Thomas Hoving
#10. Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both. Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.
George R R Martin
#11. Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.
Pico Iyer
#12. Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.
Jeffrey R. Anderson
#13. I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
Ansel Adams
#14. Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.
Eugene B. Sledge
#15. Our friends have left us
Perhaps we never saw them, perhaps
we encountered them when sleep
still brought us very close to the breathing wave
perhaps we search for them because we search for the other life,
beyond the statues.
Giorgos Seferis
#16. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
Graham Greene
#17. Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation - a gnawing familiarity - that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.
Kate Bernheimer
#18. We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience... I know that this depression will increase.
Jenny Offill
#19. The kindest and the happiest pair Will find occasion to forbear; And something, every day they live, To pity, and perhaps forgive.
William Cowper
#20. The surface causes of Adams's anxieties are not difficult to discern. Every activist knew the penalty for treason. Every congressman knew that prison, perhaps death, would be his reward if the American rebellion failed.
John Ferling
#21. Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.
Seth Shostak
#22. While knowing how to value businesses is essential for investment success, the first and perhaps most important step in the investment process is knowing where to look for opportunities
Seth Klarman
#23. Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.
Elena Kagan
#24. Perhaps not being very self-aware in the past masked depression. I think I was confused. I think I was immature. I think I probably was quite depressed.
James Nesbitt
#25. Perhaps the whole of life is a continuous
interconnecting of miracle,
but we don't always realise it.
Paul Morris Segal
#26. My love of dynamic complications often led me to avoid simplicity when perhaps it was the wisest choice.
Garry Kasparov
#27. You see that the people who are drawn to alternative medicine are often fairly healthy and they go to alternative medicine for what I call the 'symptoms of life.' Fatigue, joint pains, inability to concentrate, perhaps, the kinds of things that anyone over twenty-five gets at some point.
Marcia Angell
#28. What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace.
Tina Brown
#29. They say [Finn] has tasted the Nuts of Wisdom." Elatha laughed. "Perhaps the Nuts of Wisdom will gird him against your sister.
Holly Bennett
#30. It's funny to think that Anson and I were here, in this same place, together all that time ago, and now here we are again. It makes me feel good, makes me feel that perhaps everything doesn't just disappear, that some things are circling back, taking the long way, but circling back towards me.
Helen Humphreys
#31. I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.
Raymond Chandler
#32. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
#33. I have a message for my fans. Whatever you want to do in this world, it is achievable. The most important thing that I've found, that perhaps you could use, is be passionate and enthusiastic in the direction that you choose in life, and you'll be a winner.
Steve Irwin
#34. Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human.
Irvin D. Yalom
#35. If politics left out the manipulation of money, I would perhaps view it more than a partisan traffic jam that never ends.
Zephyr McIntyre
#36. If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those engaged in them.
Suzanne La Follette
#37. It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.
James Henry Breasted
#38. I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.
Graciela Iturbide
#39. A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.
William Shenstone
#40. A friend said to me, "I think the weather is trippy." I said, "No, man, it's not the weather that's trippy, perhaps it's the way we perceive it." And then I realized I just should have said, "Yeah."
Mitch Hedberg
#41. I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.
Gerhard
#42. Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century.
Saul David
#43. Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men.
Jeaniene Frost
#44. It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.
Erin Morgenstern
#45. Perhaps drugging the woman he intended to fall in love with wasn't the accepted method of kindling a passionate romance, yet Archimedes considered it the most sensible way to proceed.
Meljean Brook
#46. Being a teenager is as difficult as living with one. And we've all been there. Perhaps that's the reason we're so hard on them.
Melvin Burgess
#47. We cling to the most painful reminders of our youth, our memories or our injuries, perhaps so we can look back to our former selves, console them, and say: Keep going. I know how the story ends.
Sarah Domet
#48. T he United States is the first, and perhaps only, country in the world in which every Buddhist sect is represented. Although
Jeff Ourvan
#49. I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle's Roman nose so aggravated me, during the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it until he howled.
Charles Dickens
#50. Adeline had come to Christianity the same way she had come to sex and smoking:through peer pressure.Thinking about her six kids and her smoker's hack, she wondered if perhaps peer pressure didn't always lead to the best habits.
Christopher Moore
#51. It's only the beginning. Chase me if you like. Perhaps, if you remain interesting, I'll even let you catch me.
A.A. Aguirre
#52. Perhaps the final hour is come I have left no testament Only a pen, for my mother I am no hero in an age without heroes I just want to be a man.
Bei Dao
#53. One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#54. [R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#55. I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.
Sofia Samatar
#56. It doesn't matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again.
Once you've started to leave, you will run your whole life.
Charlotte Eriksson
#57. As we rode along LaBoeuf commenced whistling tunes, perhaps to take his mind off his sore arm. Rooster said, "God damn a man that whistles!" It was the wrong thing to say if he wished it to stop.
Charles Portis
#58. It seemed that the years had softened her, or perhaps they'd hardened me
Cecilia Samartin
#59. Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
Christopher Paolini
#60. My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening.
Jeanette Winterson
#61. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff
#62. Would you have her birched in the public square? Baited by dogs perhaps? Madam, we have destroyed her good name, and she will find the world a much colder and darker place as a result. Even now her father is probably changing her name to Buzzletrice.
Frances Hardinge
#63. As a group, housewives to-day suffer more from social isolation and loss of purpose than any other social group, except, perhaps, the old.
Alva Myrdal
#64. I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.
-Claude Frollo
Victor Hugo
#65. Although Ciena would have liked to have gone down to Cloud City, perhaps to meet Jude's parents, she remained aboard the Executor.
Claudia Gray
#66. The woman went on. She had not looked back. She went out of sight up the road: swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried, and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself. She walked out of their talking too; perhaps out of their minds too.
William Faulkner
#67. Tonight there was something different. Something both deeper and shallower than friendship. Familiarity, perhaps, the sudden realisation that we lived our sealed-up little lives in closeness to each other. That we had something to share and something to lose. Something to protect together.
Alexis Hall
#68. Above his Lord. Perhaps because Knox himself found such abundant strength in the midst of great personal weakness, he was used of God to raise
Douglas Bond
#69. There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.
Julia Glass
#70. Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word* Wait!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#71. The Clash had a unique, special relationship with Scotland. Perhaps it was something to do with the energy, anger and beauty in their music. In Scotland at that time, there was a lot of to be angry about. And a great need of some energy and beauty.
John Niven
#72. This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#73. Of all the contracts I had signed, this was perhaps the only one that my father could never have imagined me signing, for it traded what should never be traded. It delivered me into the unknown and erased my father's name. I could not know that this was just the first of many erasures.
Laila Lalami
#74. Perhaps it wasn't all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men's minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire's heart - and less messily, too.
Stephen King
#75. We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be.
H.G.Wells
#76. Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes.
Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall.
Paul Auster
#77. Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.
Carl Jung
#78. In 1994, the College Board changed the test's name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Scholastic Assessment Test. Now according to the College Board, the letters don't stand for anything anymore. Perhaps that itself is symbolic.
Alexandra Robbins
#80. Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.
Richard Lugar
#81. I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else
all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.
Lauren DeStefano
#82. The war had left his body pathetically damaged and weak, but his mind was as strong and clear as it had ever been, perhaps even tempered and made stronger by adversity. That, not madness, was his curse.
Dean Koontz
#83. Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
W. Somerset Maugham
#84. Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.
Osamu Dazai
#85. Perhaps this agony will wash away in the shower.
E.L. James
#86. I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
Winston S. Churchill
#87. One has to understand what the enemy is all about: the enemy's history, the enemy's culture, the enemy's aspirations. If you understand these well, you can perhaps move towards peace.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#88. In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.
Eowyn Ivey
#89. Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
John Banville
#90. Fiction is only a set of colors, however beautiful, passing over the landscape for a time - the spirit, perhaps, but not the substance.
Bill Bonanno
#91. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
Samuel Beckett
#92. Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
Adrian Desmond
#93. Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.
Boyd Norton
#94. Perhaps you can feel if you can't hear," was her fancy. "Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls. Perhaps you feel a little warm and comforted, and don't know why, when I am standing here in the cold and hoping you will get well and happy again.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#95. We have no proof, But if we extrapolate, based on the best information we have available to us, we have to come to the conclusion that ... other life probably exists out there and perhaps in many places ...
Neil Armstrong
#96. Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers. At
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#97. This is not the end. It is not even the begging of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the begging.
Kami Garcia
#98. You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
James Joyce
#99. Eagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.
Dan Simmons
#100. Perhaps the attempt to achieve grace by identification with the animals was the most sensitive thing which was tried in the whole bloody history of religion .
Gregory Bateson
