Top 74 Quotes About Preface
#1. Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death.
Christopher Morley
#2. Amida's unimpeded light is the sun of wisdom that destroys the mind of darkness.
(Preface in Teaching, Practice, Faith, Enlightenment)
Kentetsu Takamori
#3. Let no man, therefore, lose heart from thinking that he cannot do what others have done before him; for, as I said in my Preface, men are born, and live, and die, always in accordance with the same rules.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#4. Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]
Edmund Burke
#5. The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.
Richard LaGravenese
#6. That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure - the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]
Alexander McCall Smith
#7. Despite the fact that Machen included the story in his collection The Angel of Mons in 1915, with a long preface refuting the truth of the story, the world preferred to believe that in fact St. George had led the bowmen of Agincourt against the Germans at Mons.
Debra N. Mancoff
#8. [Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.
Anne Bronte
#9. As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.
Brian Kernighan
#11. I think the rule of thumb should be this: if you preface a sentence about a friend with the phrase, 'I love X, but ... ' more than once in any conversation, you should stop hanging out with them.
Sloane Crosley
#12. Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he sees in it. I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.
Morris Kline
#13. Some have supposed that the mosquito is of a devout turn, and never will partake of a meal without first saying grace. The devotions of some men are but a preface to blood-sucking.
Henry Ward Beecher
#15. Generally, if you preface an interview request with, 'I'm an author writing a book,' for some reason, that seems to open a lot of doors.
James Rollins
#16. APPENDIX 2 THE PREFACE TO OLIVER TWIST AND THE NEWGATE NOVEL CONTROVERSY
Charles Dickens
#17. The negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative
Thomas Hardy
#19. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism.
- Shaw's Preface
George Bernard Shaw
#20. I write for the beauty of the printed word
from PREFACE to BIPOLAR BUFFALO
Anthony Antek
#21. War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied." Karl Deutsch - preface of A Study of War by Quincy Wright. Added corollary by KMV: To abolish what is not understood is both arrogant and ignorant.
Karl Deutsch
#22. First of all, I should preface this by the observation that artists are not the best judges of what they've done and the word definitive does not belong, in my opinion, in any conversation about art. When somebody says it's the "definitive" something, I'm always recoiling.
Nicholas Meyer
#23. It is wonderful how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance.
From Charles Dickens' Preface to Oliver Twist, printed in 1841
Charles Dickens
#24. If you have something critical to sat to a player, preface it by saying something positive. That way when you get to the criticism, at least you know he'll be listening.
Bud Grant
#25. [P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. I shall be perfectly frank with you," which is how politicians in both Delhi and Washington preface a real whopper of a lie:
Gary J. Bass
#27. Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.
Margaret Atwood
#28. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them
in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
[From the preface.]
Kurt Vonnegut
#29. The classic formulation of the materialist conception of history is that of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written in 1859.
Anonymous
#30. The preface? Why would he waste time with the preface? Skip the preface and move on to the meat of the thing!
Kenneth Oppel
#31. It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.
Ellen Glasgow
#32. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness.
Thomas Hardy
#33. Don't share your secrets if you preface them with 'just don't tell anybody.
Igor Babailov
#34. I therefore set to work, and after two and a half years of not inconsiderable labour I now have the privilege and the satisfaction of accompanying the early volumes of the series with this preface.
James Loeb
#35. That's one of the best sets I've seen him play, although I should preface that by saying I haven't seen him play before.
John McEnroe
#36. Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion?
Bertrand Russell
#37. All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clamber over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone.
John Steinbeck
#38. It is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it.
- Shaw's Preface
George Bernard Shaw
#39. PREFACE PROBLEM: Nobody reads prefaces.
SOLUTION: Call the preface Chapter 1.
NEW PROBLEM CREATED BY SOLUTION: Chapter 1 is boring.
RESOLUTION: Throw away Chapter 1 and call Chapter 2 Chapter 1.
Gerald M. Weinberg
#40. If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was only a thought-experiment (in which however at many points he had steered clear of many things), he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.
Soren Kierkegaard
#41. They [his readers, whom he asks to be his friends] will find that I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms (Casanova, p.34, Vol 1 Preface).
Giacomo Casanova
#42. Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.
Virginia Woolf
#43. Unless you are a Bernard Shaw you find a preface a most embarrassing business.
Stacy Aumonier
#44. Stealing things. I should preface this by saying I was an only child - a precocious one at that. I also said I was going to live on the moon, invent glow-in-the-dark hair extensions,
Jodi Picoult
#45. A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical ...
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#46. Foreword by Major-General (Retired) Richard Rohmer Preface to the Fourth Paperback Edition Preface to the Third Paperback Edition Preface to the Second Paperback Edition Preface to the First Edition
Palmiro Campagna
#47. Let me offer this apology. Please excuse this self-indulgent preface. I know what I am doing. I am presenting a series of reasons as to why you should lower your expectations, so that you can be blown away by my sneaky insights about life and work. I am a grown woman. I know my own tricks!
Amy Poehler
#48. It annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it. In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I
George Bernard Shaw
#49. My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.
Daniel Handler
#50. A preface is usually an excrescence on a good book, and a vain apology for a worthless one;
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
#51. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. - from the preface to 'Demian
Hermann Hesse
#53. Well, " I began,"I've been roped into shenanigans."
Without preface, Catcher muttered a curse ,then leaned over slipped his wallet from his jeans, and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, which he handed to Mallory.
Chloe Neill
#55. A preface to the first edition of "Jane Eyre" being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
Charlotte Bronte
#56. I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.
Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
#57. Their story, as the Delany sisters like to say, is not meant as "black" or "women's" history, but American history. It belongs to all of us. (From the Preface of "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years)
Amy Hill Hearth
#58. The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.
Philip Guedalla
#59. Prayer is the preface to the book of Christian living; the text of the new life sermon; the girding on of the armor for battle; the pilgrim's preparation for his journey. It must be supplemented by action or it amounts to nothing.
Austin Phelps
#60. Kindness n: A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.
Ambrose Bierce
#61. Good wine needs neither bush nor preface to make it welcome. And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd.
Walter Scott
#62. I'm never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times. But does it matter? Who owns memories after all?
Lynn Barber
#63. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
August Strindberg
#64. I'm about to start reading it again, because what good is a story you only want to read once?
Bill Willingham
#65. Whether tales are told by the light of a campfire or by the glow of a screen, the prime decision for the teller has always been what to reveal and what to withhold. Whether in alone or with images, the narrator should be clear about what is to be shown and what is to be hidden.
Dave Gibbons
#67. We not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular
way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.
William Wordsworth
#68. The average introduction to almost any book is somewhat of a bore
Boris Karloff
#69. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
Mark Twain
#70. In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.
Joanna Macy
#71. No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.
C.S. Lewis
#72. Reader, if thou intendest to go any farther, I would entreat thee to stay here a little. If thou art, as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again, - thou hast had thy entertainment; farewell!
John Owen
#73. Ignorance and its denial will, sad to say, lead us down the same road as it did in all past history.
Jordan Maxwell
#74. The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
George Bernard Shaw
