Smil'd Quotes

#1. We grew in age - and love - together
Roaming the forest, and the wild;
My breast her shield in wintry weather -
And, when the friendly sunshine smil'd,
And she would mark the opening skies,
I saw no Heaven - but in her eyes.

Edgar Allan Poe

#2. Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Alexander Pope

#3. Konrad had gone to the New World without me, and no matter how fast I ran westward, how close I kept to the sunsets, I would never catch up with him now.

Kenneth Oppel

#4. Religion becomes a hollow shell of its former self when ritual remains and thoughtful reflection disappears.

Nouman Ali Khan

#5. A politician is someone who knows everything about running a campaign and nothing about running a country.

James Rozoff

#6. Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.

Vaclav Smil

#7. Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad - yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there's nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they're played out.

Vaclav Smil

#8. My broad sense of this is that authors like Smil really paint the clear picture, and once you see that, it's kind of Oh, of course. That's such a primal thing to all these physical services that we take for granted.

Bill Gates

#9. Chronophagos, the Devourer of Time, the Eater of Hours. What man remembereth even the hour of his death if the Chronophagos hath devoured it? - Nicephoros Attaliades, The Testament of Nightmares

H.P. Lovecraft

#10. A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.

Vaclav Smil

#11. Hot blood begets hot thoughts,
And hot thoughts beget
Hot deeds,
And hot deeds is love.

William Shakespeare

#12. I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.

Vaclav Smil

#13. No matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

Vaclav Smil

#14. Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate.

Nenia Campbell

#15. The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.

Aristotle.

#16. You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you've got a book in eight or nine months.

Vaclav Smil

#17. Behind every smile there is a cunning face

R.Gayan Priyankara

#18. I am deeply in tune with my heart and core, and it's made me a better writer, artist, and most of all woman. It's made me more myself.

Lykke Li

#19. [Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.

Michael Pollan

#20. So long, crumb-bum.

J.D. Salinger

#21. There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

Bill Gates

#22. No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.

Thorstein Veblen

#23. There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who - other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily - still told those?

Richard K. Morgan

#24. Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.

Vaclav Smil

#25. The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.

John Darnielle