B. J. Porter Quotes

Money was their God; work their religion.

Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.

The average family exists only on paper and its average budget is a fiction, invented by statisticians for the convenience of statisticians.

Money never remains just coins and pieces of paper. Money can be translated into the beauty of living, a support in misfortune, an education, or future security.

Two-thirds of my energies go in trying to save one-third for work.

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

It's amazing what you can accomplish if you simply refuse to quit.

Usually I trundle about in trainers and baggy jeans, looking about as attractive as a potato.

I don't believe in God.

To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher. It is only a matter of time before the whole edifice crumbles.

The more I read about feeding times, sleep times and waking-up times, the more inadequate and miserable I felt.

I hate reality shows like Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity. I'd rather watch a goldfish bowl.

Stress is a designer ailment that many of the so-called afflicted suffer from with pride.

Far too many women are hesitant, and remain trapped in jobs for which they are over-qualified or paid beneath their worth.

Mmm, I love Yoda. I didn't like Jar Jar Binks though, he was all wrong.

All the world loves a clown.

Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?

Be glad. Be good. Be brave.

I should think you could be gladder on Monday mornin' than any other day in the week, because 'twould be a whole week before you'd have another one!

If you are vain it is vain to sign your pictures and vain not to sign them. If you are not vain it is not vain to sign them and not vain not to sign them.

Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.

When you're blind to your own nature, the Buddha is an ordinary being. When you're aware of your own nature, an ordinary being is the Buddha.

Fire above the mark you intend to hit. Energy, invincible determination, with the right motive, are the levers that move the world.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

I teach in the medical school, the School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Business School. And it's the best perch... because most of my work crosses boundaries.

In the career of female fame, there are few prizes to tie obtained which can vie with the obscure state of a beloved wife or a happy mother.

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

Bald is the new black!

I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

The mob is a sort of bear; while your ring is through its nose, it will even dance under your cudgel; but should the ring slip, and you lose your hold, the brute will turn and rend you.

There are so many things that we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

The flatterer easily insinuates himself into the closet, while honest merit stands shivering in the hall or antechamber.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

Nothing is mine, I have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine. Do I even walk about in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed to spare my modesty?

Guilt is a spiritual Rubicon.

First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.

The only impregnable citadel of virtue is religion; for there is no bulwark of mere morality, which some temptation may not overtop or undermine, and destroy.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.

If cowardice were not so completely a coward as to be unable to look steadily upon the effects of courage, he would find that there is no refuge so sure as dauntless valor.

The doubts of love are never to be wholly overcome; they grow with its various anxieties, timidities, and tenderness, and are the very fruits of the reverence in which the admired object is beheld.

National antipathy is the basest, because the most illiberal and illiterate of all prejudices.

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

the occasional cries of a lost loon, strayed from its flock in northern migration, fill the swamp with sounds of wailing.

But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.

How different is the ready hand, tearful eye, and soothing voice, from the ostentatious appearance which is called pity.

My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.

Defeat in this world is no disgrace and that is what they cannot understand. If you really fought well and fought for the right thing.

It is not designed that the road should be made too smooth for us here upon earth.