B.S. Johnson Quotes

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.

People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don't want to know nothing about you!

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

The way to rise is to obey and please.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Prove to the world that you are alive, let your words breathe life into the nostrils of the universe.

I wanted to do two things when I was growing up, about your age. I wanted to play in the NBA, and I wanted to be a businessman after my basketball career was over, and that is what I am doing now.

America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.

Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

My boyfriend dumped me. My best friend won't talk to me. My future is in a garbage can. Everything has turned to crap. Can you please just let me be a sullen teenager. just this once

My friend told me later he got the chicken pox. I told him I caught politics and never got over it.

It is good to stay in a peaceful poverty than to stay in a painful wealth.

Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.

The most aggressive artists often hide their romantic side.

I'm doing four hours of gymnastics training a day, six days a week and then an extra two to three hours in a fitness center as well.

My Daddy liked physical fitness and wanted me to be a prizefighter.

The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.

It's important to give back to people.

Riches, perhaps, do not so often produce crimes as incite accusers.

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, / They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.

A comeback in gymnastics is almost impossible in itself.

Riches are of no value in themselves; their use is discovered only in that which they procure.

After 13 years of hard landings in gymnastics, one ski run had delivered the biggest injury of my career.

A country gentleman should bring his lady to visit London as soon as he can, that they may have agreeable topicks for conversation when they are by themselves.

People only see gymnastics on TV and in the Olympics at such an extreme. So it can be intimidating.

Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage.

Resentment gratifies him who intended an injury, and pains him unjustly who did not intend it.

The duties of religion, sincerely and regularly performed, will always be sufficient to exalt the meanest and to exercise the highest understanding.

People put too much emphasis on looks.

Entrepreneurship is not a job, nor even a calling - but a hunger.

The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.

It feels real good to look at some of the guys who have played before me, then come in and break a record. But records are made to be broken.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

The true effect of genuine politeness seems to be rather ease than pleasure.

It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving for to-morrow.

I want to die while you love me, While yet you hold me fair, While laughter lies upon my lips, And lights are in my hair.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near to laudable that they have been often praised and are always pardoned.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

"Uisce Beatha" is a compounded distilled spirit being drawn on aromatics, and the Irish sort is particularly distinguished for its pleasant and mild flavour.

I have a healthy lifestyle, but there's nothing you can really do to prevent from rolling an ankle or something like that.

Critics, like the rest of mankind, are very frequently misled by interest.

My coach, Liang Chow, had one rule while I was training for the 2008 Olympics: no skiing. I could do anything I wanted outside the gym, he said, except ski.

A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company

I had a constant fear, a constant little doubt in my mind: 'OK, I'm getting ready to do my standing back full on beam and I might re-tear my ACL.'

It is in refinement and elegance that the civilized man differs from the savage.

No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.