J.D. Stark Quotes

words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.

Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.

it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.

It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.

There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.

I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

... I want to be one of those people who are always to be found at home, nice restful people whom everybody likes because they give a feeling of permanence to this rushing world.

The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.

This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.

I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.

Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing.

Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort.

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.

I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think.

Being angry is like picking up a knife with no handle: it is self-harming.

It is difficult to age because society won't let you. People expect you to look how you did at the height of your fame.

Even when I was in my 20s and at my most beautiful, I was never obsessed with my looks. I didn't dye my hair or wear make-up.

Sometimes the more you think about an outfit the worse it gets.

I looked at my daughter's face and thought, it's lovely to be beautiful but better to be healthy.

I'm an elderly gentleman. I haven't been in a fight involving bodily contact in 60 years. Look, I fall trying to put on my underwear in the morning.

The more debt we owe, the wealthier we are.

If a bill to ban handguns came to the house floor, I would vote for it.

We are a long way from getting back the jobs lost since President Bush took office.

How much of Africa had been explored out of simple hatred?.

People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don't value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing.

It has been said of many modern Christian theologians that their primary aim is to find ways to express disbelief as belief.

It seems that not being religious is a form of risk-taking, consistent with other patterns of short-sighted behaviour in men.

America is an unusually religious nation.

No other single innovation had so much impact on history.

The overwhelming majority of social scientists were irreligious or even anti-religious. This led them to believe that religion was a disappearing and unimportant factor in human affairs.

[Some men are shortsighted, so] going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men.

It can be demonstrated that in any society there is a distribution of religious tastes and concerns.

Luckily for me, when I was growing up in high school, I had a band, and I was a singer in the band. I'm less of a legit Broadway singer than I am a pop-rock singer.

I grew up in Texas in a family that fished and hunted, so I've shot guns as a kid.

My first soldier role was in 'Flags of Our Fathers.' Casting director Jay Binder saw that movie and was looking for soldiers for 'Journey's End,' which led to 'Generation Kill.'

I'm more of a strumming guitarist, instead of a lead soloist guitarist.

I started out singing in high school in the choir and in a garage band.