As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.
T. S. Eliot

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
George Orwell

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
Blaise Pascal

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
Richard Dawkins

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who has a task to perform must know how to take sides, or he is quite unworthy of it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

President Bush is supporting Arnold but a lot of Republicans are not, because he is actually quite liberal. Karl Rove said if his father wasn't a Nazi, he wouldn't have any credibility with conservatives at all.
Bill Maher

Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.
Rita Rudner

And you know, I've had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
Richard Branson

My mother was like a sister to me, only we didn't have sex quite so often.
Emo Philips

I was at a bar nursing a beer. My nipple was getting quite soggy.
Emo Philips

There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no one independence quite so important, as living within your means.
Calvin Coolidge

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
Nikola Tesla

I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good. Maybe you're not the best, so you should work a little harder.
Jay Leno

It was not pre-arranged. It just happened that the driver made a demand and I just didn't feel like obeying his demand. I was quite tired after spending a full day working.
Rosa Parks

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.
e. e. cummings

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.
Benito Mussolini