Great Lyric Quotes

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down. ~ Phil Harris

Sometimes, the best songs are the ones you write without any pen and paper or audio recording device or guitar in your hands. Because there's nothing between you and the melody; it's just a great lyric. ~ Jon Foreman

But I always loved songs with great lyrics. ~ Johnny Rivers

You can have a great lyric and a so-so melody; it's going to be a tough sell. ~ Herb Alpert

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages. ~ Leonard Bernstein

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it. ~ Tom Robbins

The first time I ever recorded, which was into my boom-box, I was like, 'Wow, check that out.' It sounded great. The narcotic of it was so intense - it was pleasurable. I was like, 'You sound like a band.' Then I ended up spending the rest of my life trying to chase that initial high again. ~ Ian MacKaye

A great number of the women are victims to falling of the womb and weakness in the spine; but these are necessary results of their laborious existence, and do not belong either to climate or constitution. ~ Fanny Kemble

Great news for someone is always bad news for someone else ~ John Green

I will conclude this work with stating in what light religion appears to me.
If we suppose a large family of children, who, on any particular day, or particular circumstance, made it a custom to present to their parents some token of their affection and gratitude, each of them would make a different offering, and most probably in a different manner. Some would pay their congratulations in themes of verse and prose, by some little devices, as their genius dictated, or according to what they thought would please; and, perhaps, the least of all, not able to do any of those things, would ramble into the garden, or the field, and gather what it thought the prettiest flower it could find, though, perhaps, it might be but a simple weed. The parent would be more gratified by such a variety, than if the whole of them had acted on a concerted plan, and each had made exactly the same offering. This would have the cold appearance of contrivance, or the harsh one of control. But of all unwelcome things, nothing could more afflict the parent than to know, that the whole of them had afterwards gotten together by the ears, boys and girls, fighting, scratching, reviling, and abusing each other about which was the best or the worst present.
Why may we not suppose, that the great Father of all is pleased with variety of devotion; and that the greatest offence we can act, is that by which we seek to torment and render each other miserable? For my own part, I am fully satisfied that wha ~ Thomas Paine

Great books can be ruined by bad writers. ~ Travis Simmons

The reason for living is to have great relationships, to have people you love and respect and who love and respect you. ~ Brian Tracy

Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and my mother - yes, you belong in that category. Here, give me a kiss. ~ Maya Angelou

All you need is love...and a great story. ~ Hank Fielder

I don't think I've ever not had a dark side. But one of the wonderful reasons why you go into this business is that half your life you live in a fantasy, which is somebody else's life. It's actually a great release because you're not having to deal with the itty-bitty bits of life. ~ Felicity Kendal

It is crucial that we realize the great value of human existence, the opportunity and the potential that our brief lives afford us. It is only as humans that we have the possibility of implementing changes in our lives. ~ Dalai Lama

God hath prepared a little coronet or special reward (extraordinary and beside the great crown of all faithful souls) for those who have not defiled themselves with women. ~ Jeremy Taylor

Bibles and prayers are great. Also great are people who have gone to school for years and years to learn how to help you work through things. The ~ Melanie Dale

I've got a great eye for color. I'm like a chick. ~ Adam Carolla

We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool! ~ Alvin Lee

Take the great example of the four-minute mile. One guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it. And they break it in such a short period of time that it can't be because they were training harder. It's purely that it was a psychological barrier, and someone had to show them that they could do it. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Ha Jin writes: 'Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, 'Sorrow is better than joy,' and Balzac declared, 'Suffering is one's teacher.' But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched ~ David Sheff

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night
hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe? ~ Kathryn Davis

It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work. ~ Theodore Parker

Now I can do no more. We must trust to the Great Disposer of all events and the justice of our cause. I thank God for this opportunity of doing my duty. ~ Horatio Nelson

When two great powers disagree about anything - it doesn't matter what - they must find a way to settle it somehow by arbitration or by negotiation, not by war or threat of war. ~ Bertrand Russell

Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren't women. Wouldn't it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well. ~ Ben Stein

My grandparents would never admit to being Tasmanian, but I think it's really great and funny. But I guess, in the past, Tasmanians just weren't quite accepted. You had that lazy reference to them being felons. ~ Jessie Cave

Great leadership is by definition relentlessly developmental. ~ Bill Hybels

If you make great music, you can become a mold breaker or a trailblazer. It's a little scary to do that because you can't always see what's in front of you, but you're clearing out a path for people behind you to follow. ~ Anthony Evans

[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject. ~ Honore De Balzac

I like to praise and reward in a loud voice and to scold in a whisper. ~ Catherine The Great

Yeah, I mean, climbing's always been a massive hobby of mine up until, kind of, recent times when I've had family, but no, it's been a driving passion in my life and, uh, I've always wanted to climb the Matterhorn. It was the mountain that, sort of, inspired me to climb, as a youngster. So, it was great to be able to get to do it. ~ Andy Serkis

I remembered going to confession to a great priest, Father Moriarty of South William Street. I told him, "I shot a man, Father." "Did you think you were doing right? Had you no qualms about it?" he asked me. I told him I didn't have any qualms, I thought I was doing right, and he said, "Carry on with the good work," and gave me absolution. ~ Tim Pat Coogan

I have respect for anyone who's going to go out and make a movie for a small budget and turn it into a phenomenon. God bless you. Please keep making movies. That's great. But it's not what entertains me. ~ Katie Aselton

I'm not a fashionista, definitely. I'm an actress. I have a great team working with me. ~ Stephanie Sigman

Buy it for anyone you know who cries in the shower, who drinks in the morning, whose life only has meaning when they're asleep and dreaming that they're somebody else. They will find comfort here. And if they don't, it's not your fault. They've always been this way. Some people are just all banged up. Good for you for trying to help. You're a great person. Give yourself a hand. ~ Paul Neilan

I would love to have a part opposite a great actor - like, say, Pacino or De Niro or Hoffman. And to work with a top director. That's my dream. ~ Jon Lovitz

Let us drink deep brothers,' he cried, leaving off his strange anointment for a while, to lift a great glass, filled with sparkling liquor, to his lips. 'Let us drink to our approaching triumph. Let us drink to the great poison, Macousha. Subtle seed of Death, - swift hurricane that sweeps away Life, - vast hammer that crushes brain and heart and artery with its resistless weight, -I drink to it.'

'It is a noble concoction, Duke Balthazar,' said Madame Filomel, nodding in her chair as she swallowed her wine in great gulps. 'Where did you obtain it?'

'It is made,' said the Wondersmith, swallowing another great draught of wine ere he replied, 'in the wild woods of Guiana, in silence and in mystery. Only one tribe of Indians, the Macoushi Indians, know the secret. It is simmered over fires built of strange woods, and the maker of it dies in the making. The place, for a mile around the spot where it is fabricated, is shunned as accursed. Devils hover over the pot in which it stews; and the birds of the air, scenting the smallest breath of its vapour from far away, drop to earth with paralysed wings, cold and dead.'

'It kills, then, fast?' asked Kerplonne, the artificial-eye maker, - his own eyes gleaming, under the influence of the wine, with a sinister lustre, as if they had been fresh from the factory, and were yet untarnished by use.

'Kills?' echoed the Wondersmith, derisively; 'it is swifter than thunderbolts, stronger than lightni ~ Fitz-James O'Brien

Confrontation simply means meeting the truth head-on. ~ Mike Krzyzewski

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one. ~ Anna Quindlen

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions. ~ Ciaran Hinds

Many of the same people who are crying for mankind to tolerate everything have overlooked examples of intolerance that have utterly reshaped the country in which we live. For instance, what would this country be like if George Washington had tolerated British troops? Where would we be today if Thomas Jefferson had tolerated King George III? Or what if Fredrick Douglas had tolerated slavery, or Martin Luther King Jr. had tolerated segregation? What would America be like if Winston Churchill had tolerated Adolf Hitler or if Susan B. Anthony tolerated only men voting? Part of what made these individuals great was that they were strong enough to stand up for their convictions. They recognized something as "wrong," and they didn't tolerate it. ~ Brad Harrub

Good is somebody who delivered and allowed the company to overcome obstacles, without leaving a profound impact on its culture. Great is somebody who leads his company to achievements and performance and value that nobody was expecting it had. ~ Carlos Ghosn

One doesn't need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it's important to print or exhibit, but if that's not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all
being able to work without asking anybody's permission. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance - that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley