Sir Able Quotes

We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can't believe. He can't be like a creature any more than a carpenter is like a table. ~ Gene Wolfe

We talked of love, and all we said would fill a book thicker than this. Yet all we said was only this: that I loved her and she loved me, and we had waited long and long, would be parted no longer. ~ Gene Wolfe

You might have been able to fool people the first time, or something, but you really can't make a successful sequel today unless people really, really liked the predecessor. ~ Neal H. Moritz

Be able to hiccup silently, or at least without alerting neighbors to your situation. The first hiccup is an exception. ~ Marilyn Vos Savant

I like speed, so I like taking the jet skis out and hitting the water, or hitting the lake. In the winter, unfortunately, I used to ski a lot but I haven't been able to ski in the past few years because thank God I've been working, so that's a good reason not to. ~ Laz Alonso

You can have all the right ingredients, have measured them carefully and mixed them, but without warmth, you'll end up with a loaf of bread flatter than a plate. And while you might be able to eat it, it won't feed you. ~ Elissa Sussman

I give thank for God for my roots in the Word of Faith teachings. It is truly on the shoulders of great men of God like Brother Kenneth E. Hagin that we are able to see further into the Word of God today. Growing up, I learned a lot about faith from Brother Hagin who truly had a special revelation of faith from the Lord. I deeply honor and respect him for all that he has taught me. ~ Joseph Prince

The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order. ~ Jurgen Habermas

You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my life, except my life. ~ William Shakespeare

Difference between diversity and inclusion is being invited to a house and being able to rearrange the furniture. ~ Jane Silber

Let the stillness be, High Lord. Do not disturb it. If you are able, listen to its voice - but let it be. ~ Terry Brooks

No doubt it is devastating. One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced." "How? By what?" "By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. This has been tested. It is certain. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Most of the notable turn out to be the not-able. God's greatest truths still belong to babes. ~ Vance Havner

One of these days d'you think you'll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?" Peggy said, getting up. ~ Virginia Woolf

The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. "Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model," recalls Eisman. "And he said, 'Turn off your tape recorders.' Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people - in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks. ~ Michael Lewis

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope. ~ Alexandre Dumas

I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it. ~ Sally Mann

Laurel, David? Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?" he asked, one hand on his skinny hip.
"No, sir," David said. "But thank you for asking." The students around them laughed, but Mr. james didn't look pleased. Laurel leaned back and grinned. David, one. Teacher who wishes he was as smart as David? Zero ~ Aprilynne Pike

Ninety percent of [contemporary philosophers] see their principle task as that of beating religion out of men's heads ... We are far from being able to provide scientific basis for the theological world view. ~ Kurt Godel

Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems. ~ Haruki Murakami

I don't think my playing style has really changed over the years; it's just gotten better. I can hear the improvement in comparing older records and later records. I'm referring to soloing ability, to having a better sound, to knowing chords better, and getting rhythmically stronger. It also has to do with ideas - learning how to edit your ideas and being better able to follow ideas out to a logical conclusion. ~ Gary Bartz

You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there. ~ Diana Gabaldon

A very real barrier to faith is this feeling of self-sufficiency, this unrealistic idea that one can accomplish everything by his or her own self. Some people have the conviction they must do it all alone. They have no faith in others ... they are convinced that there is no one able to do the job as well as themselves. They refuse to admit that they may need the help of friends, doctor, minister, or even God. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

My mother had never openly protested my relationship with Sydney. Really, there'd been no chance. I'd simply shown up at Court with a bride in tow, and no one had been able to put asunder those whom the state of Nevada had brought together. ~ Richelle Mead

Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency! ~ Chinua Achebe

Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again. ~ Douglas Coupland

I do what I do because I believe in the country that we live in. I believe we are making a difference in stemming the flow of terrorism into Australia ... I want my children to be able to live as everyone does now without the fear of getting on a bus and having it blow up. ~ Ben Roberts-Smith

You come to doing what you do by not being able to do something. ~ Grace Paley

Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.
I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading. ~ Hugh Nibley

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

As events developed, the debate about jobs and energy extraction in general became more divisive. Those at one extreme embraced the industry as an expression of old-fashioned free enterprise. It offered work that built character and brought deserving rewards for those with initiative, whether they be roughnecks working twelve-hour shifts, investors staking their capital, or researchers staking their reputation on the next big discovery. At the other end of the spectrum were those who saw the industry as a relic of grandfather clauses and cronyism that dated to a period of predatory exploitation, when fantastical deals were pitched by door-to-door peddlers, manufacturing waste was buried in lagoons on private property, and unions were nonexistent. The middle ground was occupied by an untold number of consumers used to cheap plentiful energy, and property owners, who had their worries but also were able to calculate how much a mineral rights lease might be worth. ~ Tom Wilber

There's a big part of me that would love to be a secret agent. But if I showed up to do an investigation and interrogate someone now, they wouldn't be able to take me seriously. I've ruined that for myself. ~ Gillian Anderson

Sometimes life is so crazy, you have to go through something to be able to find out what you're supposed to talk about next, and I think that's what happened to me. ~ Gwen Stefani

The orchid hypothesis by David Dobbs in a wonderful article in The Atlantic. This theory holds that many children are like dandelions, able to thrive in just about any environment. But others, including the high-reactive types that Kagan studied, are more like orchids: they wilt easily, but under the right conditions can grow strong and magnificent. ~ Susan Cain

It's one thing you aspire to: someday, you'll be able to write a book. ~ Thomas Keller

Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope ... "
"Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves."
"No, sir."
"There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't."
"Very true, sir. ~ P.G. Wodehouse