Spends Quotes

A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they're married. ~ Kin Hubbard

She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount taken out in taxes for a single woman with no dependents is so huge it stuns her. The money starts to feel like an insult: For this, she thinks, I've uprooted my life? Whatever money she might save, moreover, she usually spends trying to console herself. And it is hard to make any job financially worth its difficulties, she realizes, when you're constantly running out to J. C. Penney's to buy bathmats. ~ Lorrie Moore

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife's edge. We're a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there's a dial tone, and your front yard isn't underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there's no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating. ~ Matt Taibbi

I gotta friend who spends his life, stabbing my picture with a bowie knife. Dreams of strangling me with a scarf, when my name comes up he pretends to barf. ~ Bob Dylan

A man who both spends and saves money is the happiest man, because he has both enjoyments. ~ Samuel Johnson

The narcissist, cut off from her spirituality, is one who spends unquantifiable energy supporting and maintaining and utterly and completely fake self, in denial of one's true self, trading it for glamour to compensate for a core of being that is simply wracked,a deep dark cold void; using and abusing others to maintain and sustain the false state. this fake self is contrived in absentia from the connectivity that even the most unaware take for granted. The narcissist doesn't see other human beings. ~ Stacey Scott Mae

A psychologist would probably diagnose insanity for a nation that spends more on its military than the next 8 nations combined, while its poor are starving. ~ Steven Magee

Deficit financing proper is rather the process whereby a Government spends more money that it withdraws from the economy by taxation, borrowing, running down reserves, etc.; thereby causing in most circumstances, and very acutely in ours, monetary inflation and severe pressure on the balance of payments. ~ John James Cowperthwaite

No man deserves a woman like that. He mortgages his very soul to win her and spends his life paying off the debt. ~ Tessa Dare

So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a ~ Neal Stephenson

The answer, of course, is that we are always and forever influenced by those with whom we associate. If a man keeps company with those who curse and complain - he will soon find curses and complaints flowing like a river from his own mouth. If he spends his days with the lazy - those seeking handouts - he will soon find his finances in disarray. Many of our sorrows can be traced to relationships with the wrong people. ~ Andy Andrews

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. ~ Cornelia Otis Skinner

A Person spends a whole day, five days a week or more, working hard to make money, but few ever think beyond this fact. They live from pay cheque to pay cheque, drifting through life, and only realize too late that what they have been doing was not wise at all.
As individuals it is now time we take charge of our money and plan for it, otherwise it will plan for you. ~ Neala Okuromade

A nation that spends billions to fix international problems will not have much left over for the victims of tornadoes in Oklahoma. ~ Deacon Jones

A hero," Max said.
"A weirdness-haunted victim of circumstance who spends his days looking for things."
Max grinned. "That's what I just said. ~ Tom Holt

The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story. ~ Nikita Gill

Terry Pratchett lives in England, an island off the coast of France, where he spends his time writing Discworld novels in accordance with the Very String Anthropic Principle, which holds that the entire Purpose of the Universe is to make possible a being that will live in England, an island off the coast of France, and spend his time writing Discworld novels. Which is exactly what he does. Which proves the whole business true. Any questions? ~ Terry Pratchett

When my kids were younger, I used to avoid them. I used to sit on the toilet 'til my legs fell asleep. You want to know why your father spends so long in the toilet? Because he's not sure he wants to be a father. ~ Louis C.K.

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: 'Einstein is a fool', or 'Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.' Everyone is ~ Paulo Coelho

A Millionaire becomes richer not when he earns his next Million but when he spends it on a Noble Cause.-RVM ~ R.v.m.

For many intelligences,the thought of homely intimacies is associated with a spontaneous disgust at too much sweetness-which is why there is neither a philosophy of sweetness nor an elaborated ontology of the intimate. One must assess the nature of this resistance if one is to get past typical initial aversions. From a distance,the subject appears so unattractive and inconsequential that for the time being,only suckers for harmony or theophilic eunuchs would get stuck on it. An intellect that spends its energy on worthy objects usually prefers the sharp to the sweet; one does not offer candy to heroes ~ Peter Sloterdijk

I've stopped being sorry for all my soft. I won't apologise because I miss you, or because I said it, or because I text you first, or again. I think everyone spends too much time trying to close themselves off. I don't want to be cool or indifferent, I want to be honest. If I love you at 5AM, I'd damn well rather that you know I felt it. If I love you two hours later, I'll tell you then too. Listen, I won't wait double the time it takes for you to text me back because I don't want to. I don't care enough to be patient with you. I'm happy, you made me feel that way, don't you want to know? So that's how it's going to be. I'm going to leave myself as open as a church door. And I'm going to wake you up before the crack of dawn to tell you that I'm fucking joyful, no pretending, not from me, not ever. Would you like some coffee, would you please kiss me? Here, these are my hands, this is my mouth, it is all yours. ~ Azra T.

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. ~ Billy Collins

A man's perspective is limited by the brevity of his existence.
Even living deliberately, how far up can we reach?
Standing on our miniscule patch of time, how far into the future can we see? How much of the past can one truly understand?

Yet, only a recreant spends their precious drops of sand before dropping back
into the abyss lounging in indulgence, not striving for understanding, knowledge,
answers that those of us
scourged/consecrated with consciousness
should seek with unconquerable passion. ~ Alpha Four

The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting debts in his passion, which his virtue obliges him to pay. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation. ~ Samuel Johnson

Character is money; and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character. As money is the most evident power in the world's uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. ~ Ernest Becker

We must move from revenue-neutral to revenue-reducing tax reform, because the federal government spends far too much money. ~ Carly Fiorina

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future. ~ Antoine Rivarol

Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon us. That is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it. ~ Thomas Merton

It is my view that what is important is cutting government spending, however spending is financed. A so-called deficit is a disguised and hidden form of taxation. The real burden on the public is what government spends (and mandates others to spend). As I have said repeatedly, I would rather have government spend one trillion dollars with a deficit of a half a trillion than have government spend two trillion dollars with no deficit. ~ Milton Friedman

A real leader spends his time fixing the problem instead of finding who to blame. ~ David Cottrell

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'm not the type who spends his free time in training camp playing with his Playstation or playing cards on trips. The other players thought it was odd: There he is, reading again. ~ Oliver Kahn

Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a month in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course. ~ Aldous Huxley

I'm not the kind of girl who spends hours getting ready. I don't blow dry my hair. And I hate make up. I'm not pretty. And I don't want to be. I am passionate and restless and wild. I'm exhausted by prudent ideologies. I'm not inferior because of my lack of convention. I'm as strong as I am broken. I'm tired of having my sexuality mistaken for an invitation. I will sweat and I will run. I will let the rain come down on me. I want to feel life as I am. I don't want to skate through having my immoderation controlled by weak judgements. By fear.

I don't want to be who I'm supposed to be, I want to be who I am. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

The way a young man spends his evenings is a part of that thin area between success and failure. ~ Robert R. Young

Driving home that night, I felt so much better. I was no longer a freak of nature--the kind of freak that spends every waking hour with a man for months on end but has some sort of bizarre mental defect that prevents her from articulating her feelings for him--the kind of freak that allows the man to express his love time after time but gives nothing in return. I felt good about it, too, that I'd had the uncharacteristic boldness to tell him I loved him before he'd had a chance to say it to me first that night. I wanted to say I love you, not I love you, too. I knew there was a reason I liked submarine movies.
I had no idea where our relationship was headed. But I did know that I meant what I'd said.
I slept like a baby that night. ~ Ree Drummond

There's a difference between, you know, God loves unconditionally in my feeling and religion loves conditionally. Religion spends an awful lot of time dictating who God can love and can't love. ~ Sinead O'Connor

A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. ~ Paulo Coelho

You say fate is almost indispensable to literature - I think it's completely indispensable, at least in a novel, because a novel always has a plot. Even if nothing happens, even if someone just spends a day walking around Dublin, or whatever, there's still something going on. ~ Daniel Kehlmann

Tashi's mother and father were just here. They are upset because she spends so much time with Olivia. She is changing, becoming quiet and too thoughtful, they say. She is becoming someone else; her face is beginning to show the spirit of one of her aunts who was sold to the trader because she no longer fit into village life. This aunt refused to marry the man chosen for her. Refused to bow to the chief. Did nothing but lay up, crack cola nuts between her teeth and giggle. ~ Alice Walker

O, how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame. ~ William Shakespeare

It probably wasn't smart to judge them based on appearance. I, for instance, was destined to be a world-renowned surgeon, but between my long, brown braid, square-framed glasses, and boyish figure, I looked more like the kind of girl who works in a library and spends Friday nights having deep, meaningful conversations with her cats. ~ Carrie Harris

I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true. ~ Sarah Vowell

The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought ... The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others ... It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves ... When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary ~ Will Durant

He spends the night in prayer. God's voice, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, tells him what the politician in him already knows: that whatever he might stand to gain from playing one against the other, the prospect of a foreign army marching through Italy can bring only instability and devastation in its wake for all. He is, it seems, the Church's shepherd after all. ~ Sarah Dunant

It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time. ~ Marilynne Robinson

He spends the majority of the evening in the company of Celia Bowen, whose elaborate gown changes color, shifting through a rainbow of hues to compliment whoever she is closest to. ~ Erin Morgenstern

The average family pays more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined. ~ Dick Armey

A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back. ~ E.W. Howe

Rejecting Jesus Christ is like a fugitive who spends all day running but has nowhere to hide; you will face him after death. He is the only judge and jury. ~ Felix Wantang

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much. ~ Ronald Reagan

When men and women fail to form stable marriages, the result is a vast
expansion of government attempts to cope with the terrible social needs that result.
There is scarcely a dollar that the state and federal government spends on social
programs that is not driven, in large part, by family fragmentation: crime, poverty,
drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems. ~ Maggie Gallagher

A book is a living, breathing thing. It spends the first chapters of its life curled up in the mind, symbiotic with its creator as it grows fat and round. And then the book is born. ~ Emily Murdoch

Get to know two things about a man. How he earns his money and how he spends it. You will then have the clue to his character. You will have a searchlight that shows up the inmost recesses of his soul. You know all you need to know about his standards, his motives, his driving desires, his real religion. ~ Robert J. McCracken

...his [Angel's] body is displayed semi-naked at least as often in scenes of woundign or torture as in "bedroom" scenes (season 2 scenes with Drusilla conflate the two throuhg S/M)..."Angel spends a ludicrous amount of time in chains, shirtless. ~ Lorna Jowett

Every group spends more when its income grows. ~ Bob Frank

A supremely religious man or woman is one who believes deeply and consistently in the veracity of his highest experiences. He has his hours in the cellar ... but he believes in the truth of the hours he spends upstairs. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

The president spends most of his time playing golf and vacationing. But the times he's away from the office are the times he's most valuable to our country. ~ Jarod Kintz

The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety. ~ Rose George

Do you remember why you started playing?"
"Why does anybody play? ... Are you a musician?"
"Yes. ... Yes, I am."
... "Then you know why I play."
... "Because your spirit has to sing. Every musician's heart bears a song from the Creator, and he spends his life trying to duplicate it as an act of worship. ~ Bryan Davis

But don't you worry," Dad says, after he spends a moment digesting this information, "that if you don't have children, there'll be one one to care for you in your old age?"
"No," I say. "Because I could have children, and they could turn out to hate me. The way I see it, I have friends who care about me now, so I'll probably have friends who'll care about me when I'm old, too. We'll take care of each other. ~ Meg Cabot

I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning. ~ Ray Dalio

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart. ~ Helen Rowland

The evangelical wing of the Church spends a lot of energy on being "born again" but little time on "growing up" again. There is a failing to encourage newborn believers out of the maternity ward and into a big world where they will spend the rest of their spiritual lives trying to find what they are looking for. ~ Steve Stockman

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

At the teasing penetration, my hips jerk upward. Wes chuckles and eases his finger deeper, until the pad of it is stroking my prostate. My entire body trembles. Tingles. Burns. He spends a maddeningly long time torturing me with his mouth and finger - no, fingers. He's got two inside me now, rubbing that sensitive place and bringing white dots to my eyes. "Wes," I murmur. He raises his head. His gray eyes are smoky with desire. "Hmmm?" he says lazily. "Stop fucking teasing me and start fucking fucking me," I rasp. "Fucking fucking you? Did you really need two fuckings?" "One's an adverb and one's a verb." My voice is as tight as every muscle in my body. I'm about to go up in flames if he doesn't make me come. His laughter warms my thigh. "I love the English language, dude. It's so creative." "Are we really having this conversation right now?" I growl when his teeth sink into my inner thigh. His fingers are still lodged inside me, but no longer moving. ~ Sarina Bowen

Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations. ~ Cofer Black

Know what Freud wrote in his diary when he was 77? "What do women want? My God, what do they want?" Fifty years this giant brain spends analyzing women. And he still can't find out what they want. So this makes him the world's greatest expert on female psychology? ~ Clare Boothe Luce

It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says what he believes but by what he actually does.Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life.Period.Anything else is a form of rationalization.
Perhaps the criterion of 'People with whom one spends one's life is better reframed as people on whom one spends one's emotional energies. ~ Andrew Sullivan

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said.
Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of lif ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more. ~ Thomas Sowell

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life. ~ Lori Wilde

PEACHES"

I imagine even peaches

have bad days,

their fuzzy bodies plucked

before their prime

and left to rot on a kitchen tray,

their pudgy meat

soft to the touch-tattoo

of my finger checking

for a pulse - nothing.


Tia Marisol spends her days

at the stove stirring

chicken broth into a copper pot;

a flowered apron hugs her waist.

There is no more talk about

a lover coming to take her north.

These days she keeps to herself,

a seed inside a green-peach shell,

hard, bitter and tart. ~ Massiel Ladrón De Guevara

His eyes drifted leisurely back up to my face and he smiled at me appreciatively, "Kelsey, when a man spends time with a beautiful woman, he needs to pace himself. I quirked my eyebrow at him and laughed. "Yeah, I'm a regular marathon alright." He kissed my fingers. "Exactly. A wise man never sprints ... in a marathon. ~ Colleen Houck

Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools. ~ Walter E. Williams

Bowel transit time, as it is known in the trade, is a very personal thing and varies widely between individuals, and in fact within individuals depending on how active they are on a given day and what and how much they have been eating. Men and women evince a surprising amount of difference in this regard. For a man, the average journey time from mouth to anus is fifty-five hours. For a woman, typically, it is more like seventy-two. Food lingers inside a woman for nearly a full day longer, with what consequences, if any, we do not know.
Roughly speaking, however, each meal you eat spends about four to six hours in the stomach, a further six to eight hours in the small intestine, where all that is nutritious (or fattening) is stripped away and dispatched to the rest of the body to be used or, alas, stored, and up to three days in the colon, which is essentially a large fermentation tank where billions and billions of bacteria pick over whatever the rest of the intestines couldn't manage - fiber mostly. That's why you are constantly told to eat more fiber: because it keeps your gut microbes happy and at the same time, for reasons not well understood, reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes, bowel cancer, and indeed death of all types. ~ Bill Bryson

If thou dost continually draw thine impulse, thy life, the whole of thy being from the Holy Spirit, without whom thou canst do nothing; and if thou dost live in close communion with Christ, there will be no fear of thy having a dry heart. He who lives without prayer - he who lives with little prayer - he who seldom reads the Word - he who seldom looks up to heaven for a fresh influence from on high - he will be the man whose heart will become dry and barren; but he who calls in secret on his God - who spends much time in holy retirement - who delights to meditate on the words of the Most High - whose soul is given up to Christ - who delights in his fullness, rejoices in his all-sufficiency, prays for his second coming, and delights in the thought of his glorious advent - such a man, I say, must have an overflowing heart; and as his heart is, such will his life be. It will be a full life; it will be a life that will speak from the sepulcher, and wake the echoes of the future. "Keep thine heart with all diligence," and entreat the Holy Spirit to keep it full; for, otherwise, the issues of thy life will be feeble, shallow, and superficial; and thou mayest as well not have lived at all. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans. ~ Ron Paul

The world's No. 1 tennis player spends 90 percent of his time winning, while the world's No. 1 golfer spends 90 percent of his time losing. Golfers are great losers. ~ David Feherty

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property. ~ Milton Friedman

The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on. ~ Paul Westerberg

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash. ~ Tom DeMarco

HOME

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
Warsan Shire

We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
These seem like contradictory principles, but they are not. Free will can take us far, suggests Dr. Schwartz's research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.
We might call this the "rubber band theory" of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much. ~ Susan Cain

You are not a gentle flower who spends its whole life in a greenhouse. You are a wildfire, Lark. A wildfire. ~ Ilona Andrews

It is the poor man who clenches so tightly to the gold he is given - for fear of losing it. The man of wealth spends his gold freely to accomplish his will in the world. It is the same with life.'
Suddenly ashamed of my conspicuous poverty, I lowered my eyes. But Scatha placed a hand beneath my chin and raised my head. 'Cling too tightly to your life and you will lose it, my Reluctant Warrior. You must become the master of your life, not its slave. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

If we could visit Highsmith today, I would lead you down the silent corridors until we came to a striking seal on the floor, a blood-red H carved in stone. This hallowed seal represents the sacred Honor of every student who spends four years at Highsmith.

The stone seal is indelible, consecrated by the generations of alumnae who have passed by, understanding and believing. No outsider, no matter how cunning, can ever steal that belief away. ~ James Klise

My wife lost all her credit cards, but I'm not going to report it. Whoever found them spends less than she does! ~ Henny Youngman

The average buyer in bookshop spends 8 seconds on the front cover and 15 seconds on the back cover before deciding whether to purchase the book or not. On average, he does not get past page 18. See? The odds are stacked against us writers! ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Citigroup has a lot of money, it spends a lot of money, and it uses that money to grow and consolidate power. And it pays off. ~ Elizabeth Warren

Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

I'd rather live in the streets than be a submissive Mexican wife who spends all day cooking and cleaning. ~ Erika L. Sánchez

The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles ... when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones. ~ Flann O'Brien

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great good things of sound and sight and smell. ~ James A. Michener

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing. ~ Paul Theroux