Colossal Quotes - Page 3

• Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.

  James Henry Breasted

  Pyramids, Childhood, Vision

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• I always felt really guilty if I spent too much time playing video games. It's a colossal waste of time. And I can't say it's a very satisfying feeling at the end of the day, if you've spent eight hours playing a video game; you just end up feeling kind of spent, and used.

  John C. Reilly

  Eight, Games, Feelings

  "Interview: John C. Reilly On His Animated Anti-Hero 'Wreck-It Ralph'". Interview with Alex Zalben, www.mtv.com. October 31, 2012.

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• Expect to make some mistakes when you try new and different approaches. Sometimes colossal failures lead to spectacular successes.

  Harvey Mackay

  Mistake, Trying, Different

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• Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  People, Appreciate, Meat

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, November 2, 2009.

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• The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Humorous, Heart

  Mark Twain (1992). “Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, Volume 1: 1852-1890”, p.725, Library of America

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• 'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.

  Junot Diaz

  Princess, Imagination, Generations

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• The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness.

  Susan Cain

  Energy, Waste, Talent

  "'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking,' by Susan Cain". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. January 26, 2012.

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• Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.

  James Buchan

  Europe, Purpose, Machines

  "Hitler's gold". www.theguardian.com. August 11, 2006.

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• The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

  Peter Carey

  Writing, Past, Giving

  "An Interview With Author Peter Carey". Interview with Ben Evans, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 6, 2010.

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• With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Family, Baby, Sweet

  Wyndham Lewis (1926). “The Art of Being Ruled”

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• The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Sleep, Animal, Insomnia

  "This column will change your life: Can't sleep, don't sleep" by Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. May 21, 2010.

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• I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful." He further added: "No man can read the gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life...Theseus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus.

  Albert Einstein

  Jesus, Hero, Men

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• Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply.

  Gustave Eiffel

  Beautiful, Art, Science

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• Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

  Primo Levi

  Country, Roots, Air

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• Well, then, since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.

  Cassandra Clare

  Praying, Another Life, Wells

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.1151, Simon and Schuster

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• I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

  Alan Moore

  School, Opportunity, Thinking

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• The heavy eyelids snapped open. Jack froze. A huge gold-and-amber eye, as big as a dinner plater, stared at him. The dark pupil shrank, focusing. Jack stood very still. The colossal head turned, the scaled lip only three feet from Jack. The golden eyes gazed at him, wirling with fiery color. Jack breathed in tiny, shallow breaths. Dont blink. Don't blink... Two gusts of wind erutped from the wyvern's nostrils Jack jumped straight up, bounced off the ground into another jump, and scrambled up the nearest tree. In the clearing, Gaston bent over, guffawing like an idiot. 'It's not funny!

  Ilona Andrews

  Eye, Dark, Color

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• Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.

  Meg Rosoff

  Heart, Thinking, Laughing

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• Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stars, Moon, Light

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli (1991). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby”, p.73, Cambridge University Press

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• Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot

  Albert Einstein

  Jesus, Men, Christianity

  "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck", The Saturday Evening Post, p. 17, www.saturdayeveningpost.com. October 26, 1929.

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• It's such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what's lost, but to be enchanted by what was.

  Jandy Nelson

  Effort, Enchanted, Lost

  Jandy Nelson (2010). “The Sky Is Everywhere”, p.173, Penguin

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• Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Appreciation, Humorous, Wrestling

  "Autobiography of a Yogi". Book by Autobiography of a Yogi, Ch. 44 - With Mahatma Gandhi At Wardha, 1946.

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• We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown. And that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship, which could hardly be improved upon. It has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it. It's beautifully equipped with oxygen, with food supplies, with all kinds of delightful things to do while on the journey.... and it's traveling through space at a colossal speed... and it's called the planet Earth.

  Alan Watts

  Attitude, Distance, Journey

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• The rates of taxation climb and the levels of capital decline, until the only remaining wealth beyond the reach of the regime is the very protein of human flesh, and that too is finally taxed, bound, and gagged, and brought to the colossal temple of the state - a final sacrifice of carnal revenue to feed the declining elite.

  George Gilder

  Sacrifice, Taxation, Levels

  George Gilder (2012). “Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century”, p.349, Regnery Publishing

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• I want you to really be able to grasp the wonder of it, the marvel of it, the size of it and really be able to get a good conception of its magnificence and it tremendous colossal gigantic stupendous size and beauty and splendour!

  David Berg

  Want, Magnificence, Able

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