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Now I will give you a piece of advice. I will tell you something that I absolutely believe you should do, and if you do not do it you will never be a witer. It is a certain truth. When your pencil is dull, sharpen it. And when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.
Mary RuefleBeauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it. Nor will a "pretty" face make it, for "pretty" faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces.
Robert HenriYou see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there may be many interesting stories behind them, but what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind.
Terry PratchettDried peas and beans, being rather on the dull side, much like dull people respond readily to the right contacts.
Irma S. RombauerIn England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar WildeGenius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonThe enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.
Tom RobbinsWho will deny that true religion consists, in a great measure, in vigorous and lively actings of the inclination and will of the soul, or the fervent exercises of the heart? That religion which God requires, and will accept, does not consist in weak, dull, and lifeless, wishes, raising us but a little above a state of indifference.
Jonathan EdwardsIn the books I read the sinners are always more interesting than the saints, and in real life good people are dismally dull. I've no desire to be wicked, but I do want to be happy. A short life and a gay one for me and I'm willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary.
Louisa May AlcottEvery so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
Diane SetterfieldThe most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.
Albert EinsteinWe gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.
Edgar Allan PoeI feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.
Anton ChekhovPerfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.
Colleen McCulloughNo spoon has yet destroyed a mouth, but the knife of war cuts portions that are hard to swallow. Perhaps the big mouths of the privileged are able to cope with them, but they dull the teeth of the little people and ruin their stomachs.
Franz GrillparzerA mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.
Samuel JohnsonIt has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
Hilaire BellocWhen ever the light of civilization faces upon you with a blighting power...go to the wilderness...Dull business routine, the fierce passions of the marketplace, the perils of envious cities became but a memory...The wilderness will take hold of you. It will give you good red blood; it will turn you from a weakling into a man...You will soon behold all with a peaceful soul.
Estwick EvansThe scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories โ not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.
Hunter S. ThompsonDuring my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.
Charles DarwinYou ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. Of acute sorrow I suppose that I know comparatively little. My saddestand most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets. The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake of its dull patience,--in winter expecting the sun of spring.
Henry David ThoreauThey say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn't, and it never was. It's about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear - a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.
Lauren OliverPerfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
W. Somerset MaughamMusic journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met...
Zachary Cole SmithMy secret is that I have never thought there is a secret to anything in life. Passion. Love. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Dull but true.
Stephen FryBe it known that Men of dull faculties and slight wisdom, They who cling proudly to signs, Cannot believe in this Dharma. Now I, joyfully and fearlessly, In the midst of the bodhisattvas Frankly casting aside my expedient devices, Merely preach the Unexcelled Path.
Gautama BuddhaThere have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.
Charles DickensThe streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.
Charles BukowskiI believe in the dull lie - make your story boring enough and no one will question it.
Sara ParetskyShort-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn AbbeySome of those stories in local newspapers are just as dull and boring as the stories that I get from on-line services, which are basically sort of straight news.
Tabitha SorenYou know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.
Samuel R. DelanyThat would be the frontispiece. This was a picture of my mother and me coming out of the United States Supreme Court, with fecal matter smeared across our faces. They wrapped it in wax paper so that when I received it I'd get the full impact of the message. Though I haven't gotten anything quite that original lately, there's still never a dull moment in my mailbox.
Madalyn Murray O'HairDisplay advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.
John Dos PassosBooks! tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There's more of wisdom in it.
William WordsworthAs a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?
Hugh LaurieDrama is life with the dull bits left out. There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
Alfred HitchcockI have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
Richard P. FeynmanThere are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThere was recently a story out that I turned down a role in a major franchise. That's not true. I refused to audition for it. I didn't get the part. I didn't even go in because I thought that the part was just a repackaged version of the parts I played before in these young adult films - sort of moody, masculine, but sensitive and all this kind of thing. It was just a repackaged, rather dull thing.
Max IronsThe writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.
Morris Kline