Top 125 Peculiar Quotes

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.

My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.

Brits have a peculiar sense of humour. I love it.

‘The Girls,’ by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.

There’s something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.

I wish to add my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind; and certainly, I should feel it no small glory if I were enabled to be one of his most noted prophets (using this word in my own peculiar sense) in this world.

There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one’s squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.

We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.

There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they’re not interested, because it’s also a country where everybody‘s opinion is their opinion, and they really don’t give a damn what you think. So it’s a very odd experience.

You don’t have to be peculiar to find God.

Love is a peculiar thing.

Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone’s enemies – sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.

What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.

I loved the idea of a book of fairytales meant especially for peculiar children, and I love even more the idea of making that fictional book real.

I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn’t even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

The lawyer has not reached the height of his vocation who does not find therein… scope for a peculiar but genuine artistic function.

Intelligence officers are a peculiar lot. Whether they are active or retired, their brains are wired for a completely different way of seeing the world around them.

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man’s moral nature.

Adam was the image of God, he was man and woman, and yet neither of them before his Eve, but a masculine virgin in peculiar love, full of chastity and purity.

I’m a private victim of a peculiar household.

I actually have a peculiar feminism that does not involve the idea that women shouldn’t be sexy. Female characters written in comics have always been pretty damned sexy, and used their sexuality. And I don’t have any problem with that.

The danger in our system is that the general government, which represents the interests of the whole, may encroach on the states, which represent the peculiar and local interests, or that the latter may encroach on the former.

The world’s a mean place. It’s unfair, then it’s fair. It’s hateful, then it’s loving. It’s a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

The course that I have uniformly pursued, ever since I became a missionary, has been rather peculiar. In order to become an acceptable and eloquent preacher in a foreign language, I deliberately abjured my own. When I crossed the river, I burnt my ships.

What I do believe is theatre is a medium with a peculiar ability to air vital issues.

I understood that ‘The Yellow Birds‘ would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong.

John Goodman is like the Jackie Chan of acting. Any prop that you put in front of him, he’s going to take advantage of it in some peculiar way.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

The city has become a serious menace to our civilization… It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

You could say I’m a character actress. Or maybe a character actress who does peculiar, interesting lead roles. Does that make sense?

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue – but I would argue it nevertheless – that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music – both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing – is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.

Having to think so much about fictitious relationships that work or don’t work, and with each relationship between characters managing to do one or other of those in its own peculiar way, I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, real and imagined.

A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to men.

When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it’s a good time to start painting.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.

I am willing to admit that if the agriculturists are oppressed by peculiar burdens, they ought to be relieved from them, or be allowed a fair and just protection equivalent to all such peculiar burdens.

Whatever happens to science in schools, there’s something peculiar going on if students don’t see it as creative.

In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone – both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.

I’m very aware that you lead a very peculiar existence as a professional footballer, being flown everywhere first-class and never having to queue up for anything. Of course, that’s attractive, but if you’re not careful, you end up living in a world where nothing is really real.

Baseball grew rapidly in favor; the field was ripe. America needed a live outdoor sport, and this game exactly suited the national temperament. It required all the manly qualities of activity, endurance, pluck, and skill peculiar to cricket, and was immeasurably superior to that game in exciting features.

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.

I think there’s something peculiar about me that I haven‘t died. It doesn’t make sense but I refuse to die.

Work place romances always seem to get very confused and peculiar, in my experience.

The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn’t have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

Shanghai was a peculiar city: so many people; everyone seemed to be working all the time. The skyline was beautiful.

It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men together. There was in it a peculiar, intense, vital spirit if you will, that I have never felt before in any strike.

As the treaty made with the United States was the first treaty entered into by your country with other countries, therefore the President regards Japan with peculiar friendliness.

Man’s constitution is so peculiar that his health is purely a negative matter. No sooner is the rage of hunger appeased than it becomes difficult to comprehend the meaning of starvation. It is only when you suffer that you really understand.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don’t necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.

I believe there is no doctrine more dangerous to the Church today than to convey the impression that a revival is something peculiar in itself and cannot be judged by the same rules of causes and effect as other things.

At the age of seven, I wanted a doll with blonde hair and blue eyes like other girls in my class. But my father gave me a black doll and said ‘black is beautiful.’ Telling this to a seven-year-old was quite peculiar, but these were the values we inherited from him.

I think there’s something very peculiar about living in the city and not part of the major metropolis; that actually makes it remarkably easy to disappear.

I can remember somebody once saying to me that they thought my life must be less real than these other people that they were writing about, which I found a very peculiar thing ‘cos all our lives are equally real, and it’s just a matter of depicting them and talking about them.

The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic – just one of those unfortunate things.

I always like to have faith that an audience will suspend their disbelief, if you present it to them in the right way. I find it peculiar when people scoff at one bold idea, and yet they’ll then turn over and watch a man travel through time in a police phone box. I think it’s just how you present the idea.

Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson.

Vice, by comparison with terrible accidents, has its own peculiar explanation. For, in a way, it does occur in accordance with the rationale of nature, and its occurrence is not, so to speak, useless in relation to the whole world. For otherwise, the good would not exist, either.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

For some peculiar reason, two films about Oscar Wilde were started at the same time, back in 1959 or 1960. I played Wilde in one, and Robert Morley was in the other. As it turned out, at that particular moment there was no market for any Oscar Wilde movie at all.

People avoid the telephone because it’s easier to text. Calls can be awkward – you interrupt each other; you can’t quite hear someone. But the advantage is you get to hear someone else’s voice. You find out whether or not you can have a fluid conversation or if it’s stilted and peculiar.

On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitoes fed on malarial.

Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.

I live and love in God’s peculiar light.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Today’s particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar – and they had the ability to investigate it.

Americans hate their cable companies – for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I’d been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

But to the slave mother New Year‘s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

It is a peculiar part of the good photographer‘s adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

The American president has a peculiar leadership responsibility to speak out for freedom.

In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.

For my peculiar face, I look best when I look as though I’m not wearing make-up.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that’s the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times – almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I’ve seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.

I don’t feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that’s quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government.

Power is a very peculiar thing. It’s like the ego. The ego’s only there to keep you above water. Once we realize something good about ourselves, we have a tendency to abuse the gift.

God’s people are peculiar. Their spirit cannot mingle with the spirit and influence of the world. You do not wish to bear the Christian name and yet be unworthy of it.

My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else‘s in the field.

If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks – that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.

There is a peculiar burning odor in the room, like explosives. the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookies. The war has begun.

Nico was peculiar. She was extraordinary.

I’m a transactional lawyer, which involves a lot of negotiation. If nothing else, that’s given me a good eye for human motivation and frequent case studies in peculiar psychological quirks. I think that’s served me fairly well as a writer.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed.

The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a peculiar flavor, like none other.

I wouldn’t be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, ‘What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.’

God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.

That’s one of the peculiar things about bad moods – we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true.

I think I have got a peculiar voice really, it neither one thing nor the other. It’s not a contralto and it’s not a mezzo soprano; it’s a nothing voice really.

At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being.

Value is consequently the necessary theoretical starting point whence we can elucidate the peculiar phenomenon of prices resulting from capitalist competition.

I never wanted credit for being a wonderful person or a great human being or looking peculiar. I just wanted credit for the music.