Biography Quotes

“They all laughed when I said I'd become a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.”
― Bob Monkhouse, Crying With Laughter: My Life Story

“I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.
You've got to become them."
(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“What was wrong with these American students? Didn’t they know I was the teacher and they had to do as I said? I learned quickly that my authority meant little, if anything, to them. I was not the all-powerful and feared mwalimu (teacher) of Africa.”
― Maria Nhambu, America's Daughter

“I turned to books for comfort.”
― Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart Collector's Edition

“Just as Wallace learned and evolved, Ali was on his own journey of discovery. Starting out as a 15-year-old cook, Ali learned to collect and mount specimens. He took on responsibility for organizing travel. He nursed Wallace during many bouts of fever and injury.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“The “facts” about Ali’s life are few, and come from Wallace’s writing. Wallace was a careful writer, but he naturally wrote through his own perceptions, memories, and filters.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“History is the biography of murderers.”
― Khayri R.R. Woulfe

“I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism”
― Alexander Hamilton

“We quickly became friends with other art faculty members such as the ceramist Jim Leedy and his wife Jean and art historian/artist Bill Kortlander and his wife Betty. I also began taking classes in Southeast Asian history with John Cady, who had resigned from his position at the U.S.[CB4] [mo5]  State Department because he thought it would be a huge mistake to get involved in a “land war in Southeast Asia.” In 1966, his warnings were starting to become all too obvious as the Vietnam war grew and protests against it emerged. Dr. Cady was in the thick of the protests and was even being shadowed by the F.B.I. After I finished my BFA in art in 1966, I began work on a master’s degree in history at Dr. Cady’s urging. He and his wife became frequent guests at our parties”
― Mallory M. O'Connor, The Kitchen and the Studio: A Memoir of Food and Art

“Indeed, there is nothing on this earth more peaceful than a sleeping, purring cat.”
― Jonathon Scott Payne, Mighty Little Man: My Story, His Story, Our Story

“We see the pain and the misery around the world and what the demonic kingdom and the devil and demons have done to mankind.”
― John Ramirez, Fire Prayers: Building Arsenals That Destroy Satanic Kingdoms

“Tout est question d'équilibre”
― Mireille Guiliano

“We had a teacher called Fanny Menlove, and I remember once when she was out of the room Nancy went up to the blackboard and wrote it backward - Menlove Fanny - and we all fell around laughing. She got into big trouble, but she didn't seem to mind. She had no fear.”
― Peter FitzSimons, Nancy Wake

“For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.”
― George Plimpton

“The creative person should have no other biography than his works.”
― B. Traven

“Anyone who likes or hates Dana White should take a look at this.”
― June White, Dana White, King of MMA

“Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you should!”
― Bill Collins

“Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

—Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I asked Bill what career path he thought I should take, and he replied, “Live the artist’s life.” For years I pondered over his advice. What did it mean to “live the artist’s life?” I finally came to realize that there were no written codes, no hard and fast rules. You didn’t have to starve in a garret or drink yourself to death or cut off your ear. You didn’t even have to literally “make art” physically. The art was your life—your values, your outlook, your passions, your point of view. It was the things you cherished, whether they were people or places or ideas.”
― Mallory M. O'Connor, The Kitchen and the Studio: A Memoir of Food and Art

“Remember this, Anya,” Dostoyevsky told his wife on his deathbed, “I always loved you passionately and was never unfaithful to you even in my thoughts.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“One can speak best through stories. Things only come alive in this way. This is because such things are the children of our experiences. They are conceived during big events in our lives, born when we begin to reflect on those incidents and then grow with us as our appreciation for the memories that brought them into being also lives and thrives.”
― Ali Hussain, A Childhood Between Rivers and Mountains

“Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you sh”
― Bill Collins