Quotes about brick

A collection of quotes on the topic of brick, likeness, wall, housing.

Quotes about brick

Steve Jobs photo

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

2005-09, Address at Stanford University (2005)
Context: Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

Douglas Adams photo
Ol' Dirty Bastard photo

“If a brick don't sit on walls no more, what would you aks it?”

Ol' Dirty Bastard (1968–2004) American rapper

Variant: If a dick don't get hard off of cocaine, what would you aks it?

Hermann Göring photo

“The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (28 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Sarah Dessen photo
Derek Landy photo

“I swear, talking to you is like talking to a really good-looking and mildly stupid brick wall.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Tennessee Williams photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Muhammad Ali photo

“I’ve wrestled with alligators,
I’ve tussled with a whale.
I done handcuffed lightning
And throw thunder in jail.
You know I’m bad.
just last week, I murdered a rock,
Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

A poem about his match with George Foreman, known as the Rumble in the Jungle (1974)
Context: Last night I had a dream, When I got to Africa,
I had one hell of a rumble.
I had to beat Tarzan’s behind first,
For claiming to be King of the Jungle.
For this fight, I’ve wrestled with alligators,
I’ve tussled with a whale.
I done handcuffed lightning
And throw thunder in jail.
You know I’m bad.
just last week, I murdered a rock,
Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.
I’m so fast, man,
I can run through a hurricane and don't get wet.
When George Foreman meets me,
He’ll pay his debt.
I can drown the drink of water, and kill a dead tree.
Wait till you see Muhammad Ali.

Oscar Wilde photo
Mark Twain photo
Fannie Flagg photo
Roger Waters photo

“"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" on The Wall (Pink Floyd, 1979)”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Variant: "Comfortably Numb" on The Wall (Pink Floyd, 1979)

Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo

“The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream… the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them — poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and the beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck "When for a moment, like a drop of rain/He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan/Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." The lighthearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear — the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Tomáš Baťa photo
Tom Robbins photo
Lady Gaga photo

“I've learned love is like a brick, you can build a house or sink a dead body.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Lyrics, Judas.

Socrates photo
Jim Butcher photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Mark Twain photo

“The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

"My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It" http://www.mtwain.com/My_First_Lie,_And_How_I_Got_Out_Of_It/0.html, in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)

Louis Armstrong photo
Augustus photo

“He could boast that he inherited it brick and left it marble.”

Augustus (-63–14 BC) founder of Julio-Claudian dynasty and first emperor of the Roman Empire

Suetonius, of Augustus and the city of Rome, in Lives of the Caesars, Divus Augustus, XXVIII, 3.

Augustus photo

“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”

Augustus (-63–14 BC) founder of Julio-Claudian dynasty and first emperor of the Roman Empire

Marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi.
Quoted in Svetonius, Lives of the Cesars, Aug., XXVIII, 3

Kazi Nazrul Islam photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Arthur Conan Doyle photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Ruskin Bond photo

“On books and friends I spend my money;
For stones and bricks I haven't any.”

Ruskin Bond (1934) British Indian writer

Source: Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas

David Brinkley photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Dorothy Day photo
Cornelia Funke photo
Sarah Waters photo
Darren Shan photo
Shannon Hale photo
David Suzuki photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Dorothy L. Sayers photo
Robin Jones Gunn photo
Richard Bach photo

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Source: The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Ch. 1
Context: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Douglas Adams photo
Ann Brashares photo
Cassandra Clare photo
William Blake photo

“Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of religion.”

Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 21

Lionel Shriver photo

“… how do you run and play when you feel like there are bricks of the heaviest sadness weighing down every part of your body? How do you laugh and talk when there are no laughs left inside of you?”

Katherine Hannigan (1962) American artist and novelist

Source: Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Source: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Mary Karr photo
Scott Lynch photo
Tony Hoagland photo
Sylvia Day photo
Vitruvius photo
John Betjeman photo

“No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm
Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by.
The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm,
Its chimneys steady against the mackerel sky.”

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

"Devonshire Street W.1" line 1, from A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954).
Poetry

Le Corbusier photo
Isaac Leib Peretz photo

“With the same bricks one may erect… a palace or a prison…. The same letters are used in Holy Writ and heretical works.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

A Gilgul fun a Nign, 1901. Alle Verk, vi. 33.

Jeremy Clarkson photo
Mark Satin photo

“Scott wants us each to talk about "the kind of society we'd like to live in." … From the start I am very nervous. Phil goes on about "the redistribution of wealth"; nearly everyone comes out for "socialism" of one kind or another; Brick even hints at "another revolution." When it is my time to speak I am moved to say, "I think people's tolerance is the main issue, even more than socialism. I mean, look at the people who are for the war. Look at the courthouse square."”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

I am afraid to go on and say what I don't like about socialism. ...
Pages 93–94. It's the spring of 1965. Satin had dropped out of college to become a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Holly Springs, Mississippi. The meeting above had been called by SNCC to explore SNCC workers' views.
Confessions of a Young Exile (1976)

“There was a house made out of sticks, there was a city, made out of bricks, I was amazed at what I saw, all I could say was Subhanallah!”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Subhanallah, Alhamdulillah and Insha Allah"
A Picnic of Poems in Allah's Green Garden (2011)

Colm Tóibín photo
Bill Downs photo
Greg Egan photo
Eduardo Torroja photo
Vitruvius photo
Fetty Wap photo
Herbie Brennan photo
Elton John photo

“So goodbye yellow brick road,
Where the dogs of society howl.
You can't plant me in your penthouse,
I'm going back to my plough.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Song lyrics, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

Henry Hazlitt photo

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Jack Johnson (musician) photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Jonah Lehrer photo
Sugar Ray Leonard photo
Peter Jennings photo
Isaac Leib Peretz photo

“A heap of bricks is not yet a house.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

A Gilgul fun a Nign, 1901. Alle Verk, 35; S. Liptzin. Peretz. Yivo, 1947, p. 239.

William Ellery Channing photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Nikolai Gogol photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Grant Morrison photo

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Vitruvius photo
Leon M. Lederman photo
Randy Pausch photo