Explore well-known and useful English quotes, phrases and sayings. Quotes in English with translations.
“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
Notebooks (Summer 1886 – Fall 1887)
Variant translation: Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…
As translated in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) by Walter Kaufmann, p. 458
“Liberals can understand everything but people
who don't understand them.”
“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”
Preface (December 1960) to The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961), p. xix
“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
“Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.”
“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”
As quoted in "Wisdom of a forefather" https://web.archive.org/web/20100716212616/http://www.today.colostate.edu/story.aspx?id=546 (11 February 2009), Colorado State University.
Posthumous attributions
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
“Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel?”
A similar remark was reportedly made by Pratchett in The Herald (4 October 2004): I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel.
"I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist" (2008)
Context: Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
“Animals are my friends… and I don't eat my friends.”
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”
Source: Pride and Prejudice (1813)
“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”
Source: The Complete Sherlock Holmes
“Patience and time do more than strength or passion.”
Patience et longueur de temps
Font plus que force ni que rage.
Book II (1668), fable 11.
Fables (1668–1679)
Where Is Science Going? (1932)
Source: Where is Science Going?
“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
Variant: A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Source: The Critic as Artist (1891), Part II
“Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.”
Source: The Quiet American
“The only obligation we have in any lifetime is to be true to ourselves.”
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Variant: Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Context: Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
Context: Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
“If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.”
Source: Germinal
“The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.”
“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
As quoted in Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior (1991) by Dan Millman, p. 78
Life’s not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.
As quoted in "They Came to Write in Hawai‘i" by Joseph Theroux, in Spirit of Aloha (March/April 2007)
“Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.”
Source: Break, Blow, Burn
Bruce Lee radio interview with Ted Thomas
Bruce Lee
Context: When I look around, I always learn something: to be always yourself, and to express yourself, to have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.
Context: When I look around I always learn something, and that is to be yourself always, express yourself, and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate him. Now that seems to be the prevalent thing happening in Hong Kong, like they always copy mannerism, but they never start from the root of his being and that is, how can I be me?
“One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.”
“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.”
“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
Source: The Happy Prince and Other Stories
"I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist" (2008)
Context: There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should.
It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this.
As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book … But since contracting Alzheimer's disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe.
“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body”
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Context: The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence... the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Context: But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
“What does not kill him, makes him stronger.”
… was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn stärker
"Why I Am So Wise", 2
Cf. Twilight of the Idols (1888), "Maxims and Arrows", aphorism 8: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Ecce Homo (1888)
As quoted in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1944; 1948) by Dale Carnegie; though Roosevelt has sometimes been credited with the originating the expression, "Damned if you do and damned if you don't" is set in quote marks, indicating she herself was quoting a common expression in saying this. Actually, this saying was coined back even earlier, 1836, by evangelist Lorenzo Dow in his sermons about ministers saying the Bible contradicts itself, telling his listeners, "… those who preach it up, to make the Bible clash and contradict itself, by preaching somewhat like this: 'You can and you can't-You shall and you shan't-You will and you won't-And you will be damned if you do-And you will be damned if you don't.' "
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Μηκέθ᾽ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.
X, 16
Variant: Don't go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one.
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
Source: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
Source: On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
Source: Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
“Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind. Self changes, and you follow.”
Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Niemand kann dir die Brücke bauen, auf der gerade du über den Fluß des Lebens schreiten mußt, niemand außer dir allein.
“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129
Untimely Meditations (1876)
“It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
Anonymous American proverb; since 1998 this has often been attributed to Mark Twain on the internet, but no contemporary evidence of him ever using it has been located.
Variants:
It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that matters.
"Stub Ends of Thoughts" by Arthur G. Lewis, a collection of sayings, in Book of the Royal Blue Vol. 14, No. 7 (April 1911), cited as the earliest known occurrence in The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro, p. 232
It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins.
Anonymous quote in the evening edition of the East Oregonian (20 April 1911)
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, declaring his particular variant on the proverbial assertion in Remarks at Republican National Committee Breakfast (31 January 1958) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11229
Misattributed
“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success”
“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”
Variant: Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it.
Source: Complete Works - Volume XII
The Bulletin, San Francisco, California, December 2, 1916, part 2, p. 1.
Also included in Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, ed. Irving Shepard, Introduction, p. vii (1956)
Context: I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: 1984
Context: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Page 44.
Source: Invisible Cities (1972)
Context: With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
Address in Des Moines, Iowa (4 November 1910)
1910s
Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie
Variant: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
Context: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)
Quoted allegedly "From da Vinci`s Notes" in Jon Wynne-Tyson: The Extended Circle. A Dictionary of Humane Thought. Centaur Press 1985, p. 65 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=1mMbAQAAIAAJ&q=murder.
Actually the quote is not authentic but made up from a novel by Dmitri Merejkowski (w:Dmitry Merezhkovsky) entitled "The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci" (La Résurrecton de Dieux 1901), translated from Russian into English by Herbert Trench. G.P. Putnam's Sons New York and London, The Knickerbocker Press. There, in Book (i.e. chapter) VI, entitled The Diary of Giovanni Boltraffio, one finds the following:
The master [Leonardo da Vinci] permits harm to no living creatures, not even to plants. Zoroastro http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommaso_Masini tells me that from an early age he has abjured meat, and says that the time shall come when all men such as he will be content with a vegetable diet, and will think on the murder of animals as now they think on the murder of men ( p. 226 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=g_pa0OaYX64C&pg=PA226).
However, despite the quote's false attribution, da Vinci was in fact a vegetarian.
Misattributed
Variant: When each day is the same as the nest it's because people fail to reconize the good things that happen in thier lives everyday the sunrises
Source: The Alchemist
“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
The Finest Story in the World http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/ManyInventions/fineststory.html (1893).
Other works
Source: Many Inventions
Context: When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
“You can suffer the pain of change or suffer remaining the way you are.”
“A man is never as big as when he is on his knees to help a child.”
“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work…”
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Variant: All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
Source: Pensées
“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
" The Remarkable Rocket http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/179/".
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
Variant: Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.
