English quotes
English quotes with translation | page 5
Explore well-known and useful English quotes, phrases and sayings. Quotes in English with translations.
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
Variant: You have to die a few times before you actually live.
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
As quoted in Building A Life Of Value : Timeless Wisdom to Inspire and Empower Us (2005) by Jason A. Merchey, p. 74
“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.”
Source: Much Ado About Nothing
“Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones.”
“I always just thought if you see somebody without a smile, give'em yours!”
Variant: If you see someone without a smile give them yours.
Source: The Metamorphosis (1915)
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
“Dogs never bite me. Just humans.”
As quoted in "A Beautiful Child" in Music for Chameleons (1980) by Truman Capote
“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?”
Source: A Brief History of Time
“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.”
Variant: What I mean is... maybe it's only us...
Source: Lord of the Flies
“If a man wants you, nothing can keep him away. If he doesn't want you, nothing can make him stay.”
Source: 1940s, A History of Western Philosophy (1945)
“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
As quoted in Sunday Herald Sun [Melbourne, Australia] (13 January 2003)]
Variant: Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
“The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain”
Oprah Magazine (2004)
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
“Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?”
Shared on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MayaAngelou/posts/10150251846629796, July 4, 2011
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
“Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be smarter than them.”
Variant: Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be better than them.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”
As quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973) by Melvin A. Benarde, p. v
Context: Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”
Source: book Man's Search For Meaning
“I'm not interested in money, I just want to be wonderful.”
As quoted in Ms. magazine (August 1972) p. 41
“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough”
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 94
Context: Religion and science go together. As I've said before, science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. They are interdependent and have a common goal—the search for truth. Hence it is absurd for religion to proscribe Galileo or Darwin or other scientists. And it is equally absurd when scientists say that there is no God. The real scientist has faith, which does not mean that he must subscribe to a creed. Without religion there is no charity. The soul given to each of us is moved by the same living spirit that moves the universe.
“Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.”
“Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.”
"Getting into Print", first published in 1903 in The Editor magazine
Variant: You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Context: Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
Context: Fiction pays best of all and when it is of fair quality is more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration. Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible - if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.) Humour is the hardest to write, easiest to sell, and best rewarded... Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
Source: The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking".
“We think too much and feel too little.”
“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.”
Variant: I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.
Source: Rising Strong
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.”
“For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it.”
“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
“Play always as if in the presence of a master.”
“When we find someone who is brave, fun, intelligent, and loving, we have to thank the universe.”
“It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.”
“If people hate you, then you're probably doing something right”
As prime minister, introducing the 4th Amendment to the Constitution Bill, 23 May 1980, which envisaged a tricameral corporate federation. Cited in The Star, and Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, PW Botha in his own words, p. 27
Interview: Alan Rickman on "Nobel Son" http://www.ifc.com/2008/12/alan-rickman-on-nobel-son by Aaron Hillis, IFC.com (4 December 2008)
“If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
Source: Abiola Abrams The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love: The 11 Secrets of Feminine Power http://books.google.co.in/books?id=ILK0AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT30, El Dorado Publishing, 25 June 2014, p. 30
Other
“When the situation is obscure, attack.”
As quoted in Waging Business Warfare (1988) David J. Rogers, p. 236
“I think being humble is sexy.”
1990s, MTV interview with Tabitha Soren (1995)
Twitter statement on the Manchester terrorist attack https://twitter.com/ArianaGrande/status/868164986887176192 (26 May 2017)
“He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.”
Variant: Those who know, do not speak, those who speak, do not know.
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 56
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
This quotation is from Notebook IV in Notebooks: 1942-1951, not Myth of Sisyphus. The quotation appears in none of Camus books you find in bookstores
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning
“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
In his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg in early summer 1920, in response to questions on the nature of language, as reported in Discussions about Language (1933); quoted in Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy (1972) by Robert J. Pranger, p. 11, and Theorizing Modernism : Essays in Critical Theory (1993) by Steve Giles, p. 28
Context: We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
“The true objective of war is peace.”
This attributed to Sun Tzu and his book The Art of War. Actually James Clavell’s foreword in The Art of War http://www.scribd.com/doc/42222505/The-Art-Of-War states http://www.collegetermpapers.com/TermPapers/History_Other/Sun_Tzu_vs_The_Wisdom_of_the_Desert.shtml, “’the true object of war is peace.’” Therefore the quote is stated by James Clavell, but the true origin of Clavell's quotation is unclear. Nonetheless the essence of the quote, that a long war exhausts a state and therefore ultimately seeking peace is in the interest of the warring state, is true, as Sun Tzu in Chapter II Waging Wars says that "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on." This has been interpreted by Lionel Giles http://www.dutchjoens.info/SunTzu%20-%20Art%20of%20War.pdf as "Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close."
Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, President of Kobe College, Nishinomiya, Hyōgo, Japan is recorded as saying "the real objective of war is peace" in Pacific Stars and Stripes Ryukyu Edition, Tokyo, Japan (10 February 1949), Page 2, Column 2.
Misattributed
“I never tried to prove anything to someone else. I wanted to prove something to myself.”
“Give the opponents more than one reason to stare at your feet.”
“Never let your personal desires and emotions outcompete your reasoning capacity.”
Quoted from his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_and_Failure_Based_on_Reason_and_Reality, "Success and Failure Based on Reason and Reality" https://www.amazon.co.uk/SUCCESS-FAILURE-BASED-REASON-REALITY/dp/9970983903/ on Amazon, P.51 (July 2018)
“The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.”
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
Source: Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.”
“The way we see the problem is the problem.”
“The funniest people are the saddest ones”
“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”
“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), The Strenuous Life
Context: It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.
Context: A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. [... ] If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise.
Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”
“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”
“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”
Source: His Last Bow: 8 Stories
“Beware when making a woman cry. God is counting her tears.”
Source: Adultery
“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
“Never was anything great achieved without danger.”
“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”
As quoted in Business Etiquette for the Nineties : Your Ticket to Career Success (1992) by Lou Kennedy, p. 8
Variant: Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.
“A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left.”
Variant: A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.
