Quotes about people

page 18

“We are not the person other people wish we were. We are who we decide to be.”

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he made so many of them.”

“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”

“Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”

“Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? I guarantee nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea islands and back, but you will find good use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once.'

Next day the following telegram arrived from Torstein:

COMING. TORSTEIN.”

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

“As you go through life's rich tapestry, you realize that most people you meet aren't fit to shine your shoes. It's a sad fact, but it's true. A good friend is someone who'd hide you if you were on the run for murder. How many of them do you know?”

“But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

“Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.”

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.”

“Most people don't bother about their friends in the vegetable kingdom.”

“Strange, he thought, how seldom people tend to look up”

“If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?”

“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could”

“Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

“When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.”

“Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?”

“Jesus paid for salvation for every man, woman, boy, and girl who would ever live on this earth. But people must believe on Jesus and receive Him as their own Savior before salvation can benefit them.”

“It's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave… you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.”

“The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.”

“People whose wishes get granted often don't turn out to be very nice people.”

“When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.”

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing”

“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”

“Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it”

“I make it easier for people to leave by making them hate me a little.”

“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.”

“Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”

“What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

“There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.”

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”

“I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.”

“Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.”

“Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.”

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”

“Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

“But when two people feel something, they ought to respect that enough to figure it out”

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

“I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.”

“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.”

“He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity.”

“When you reach out to hurting people, that’s when God is going to make sure your needs are supplied. When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.”

“People only disappear when they have somewhere to go”

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”

“I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I'm not interested in. So, as far as I'm concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don't know. When I know, I don't care because I knew how it was.”

“If people are dishonest once, they will be dishonest a second time. And honest people should keep away from them. (Lady Chiltern)”

“Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.”

“And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

“And my parents made me want i am. So what? We get stuff from our parents, but we also get stuff from the world around us. From people around us. And at the end of the day, we're us.”

“Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.”

“People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.”

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

“You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.”

“The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.”

“Love people, not things; use things, not people.”

“I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I'm trying to give a little of it back to others. It's one of the greatest pleasures I know.”

“Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.”

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”

“A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.”

“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.”

“And for all these people alike, the key to healing turned out to be the same. Each had a hurt he had to forgive.”

“Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?”

“Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.”

“When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget… So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.”

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act."”

“As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”

“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.”

“I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.”

“People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

“If you want God to bless you and use you greatly, you must be willing to walk with a limp the rest of your life, because God uses weak people.”

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

“You can say anything if enough people will listen.”

“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

“Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.”

“Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.”

“I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.”

“It is no use trying to sum people up.”

“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!"”

“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.”

“It is perhaps well enough that the people of the Nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”

“Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile.”

“If for a while the harder you try, the harder it gets, take heart. So it has been with the best people who ever lived. (The Inconvenient Messiah, BYU Speeches, Feb 15, 1982)”

“To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”

“Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”

“Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.”

“I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”