Quotes about people

page 19

“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

“When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.”

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

“I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.”

“One must speak in such a way that although someone else, or many others, or an infinite number of people have said it before, it seems as though you said it first.”

“He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spent ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air everyday.”

“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them."

()”

“When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them”

“Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”

“I knew that there had been times in the past-terrible times-when people had destroyed others in haste, in fear, and had brought about their own destruction”

“It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.”

“Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.”

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.”

“Look, sir, I know Angua. She's not the useless type. She doesn't stand there and scream helplessly. She makes other people do that.”

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”

“Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”

“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.”

“With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap”

“Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”

“People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.”

“Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.
Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.”

“In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.”

“One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”

“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.”

“Everyone has their weaknesses. Some people smoke. I collect stuffed penguins. If you won't tell, I won't.”

“Harry Dresden: I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family.”

“It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.”

“In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.”

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”

“He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there was never an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.”

“A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.”

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.”

“A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.”

“I don't know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change.”

“Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”

“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.”

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

“In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”

“Of course I want to kill you," said Skulduggery. "I want to kill most people. But then where would I be? In a field of dead people with no one to talk to.”

“Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.”

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!”

“Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.”

“Sadness of any sort is also seductive, particularly if it seems deep-rooted, even spiritual, rather than needy or pathetic—it makes people come to you.”

“It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.”

“It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people.”

“The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.”

“My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

“It's a lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.”

“I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.”

“The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.”

“Really! Between you and Eragon, I seem to spend most of my time among the Varden healing people to silly to realize they need to avoid getting chopped into tiny little pieces”

“You have to live with the people to know their needs, and you have to live with God to know how to solve them.”

“The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves”

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”

“People and relationships never stop being a work in progress”

“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss… The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”

“But we're a university! Weto have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?"

"Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely.”

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.”

“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”

“A people free to choose will always choose peace.”

“A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves”

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

“At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?”

“Remember, young man, experience is not the best teacher. Other people's experience is the best teacher. By reading about the lives of great people, you can unlock the secrets to what made them great.”

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”

“I think we deserve people who really, really love us.”

“People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”

“In my view, philanthropy goes against the grain; therefore it generates a lot of hypocrisy and many paradoxes. Here are some examples: Philanthropy is supposed to be devoted to the benefit of others, but philanthropists are primarily concerned with their own benefit; philanthropy is supposed to help people, yet it often makes people dependent and turns them into objects of charity; applicants tell foundations what they want to hear, then proceed to do what the applicant wants to do.”

“If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.”

“So, you wrecked Alcatraz Island, made Mount St. Helens explode, and displaced half a million people, but at least you're safe."
"Yep, that pretty much covers it.”

“One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.”

“A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want.”

“People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.”

“Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?”

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”

“I try not to speak about all the charities and people I help, because I believe we can only be truly generous when we expect nothing in return.”

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”

“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.”

“I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.”

“People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.”

“What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!”

“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”

“People who don't think shouldn't talk.”

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

“Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them, you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?”

“Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”

“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

“People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.”

“No people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.”