„One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.“

— Marie Curie

Letter to her brother (1894)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021.

Marie Curie21

French-Polish physicist and chemist 1867 - 1934

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„I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.“

— Marie Curie French-Polish physicist and chemist 1867 - 1934

„America's never been about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government.“

— Barack Obama 44th President of the United States of America 1961

2012, Re-election Speech (November 2012)
Context: The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote. America's never been about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That's the principle we were founded on. This country has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that's not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores. What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for comes with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That's what makes America great.

„What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.“

— Stephen King, book It

Source: It

„What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.“

— Anne Frank victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary 1929 - 1945

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

„But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.“

— Mikhail Bulgakov, book The Master and Margarita

Source: The Master and Margarita

Love, Fate

„I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.“

— Pablo Picasso Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer 1881 - 1973

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friendenthal (1963, p. 256).
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

People, Winter

„Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.“

— Umberto Eco, book The Name of the Rose

Source: The Name of the Rose

World, Beauty

„If we can forgive what's been done to us… If we can forgive what we've done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.“

— Chuck Palahniuk, book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 21

World, Forgiveness

„One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.“

— Alice Miller Swiss psychologist 1923 - 2010

Source: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

„Life passes; work is permanent. It is all going — fleeting and withering. Youth goes. Mind decays. That which is done remains. Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for God, that, and only that, you are. Deeds never die.“

— Frederick William Robertson British writer and theologian 1816 - 1853

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 119.

Life, God, Youth, Age

„You can only anticipate what someone is going to do if you know exactly what that someone has just done.' --Skulduggery“

— Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

„How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.“

— Vincent Van Gogh Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890) 1853 - 1890

Source: Dear Theo

Art

„What men have done can still be done
And shall be done to-day.“

— George Barlow

The Song of Abu Klea, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Men

„Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends.“

— Richard M. Weaver American scholar 1910 - 1963

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 60.

Effort

„It is all well and good to copy what one sees, but it is much better to draw only what remains in one's memory. This is a transformation in which imagination and memory collaborate.“

— Edgar Degas French artist 1834 - 1917

Quote of Degas in 1883, as cited by Colin B. Bailey, in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publish. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 30 note 10
Degas confided this to Pierre-George Jeanniot
1876 - 1895

Imagination, Memory, Drawing

„Has everything been done to justify our actions in the light of history? What can there be left for a commander in defeat? In antiquity they took poison.“

— Walter Model German field marshal 1891 - 1945

To his chief of staff General Carl Wagener on 17 April 145, before dissolving Army Group B. Quoted in "Battle for the Ruhr" - Page 373 - by Derek S. Zumbro - 2006

History, Light

„If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.“

— Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist 1817 - 1862

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Thursday

Reading

„One of the reasons why our people are alive and flourishing, and have avoided many of the troubles that have fallen to less happy nations, is because we have never been guided by logic in anything we have done. If you will only do as I have done—study the history of the growth of the Constitution from the time of the Civil War until the Hanoverians came to the Throne—you will see what a country can do without the aid of logic, but with the aid of common sense.“

— Stanley Baldwin Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1867 - 1947

Speech to the Empire Day and Coronation Banquet of the Combined Empire Societies, London (24 May 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 154-155.
1937

War, People, History, Sense

„Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.“

— Antonin Artaud French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director 1896 - 1948

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

People, Drawing

„In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever.“

— John Brunner, book Stand on Zanzibar

context (11) “Come Outside and Say That”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

„One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.“

Marie Curie21

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