Quotes about anything

Other quotes, 2018
Original: (ja) 特に自分からコメントを常に発信したいなとは思ってないし、何よりも、自分がたくさんの方々に愛してもらってるのはすごく分かってるので…うん…あのー、何だろう？ 特別自分から何かをしなくてもいいかなという風に思っています。
Source: Hanyu about his absence from social media in an interview https://www.olympicchannel.com/en/video/detail/yuzuru-hanyu-happy-to-say-nothing-at-all/ at the Olympics 2018, published 27 February 2018 on the Olympic Channel. (Retrieved 18 September 2020)

Page: 165.
Blue Flame
Original: (ja) 今はとにかく、一日一日を大事にしたいと思う。何気ない日常の一日一日、アイスショーの日々、練習の日々、試合の日々をすべて大切にしたい。そんなことを、あの日を境により強く感じるようになりました。

Translation source: https://kaerb.tumblr.com/post/169666201799/i-always-open-my-heart-if-you-dont-open-your (user-translation) from 13 January 2018.
Annotation: This quote originates from an interview of the 2012/13 season. A variation can be found in the Japanese magazine Sports Graphic Number, issue no. 822, released on 7 February 2013.
Page: 25.
Original: (ja) いつも心を開いているんです。心を開いていなければ何も吸収できないし、おもしろくない。心を開くことが成長の原動力。

Variant: Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

The Race of My Life: An Autobiography Milkha Singh (2013)

Variant: A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Cut It Out (2004)
Source: Wall and Piece

http://rocknrollworldmagazine.com/2015/08/82915-rock-history/

Source: Reaper Man

Source: GDC 2011

As quoted in O₂ : Breathing New Life Into Faith (2008) by Richard Dahlstrom, Ch. 4 : Artisans of Hope: Stepping into God's Kingdom Story, p. 63; this source is disputed as it does not cite an original document for the quote. It is also used in <i> The White Rose </i> (1991) by Lillian Garrett-Groag, a monologue during Sophie's interrogation.
Disputed
Context: The real damage is done by those millions who want to "survive." The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves — or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Notebook entry, January or February 1894, Mark Twain's Notebook, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (1935), p. 240 http://books.google.com/books?id=DjBVlb7cBSIC&pg=PA240
Variant: If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory!
Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

CW 12, par. 126 (p 99)
Psychology and Alchemy (1952)
Context: People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come.

This is cited to to Rommel‎'s Infanterie Greift An [Infantry Attacks] (1937) in World War II : The Definitive Visual History (2009) by Richard Holmes, p. 128, and Timelines of History (2011) by DK Publishing, p. 392, but to George S. Patton, in Patton's Principles : A Handbook for Managers Who Mean It! (1982) by Porter B. Williamson as well as Leadership (1990) by William Safire and Leonard Safir, p. 47
Disputed
Source: Rommel: In His Own Words

Nahj al-Balagha

Source: Diary of a Drug Fiend

Source: The Art of Horsemanship

Source: Devil at My Heels

Music Preservation Society biography http://www.wchandymusicfestival.org/downloads/HandyBiography.pdf
Variant: Life is like a trumpet - if you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out of it.

Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: Speak

Interview at the 1989 Australian Grand Prix, November 1989 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6brLntJE8s

The Satanic Bible (1969)

Source: Song THE HEART OF MAN

Source: A Case of Identity

Source: The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe, (1998), Quotations from "Journey to Ixtlan" (Chapter 8)

The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), edited by Thomas H. Johnson, associate editor Theodora Ward. Quoted in "The Conscious Self in Emily Dickinson's Poetry" by Charles A. Anderson: American Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Nov. 1959), pp. 290-308.

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Titan's Curse

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Variant: We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Sometimes paraphrased as "Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear."
Variant: Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Source: Original preface to Animal Farm; as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison

Source: The Master and Margarita

Quoted in: Ingo F. Walther (1996), Picasso, p. 67.
Attributed from posthumous publications

He said ‘play my son’ but I was sweating. I stopped playing.
Khan used to do riyaz (practice) before the temple of Balaji as advised by his mamu (maternal uncle) who had also told him not talk to any body about anything that might happen. But when he told his mamu about his seeing Balaji, mamu was annoyed and slapped him.
Quote, Power Profiles

Quoted in "Standing Up for Freedom," Academy of Achievement.org (2005-10-31)

Letter to Leopold Mozart (Mannheim, 2 February 1778), from The letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1769-1791, translated, from the collection of Ludwig Nohl, by Lady [Grace] Wallace (Oxford University Press, 1865, digitized 2006) vol. I, # 91 (p. 164) http://books.google.com/books?vid=0SGwLiCNxu7qZ5ch&id=KEgBAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage&dq=%22The+letters+of+Wolfgang+Amadeus+Mozart,+1769-1791%22&hl=en#PRA1-PA164,M1

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 26

As quoted in Moral Epistles by Seneca, iii. 10.

To Leon Goldensohn (21 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

To Leon Goldensohn (24 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

As quoted in an interview in Vanity Fair (August 2000).

Context: Grace Jones said this to me when I met her. I washed her feet, and I looked up at her and she said, "No matter what you do in your life, don’t you ever let anybody take your creative people away from you." And what my creative friends always remind me of is they say, "Only value the opinion of those that you respect. And anyone that you don’t respect, pay no mind to their opinion about you or anything else." And that’s how I live my life. If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist.

"On Medicine, (c. 1020) http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1020Avicenna-Medicine.html
Context: The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and disease. Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials. Of these causes there are four kinds: material, efficient, formal, and final.

Source: ... y no se lo tragó la tierra ... and the Earth Did Not Devour Him

Source: Leaves of Grass

Source: The Book of Questions

Variant: You are educated when you have the ability to hear almost anything without losing your temper, or your self-confidence.

As quoted in Straight Whisky: A Living History of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll on the Sunset Strip (2003), by Erik Quisling, and Austin Lowry Williams p. 152

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the Present, and quicken the annals of the dead Past with the life of to-day. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening, depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral reflections must here be specially noticed, the moral teaching expected from history; which latter has not unfrequently been treated with a direct view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul, and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of peoples and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 6 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Source: The Labours of Hercules

Source: Mastery through Accomplishment

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth