Quotes about burn-out (41 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

Jack London (1876–1916) American author, journalist, and social activist

The Bulletin, San Francisco, California, December 2, 1916, part 2, p. 1.
Also included in Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, ed. Irving Shepard, Introduction, p. vii (1956)

Time , Wise

“It's better to burn out than to fade away.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Misattributed

“It's better to burn out than to fade away.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Quoted by Cobain in his suicide note, this is from the song My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) by Neil Young, from his album Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Misattributed
Variant: It's better to burn out than fade away.

“It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Playboy interview (1980)
Context: It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison — it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo.

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Variant: Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

Hurtful , Positive , Pain , Joy

“One fire burns out another's burning,
One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Pain

“Who sits alone by the bright window?
My shadow and I, only we two.
But the lamp burns out, there is darkness.
Even my shadow forsakes me.
Alas, alas!
I am forlorn!”

Li Qingzhao (1084–1155) Chinese writer

"To the Tune of ‘Like a Dream’", in The White Pony: An Anthology Of Chinese Poetry (G. Allen & Unwin, 1949), ed. Robert Payne, p. 300

“A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Statement to a TImes reporter in 1990, as quoted in "The wit and wisdom of Boris" in Guardian Unlimited (23 April 2007)
1990s

“Is it a shame that I can’t accept love? Am I too burned out to move towards what will keep me alive or too smart to get pulled into someone else’s world?”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Solipsist

Love , World

“I'm so burned out, the only person I can stand is myself.
I'm the only one I would put through this.
Wheels and wings,
The ride is everything.
I'm all I've got.
I'm all I can take.
Another day has destroyed a part of me.
So far so good.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: See A Grown Man Cry/Now Watch Him Die

Parting , Personality

“In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Men , History , Thinking , Learning

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.”

Irving Stone book The Agony and the Ecstasy

Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy

“(…) As it is natural for the incense stick to burn out, so it is natural for the body to die. Really, it is a matter of very little importance. What matters is that I am neither the body nor the mind. I am.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Body
Source: I am That, P.184.

Nature

“The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 10, Great Power Politics in the Twenty First Century, p. 361

War , Future

“Women today are less than half as likely as men to work in excess of 50 hours per week. (Again, working women put in more hours at home.) It is rarer still for women to sustain that commitment for 20 years and then, without having burned out, increase her hours still more as a CEO. But exactly because it is rare, women who are willing stand out as more exceptional. Women, as it turns out, are far more 'European'--working to live rather than living to work. But the glass ceiling is rarely cracked by healthy, balanced people who work to live.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 82.

Women , Men , People , Home

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

People , Secret , Age , World

“She again rubbed a match on the wall, and the light shone round her; in the brightness stood her old grandmother, clear and shining, yet mild and loving in her appearance. "Grandmother," cried the little one, "O take me with you; I know you will go away when the match burns out; you will vanish like the warm stove, the roast goose, and the large, glorious Christmas-tree." And she made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Match Girl

The Little Match Girl
Fairy Tales (1835)

Love , Hunger , God , Pain

“And what this could mean, as illustrated by what happened in 1854, the first real test of the Fugitive Slave Act? There was a slave named Anthony Burns in Virginia who stowed away on board a coastal vessel that then sailed to Boston. And Anthony Burns, who was apparently quite literate but not very smart, wrote a letter to his brother back in Virginia telling him where he was. Well, before Anthony Burns was returned to the State of Virginia, the President, Franklin Pierce, had sent an artillery regiment of marines to Boston. He had federalized the National Guard of Boston. He had 3,000 soldiers surrounding them, making sure that nobody could break the jail and let Anthony Burns out. This was an example of the way in which the federal police power would be used to make sure that slaves were returned to their masters or that slaves couldn’t escape from their masters. So this is the real issue.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Way

“The reason why lime makes a solid structure on being combined with water and sand seems to be this: that rocks, like all other bodies, are composed of the four elements. Those which contain a larger proportion of air, are soft; of water, are tough from the moisture; of earth, hard; and of fire, more brittle. Therefore, if limestone, without being burned, is merely pounded up small and then mixed with sand and so put into the work, the mass does not solidify nor can it hold together. But if the stone is first thrown into the kiln, it loses its former property of solidity by exposure to the great heat of the fire, and so with its strength burnt out and exhausted it is left with its pores open and empty. Hence, the moisture and air in the body of the stone being burned out and set free, and only a residuum of heat being left lying in it, if the stone is then immersed in water, the moisture, before the water can feel the influence of the fire, makes its way into the open pores; then the stone begins to get hot, and finally, after it cools off, the heat is rejected from the body of the lime.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter V, Sec. 2

Way , Feeling , Lying , Water

“When I grow too old and dull to rock 'n roll
Like to hold on tight to you darling
And when my fires have all burned out
I'd like to think I can still think about
The things I used to sing about
When I was spending all my time alone
By myself and on my own
Seldom seen and quite unknown.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"London Town"
Song lyrics, Dad Love His Work (1981)

Thinking , Singing , Time

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age , Light

“Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

Understanding , Time , Personality

“Then they died.
And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out; the howling peoples dwelt in smashed cities and kindled their fires with books.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Prologue (p. 1)
The Enemy Stars (1959)

Men , War , People , Books

“The king is gone
But he's not forgotten.
This is the story
Of a Johnny Rotten
It's better to burn out
Than it is to rust.
The king is gone
But he's not forgotten.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)
Song lyrics, Rust Never Sleeps (1978)

“Life’s been quite a journey. My career has been slow, yet steady. I like it that way. I never wished for overnight success. Neither did I want to rush through my career and suffer a burn-out.”

Yuvan Shankar Raja (1979) Indian musician

Yuvan Unplugged (2009)

Life , Way , Suffering , Success

“Now there was a young gentleman which had married a merchant's wife. And having a little wanton money, which him thought burned out the bottom of his purse, in the first year of his wedding took his wife with him and went over sea, for none other errand but to see Flanders and France and ride out one summer in those countries.”

Thomas More (1478–1535) English Renaissance humanist

Works (c. 1530)
Sometimes paraphrased "A little wanton money, which burned out the bottom of his purse."

Money , Wedding , Summer , Sea

“And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind,
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in.
And I would have liked to have known you,
But I was just a kid.
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Candle in the Wind
Song lyrics, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

Life

“The foundation of all religion is the belief in a God, and that He exists in certain relation with His creatures. Such belief necessarily leads to the consciousness of some obligation towards the Deity; and this consciousness suggests the duty of worship; and in the selection of the form of this worship originates the various creeds which distinguish and distract mankind. There is a sort of geography of religion; and I regret to think that the majority of mankind take their creed from the clime in which they happen to be born; and that many, and not an inconsiderable portion of mankind, suffer the sacred torch to burn out altogether, in their contact with the world, and then vainly imagine that they can recover the sacred fire by striking a park out of dogmatic theology.”

Charles Babbage Passages from the life of a philosopher

"Passages from the life of a philosopher", Appendix: Religion, Note (B) pp. 491-492
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

God , World , Religion , Imagination

“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

God , People , Way , Feeling

“It's hard to get burned out on doing a TV show.”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

2000s
Source: Chicago, Vol. 57, Nr, 1-4 (2008), p. 28

“Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought's to dread,
Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There's nothing but the night.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 60.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Fear , Light , Night

“Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 14: Doctor Moreau Explains

Men , Pain , Time , Animals

“You start to think, when you’re younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right—your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that – I’m talking the big picture here – eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing – Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there’s a lot of noise and sound and fury – and where’s it going? It’s not going any place… Now, you can’t actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and – why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it’s the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Interview with France 24 (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsuqvLIttk.

Life , Star , Thinking , Universe

“I ran and grabbed the arm of the soldier who was lighting the fire. I tore the fuse away from him and, furious, threw myself into my machine to break down the contraption surrounding it. But I was too late. Hardly had I stepped inside when I found myself propelled into the clouds.
I was terrified, but my mind was not too upset for me to remember all that happened at that moment. I can tell you, then, that the fire burned out a bank of rockets (which had been linked together in rows of six with a hook at the edge of each set of half-dozen). Another stage ignited, then another, so that the danger in the gunpowder was left behind as it burned. When the material was used up, the scaffolding was gone. I was thinking that all I had left to do was ram my head against some mountain when I felt (without moving in the slightest) that I was still going up. My machine separated from me, and I saw it fall back to earth.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Mountain , Thinking , Light

“My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay.
It's better to burn out
Than to fade away.
My my, hey hey.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Hey Hey, My My, written with Jeff Blackburn; quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.
Song lyrics, Rust Never Sleeps (1978)

“Comets are flying around the solar system. As they near the sun, they develop a tail as material is blown off by the solar wind. Most astronomers agree that comets cannot be more than 10,000 years old. They would have completely disappeared by now. Some scientists have recognized this as a serious problem for the theory that the earth is billions of years old, so they have proposed a new theory that new comets are constantly being introduced into the solar system to replace the old ones that burn out. They say they are coming from the “Oort Cloud.” No one has ever seen this Oort cloud, Oort never saw the Oort cloud! There is NO scientific evidence for its existence, but in their mind, this answers the serious problem the short lives of comets creates. There is a simpler answer, of course: the universe is NOT billions of years old!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 38

Problem , Universe , Sun , Flying

“We belong to the Society of Friends, a community of love, a family of persons. In so far as we are not just another “denomination,” we know also that the salvation of our age is in our keeping; that is, that it lies in the divine-human society which is "rooted and grounded in love." This is the unity which alone can make one world out of "one world", and not one nightmare, one hell, one burned-out cinder. We know also and in a way we respond to the fact that we have a mission, we are "called to be saints".”

A. J. Muste (1885–1967) Christian pacifist and civil rights activist

Saints for This Age (1962).

Love , Age , World , Family

“I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst through the sky.
There was a band playing in my head
And I felt like getting high.
I was thinking about what a
Friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

After the Gold Rush
Song lyrics, After the Gold Rush (1970)

Lie , Hope , Lying , Thinking

“It's about a person who has a spectacular, meteor-like rise, but burns out or dies young.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

As quoted in in Uncut (July 2008) http://www.uncut.co.uk/the-waterboys/the-making-of-the-waterboys-the-whole-of-the-moon-feature
Context: I recorded "…Moon" on my own with a drum machine, then brought musicians in as they were needed. It's about a person who has a spectacular, meteor-like rise, but burns out or dies young. Though the song ain't about him, the nearest equivalent would be Hendrix. Adding a list of all the things the hero/heroine saw raised the emotional temperature. The final chorus now had an extra fatefulness. To express this I inserted "you came like a comet, blazing your trail", then a "comet", a firework sample from a BBC sound effects record. That sweetly collided with Anthony's sax solo, so that it sounds as if the sax erupts from the comet itself. Magic like that just happens. … The Beatles' "Penny Lane" influenced the trumpet break — the sudden injection of super-fresh, bright and clear horns, a sound of optimism and clarity. Bowie's "Fame" inspired the final descending vocal, thought up and sung by Karl. I wanted the whole thing to sound like a carnival.

Personality

“According to the Buddhist tradition, the spiritual path is the process of cutting through our confusion, of uncovering the awakened state of mind. When the awakened state of mind is crowded in by ego and its attendant paranoia, it takes on the character of an underlying instinct. So it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather of burning out the confusions which obstruct it. In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process we otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product, dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution.”

Chögyam Trungpa book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Dependency

“I got so burned out on that picture that I wanted to leave the business, but then if you wait long enough you think, "Oh, I miss certain things."”

Kim Novak (1933) American actress

The making of a movie is wonderful. What's difficult is afterward when you have to go around and try to sell it. The actual filming, when you have a good script—which isn't often—nothing beats it.
Source: "As quoted in Rustic Oregon life is a real picnic for Kim Novak" by Bob Thomas, Associated Press, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 14 May 2004 https://www.seattlepi.com/ae/movies/article/Rustic-Oregon-life-is-a-real-picnic-for-Kim-Novak-1144800.php

Business , Thinking , Waiting