Quotes about doing
page 16

“Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives. Forgetting loses the lesson.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Forgiveness, Change, Hurt, Forgetting

“Very often we write down a sentencethen anotherwhat we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.”

Thomas Bernhard book Concrete

Source: Concrete

Time

“The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you think you can only do a little.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

Courageous, Thinking

“Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work - and realizing what opportunity is and what isn’t.”

Lucille Ball (1911–1989) American actress and businesswoman

People

“Think thoughts that make you happy. Do things that make you feel good. Be with people who make you feel good. Eat things that make your body feel good. Go at a pace that makes you feel good.”

Louise L. Hay book You Can Heal Your Life

Source: You Can Heal Your Life

People, Feeling, Thinking, Happiness

“Why it's simply impassible!
Alice: Why, don't you mean impossible?
Door: No, I do mean impassible. Nothing's impossible!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

“Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing.”

Nikki Sixx (1958) American musician

Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: Tragedy of Coriolanus

Love, Men, Hate, Cry

“Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.”

Douglas Adams book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Men, Way

“Do you want to go along with others? or go on ahead? or go off on your own?… you must knowyou want andyou want. Fourth question for the conscience.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Source: Twilight of the Idols

Question

“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James book The Middle Years

Source: The Middle Years (1893).

Art, Passion, Madness

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 63 (Act 2, Scene 1)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Context: But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Life, Help

“I wouldn't know what to do with [colour]. Colour to me is too real. It's limiting. It doesn't allow too much of a dream. The more you throw black into a colour, the more dreamy it gets… Black has depth. It's like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Source: Lynch on Lynch

Love, Dreams

“When I hold you in my arms and I feel my finger on your trigger I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Feeling, Happiness

“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa (2003)

Love

“If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

Romantic, Love

“It’s more difficult to create the problem than to solve it. All the person trying to solve the problem has to do is always respect the problem’s creator.”

Keigo Higashino The Devotion of Suspect X

Source: The Devotion of Suspect X

Problem, Personality

“It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Courageous, Fear, Courage

“Witches aren’t like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

Nature

“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”

Djuna Barnes book Nightwood

Source: Nightwood

“All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we've done to make so many children's hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass - what values we must live by.”

Barack Obama book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Source: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Children, People, Heart

“Success is a journey not a destination. The doing is usually more important than the outcome. Not everyone can be Number 1.”

Arthur Ashe (1943–1993) American tennis player

Success

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible….”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

People, World, Appearance

“Questions don't have to make sense, Vincent," said Miss Susan. "But answers do.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

Question, Sense

“Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: He Still Moves Stones

Faith, God, Faith

“We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.”

Saul Bellow book Henderson the Rain King

Source: Henderson the Rain King

Love, Star

“Sandry: "There has to be something we can do."
Lark: "We're mages. We do what we can, but some problems are too big to fix."
Sandry: "Then I wish I weren't a mage. What good is magic, if you can't use it to help people.”

Tamora Pierce book Daja's Book

Source: Daja's Book

People, Problem, Help

“animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that's why we get along”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Last Night of the Earth Poems

Hell, Animals

“I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.”

David Ogilvy (1911–1999) Advertising executive

People

“When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

World, Thinking

“Do you smoke?

Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.

I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant: Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Source: Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“They do not love, that do not show their love.”

William Shakespeare The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Variant: They do not love that do not show their love.
Source: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

For Him, Love

“One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Variant: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Life, Help

“Let's don't wait forever for our lives to start. Let's begin them ourselves. Let's be fearless for once and say, we can do this.”

Cammie McGovern

Source: Say What You Will

Waiting

“there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Understanding

“We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Black Book

Source: The Black Book

Dreams, Time

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Way, Reading

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

Thinking, Reading, Parting

“If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.”

Stephen King book Duma Key

Source: Duma Key

Way

“Destiny doesn't do home visits… you have to go for it yourself.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Prisoner of Heaven

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

Home

“As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

“You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

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

Time

“What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?'

Be yourself,' said Ipek.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Love

“Do you know, sire, I think that if we live to tell our grandchildren about this war, they will accuse us of making it up.'
-Marielle”

Tamora Pierce The Realms of the Gods

Source: The Realms of the Gods

War, Thinking

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Variant: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

“Do you know what a foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery.”

Amy Chua book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Source: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

“Marriage is for noblewomen with nothing else to do.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Source: Trickster's Choice

Marriage

“Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Variant: Do you love the cross because it makes much of you? Or do you love it because it enables you to enjoy and eternity of making much of God?

Love, God, Feeling

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

“Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Life, Speed

“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Shoe, Way, Funny

“I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?”

William Gaddis book The Recognitions

Source: The Recognitions

People, Way

“We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable…”

Edna O'Brien (1930) Novelist, memoirist, biographer, playwright, poet and short story writer

Source: Girl with Green Eyes

Change, Personality

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: —
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.

Decision, Universe, Time

“It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

“Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.”

Terry Pratchett book A Hat Full of Sky

Source: A Hat Full of Sky

Learning

“All you realy need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now

“Well, you do what you do and you pay for your sins, but there's no such thing as what might have been. That's a waste of time; drive you outta your mind”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Time

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, Rice University speech

“Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Source: Emile or On Education

People, Understanding

“Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

World, Courage, Evil

“God is not good, or else he could do better.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

God

“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

“If you’re looking for the full deal, the till-death deal, then look at me. No one’s ever going to love you, stick by you, understand how you work the way I do.
(Malcolm Kavanaugh)”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Happy Ever After

Love, Death, Way, Understanding

“To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Women, Secret, Beauty

“And if wishes were pies, I`d weigh more than I do.
Sir Myles of Barony Olau”

Tamora Pierce Squire

Source: Squire

“You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Quoted in Herbert V. Prochnow (1955), Speaker's Book of Epigrams and Witticisms
Misattributed

“We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: Sceptical Essays

Hate, Truth, Fools, Thinking

“Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Understanding

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Love, Understanding

“When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.”

Iris Chang (1968–2004) American historian

Thinking, Future

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Lolita

Imagination

“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Change

“Do everything with a mind that lets go. Don’t accept praise or gain or anything else. If you let go a little you a will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.”

Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) thai Buddhist monk

Peace

“For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Source: Pierre or the Ambiguities

Men, Soul, Sea

“I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"The Moral Problem"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Context: There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

Feeling, Personality

“Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Courageous, Death, Fear

“Doing is never enough if you neglect Being.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

“I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust: to love him that is honest; to converse with him that is wise, and says little; to fear judgment; to fight when I cannot choose; and to eat no fish.”

William Shakespeare King Lear

Source: King Lear

Love, Fear, Fish, Fight

“Why bother with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?”

Terry Pratchett Thud!