Quotes about doing
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“You cannot have the right to do what is wrong!”

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

“You must tell Lady Alanna that sometime. I'd do it from a distance.”

Tamora Pierce book Emperor Mage

Source: Emperor Mage

“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“Love what you do; Do what you love.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Love

“Real children do not go hoppity skip unless they are on drugs.”

Terry Pratchett book Hogfather

Source: Hogfather

Children

“The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

Way, Reading

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 13.

“I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”

Terry Pratchett book I Shall Wear Midnight

Source: I Shall Wear Midnight

Business

“The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger…”

Sarah Waters (1966) novelist

“everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait… there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Time, Waiting, Patience

“I want so much that is not here and do not know
where to go.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”

Terry Pratchett book Snuff

Source: Snuff

Hunger, Law

“Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Success

“What am I doing here?”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

“It is perhaps well enough that the people of the Nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Misattributed

People, Understanding

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America

Men, People

“Love can really screw you up before you figure out how to live with it. And once you do? You wonder how the hell you ever lived without it”

Nora Roberts book Bed of Roses

Source: Bed of Roses

Love, Hell

“I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1441/ The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) Context: I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My county is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.

Love, Hate, Fate, Fight

“Do it for joy and you can do it forever”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Joy

“People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

People

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

A Poet's Advice (1958)
Context: Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel …
the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

World, Fight, Night

“I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

Source: Viper's Tangle

Life, Men, Hate, Universe

“He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.”

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

Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Communication, Bird, Learning

“A visiting pastor at our church in Plains once told a story about a priest from New Orleans. Father Flanagan’s parish lay in the central part of the city, close to many taverns. One night he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub. The man landed in the gutter, and Father Flanagan quickly recognized him as one of his parishioners, a fellow named Mike. Father Flanagan shook the dazed man and said, “Mike!” Mike opened his eyes and Father Flanagan said, “You’re in trouble. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me what it is.ℍ “Well, Father,” Mike replied, “I hope you’ll pray for me.” “Yes,” the priest answered, “I’ll pray for you right now.” He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, “Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.ℍ At this, a startled Mike woke up fully and said, “Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.ℍ Sometimes we don’t feel much of a personal relationship between God and ourselves, as though we have a secret life full of failures and sins that God knows nothing about. We want to involve God only when we plan to give thanks or when we’re in trouble and need help. But the rest of our lives, we’d rather keep to ourselves.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President

Life, God, Secret, Hope

“I love to sleep. Do you? Isn't it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

Love, World, Sleep

“Listen, Peaches, is what humans are all about," said the voice of Maurice. "They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Time

“This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Suffering

“What hasto do with the price of peas in Persopolis?”

Tamora Pierce The Realms of the Gods

Source: The Realms of the Gods

“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.”

Terry Pratchett book Equal Rites

Source: Equal Rites

People, Age, Holiday

“I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Feeling

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

Terry Pratchett book Small Gods

Source: Small Gods

God, People, Business, Thinking

“There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you.”

Richard Branson (1950) English business magnate, investor and philanthropist

Powerful, Life, World, Way

“You can think whatever you want, do whatever you want. I'm going to just go on loving you, even if it's hopeless.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Love, Thinking

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

Arthur Miller The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Act 1
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)
Source: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Hope

“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

Understanding

“… the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today's work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Way, Intelligence, Future

“I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite.”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

Source: No Exit

Idea

“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.”

Terry Pratchett book Jingo

Source: Jingo

People

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

World, Time, Painting

“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

Joy

“I never knew I could hate someone as deeply as I do you.”
“I often help others discover the outer limits of their hatred. It’s a talent of mine.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Lothaire

Hate, Help

“Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyhow.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

The Motto Book (1907).
Variant: Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyhow.

“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.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

Love, People, Heart, Selfishness

“If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Justice, Help

“this satsangh?’ You just drop that. You don’t have to get anything, okay? You don’t have to benefit from this. Just waste half a day and go. (Laughter) Really. ‘What should I get out of my meditation?’ Nothing. Just waste fifteen-twenty minutes every day. So do not meditate; just learn to waste some time. Nothing needs to happen. This is not about resting; this is not about becoming healthy; this is not about becoming enlightened; this is not about reaching heaven. All this is just wasting time. When you are not trying to be anything, not trying to get anywhere, you are being.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Himalayan Lust

Laughter, Learning, Time

“You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen”

Ann Brashares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Love, Secret

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

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Attributed to Orwell by John H. Bunzel, president of San Jose State University, as reported in Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), p. 151; but not found in Orwell's works or in reports contemporaneous with his life. Possibly a paraphrase of Orwell's description of the rationale behind Newspeak in 1984.
Disputed

People, Thinking

“In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Love, Hell

“Only someone who (like the Intuitionist) denies that the concepts and axioms of classical set theory have any meaning could be satisfied with such a solution, not someone who believes them to describe some well-determined reality. For in reality Cantor's conjecture must be either true or false, and its undecidability from the axioms as known today can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of reality.”

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics

Reality, Falseness

“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

“When is your birthday?” (…)
Wide silver-gold eyes swung to him. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
Pouting, she twirled a strand of her hair. “How can you not know?”
“Do you know mine?” he asked.
“Of course I do. It’s the day you met me.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Surrender

Birthday

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

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

People, Education

“Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit - you will always be respected.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 82

Drawing, Painting

“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Sleep

“He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

184
Stray Birds (1916)

Business, Time

“What you're really supposed to be doing is whatever makes your heart sing.”

Barbara Sher (1935) American writer

Source: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It

Singing, Heart

“Don't go getting full of yourself becuase once you do, somebody's going to come and let the wind out of your sails”

Sharon G. Flake book The Skin I'm In

Source: The Skin I'm In

“Nice dress Zoey. It looks just like mine. Oh, wait! It used to be mine.

Aphrodite laughed a throaty, I'm-so-grown-and-you're-just-a-kid laugh.

I really hate it when girls do that. I mean, yes, she's older, but I have boobs, too.”

P. C. Cast book Marked

Source: Marked

Hate, Girl, Waiting

“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.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

People, Sadness, Change, Cry

“If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Soul, Thinking, Sense

“Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

World, Thinking, Sense, Personality

“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

“This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Way, Reading, Success

“Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well.”

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

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

“Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena, and you're a bone!”

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

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

“What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

“No, I'm just a very naughty boy. I do all sorts of bad things. I kick kittens. I make rude gestures at nuns.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Jace to Alec, pg. 311
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Boy

“Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Way, Help

“If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.”

Terry Pratchett book I Shall Wear Midnight

Source: I Shall Wear Midnight

“It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Life, Training

“But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Wisdom

“I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.
Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Women, Sister

“I lived in countries that had no democracy… so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Democracy, Freedom, Country

“I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”

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

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

Education, Thinking

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”

Jonathan Swift book The Battle of the Books

The Battle of the Books, preface (1704)

“Sometimes there's nothing you can do. […] Sometimes they don't have enough to fight with.”

Tamora Pierce Briar's Book

Source: Briar's Book

Fight

“Do you know what happens when you play a country song backwards? You get your wife back, your dog back and your job back.”

Richard Belzer (1944) American actor and comedian

Dogs, Country

“Oh for craps sake. You're not dying again, are you? It's seriously inconvenient when you do that." -Aphrodite”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

“Patience, grasshopper," said Maia. "Good things come to those who wait."
"I always thought that was 'Good things come to those who do the wave,'" said Simon. "No wonder I've been so confused all my life.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Life, Waiting, Patience

“Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VI, 19
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

Thinking

“Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?”

Stephen King book The Gunslinger

Source: The Gunslinger

Men, Age

“Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.”

Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Variant: To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 22.

World, Way