“Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.”
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”
Source: Pride and Prejudice (1813)
“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.”
“Patience and time do more than strength or passion.”
Patience et longueur de temps
Font plus que force ni que rage.
Book II (1668), fable 11.
Fables (1668–1679)
Source: Wyrd Sisters
Bruce Lee radio interview with Ted Thomas
Bruce Lee
Context: When I look around, I always learn something: to be always yourself, and to express yourself, to have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.
Context: When I look around I always learn something, and that is to be yourself always, express yourself, and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate him. Now that seems to be the prevalent thing happening in Hong Kong, like they always copy mannerism, but they never start from the root of his being and that is, how can I be me?
Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book I: The Book of Three (1964), Chapter 1
Context: "Why?" Dallben interrupted. "In some cases," he said, "we learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
Heathcliff (Ch. XVI).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe; I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I can not find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!
“What I do I do because I like to do.”
Variant: But what I do I do because I like to do.
Source: A Clockwork Orange
“If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.”
As quoted in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1944; 1948) by Dale Carnegie; though Roosevelt has sometimes been credited with the originating the expression, "Damned if you do and damned if you don't" is set in quote marks, indicating she herself was quoting a common expression in saying this. Actually, this saying was coined back even earlier, 1836, by evangelist Lorenzo Dow in his sermons about ministers saying the Bible contradicts itself, telling his listeners, "… those who preach it up, to make the Bible clash and contradict itself, by preaching somewhat like this: 'You can and you can't-You shall and you shan't-You will and you won't-And you will be damned if you do-And you will be damned if you don't.' "
Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, Feb. 1st 1867 (1867) p. 36. http://books.google.com/books?id=DFNAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA36
Source: Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867
Context: What is called the Law of Nations is not properly law, but a part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as authoritative by civilized states. It is true that these rules neither are nor ought to be of eternal obligation, but do and must vary more or less from age to age, as the consciences of nations become more enlightened, and the exigences of political society undergo change. But the rules mostly were at their origin, and still are, an application of the maxims of honesty and humanity to the intercourse of states. They were introduced by the moral sentiments of mankind, or by their sense of the general interest, to mitigate the crimes and sufferings of a state of war, and to restrain governments and nations from unjust or dishonest conduct towards one another in time of peace. Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.
Spoken on his deathbed to his sister-in-law, Sophie Weber (5 December 1791), from Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words by Friedrich Kerst, trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (1906)
Variant: The taste of death is on my tongue, I feel something that is not from this world (Der Geschmack des Todes ist auf meiner Zunge, ich fühle etwas, das nicht von dieser Welt ist).
"Lady Lazarus" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/lady.html
Source: Ariel (1965)
Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
Source: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
“The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.”
As quoted in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 575.
“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.”
Source: Requiem for a Dream
Two Precepts of Charity (1273)
Sermons on the Ten Commandments (Collationes in decem praeceptes, c. 1273), Prologue (opening sentence)
Variant translation: Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.
Original: (la) Tria sunt homini necessaria ad salutem: scilicit scientia credendorum, scientia desiderandorum, et scientia operandorum.
Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers’ Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “Expulsion".
Source: Story of O
“Love isn’t something you have, it’s something you do.”
“Two drowning people can't save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.”
Source: We, the Drowned
Source: The One by Whom Scandal Comes
“Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.”
As quoted in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought (1992) by John Paynter, p. 590
Unsourced variant: Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Correspondence, Letters to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie
Variant: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
Context: Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live. (June 1857)
Variant: She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of, and what you do.
Source: A Little Princess
“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
As quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) edited by Geoff Tibballs, p. 299
General sources
Source: God's Revelation to the Human Heart
“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY”
1984
Variant: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
Source: So You've Been Publicly Shamed
" The Remarkable Rocket http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/179/".
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
Variant: Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.
Variant: The world is dangerous, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
"Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)
Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community
Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Context: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
Book II, 1109a.27.
Variant translation: Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
As quoted in The Child: At Home and School (1944) by Edith M. Leonard, Lillian E. Miles, and Catherine S. Van der Kar, p. 203
Nicomachean Ethics
“Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.”
Ziglar has often used this saying, but it originates with Phillips Brooks, as quoted in Primary Education (1916) by Elizabeth Peabody.
Misattributed
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Source: What is strategy?, 1996, p. 70
"Reflections on State and War" (2 December 2006) http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe17.html
“If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.”
“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
Dick the Butcher, Act IV, scene ii.
Henry VI, Part 2 (1592)
Source: King Henry VI, Part 2
Source: Nan-Hua-Ch'en-Ching, or, the Treatise of the transcendent master from Nan-Hua
Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
Source: The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People (1989), p. 239
Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
“We are too young to realize that certain things are impossible… So we will do them anyway.”
“Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.”
