Quotes about everything
page 6

“Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.”

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

“The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

“I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Loss, Childhood

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

Love, Smile

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

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

“Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”

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

Fear, Heart

“Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Midnight Palace

Source: The Midnight Palace

Falseness

“Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. The sun shines. To hell with everything else”

Stephen Fry book Making History

Source: Making History

Hell, Sun

“Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. We’re so used to evaluating everything (and everyone) by their usefulness that this thought will take a minute or two to begin to dawn on us. Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Which is to say, beauty is in and of itself a great and glorious good, something we need in large and daily doses.”

Stasi Eldredge

Source: Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul

Beauty, Nature

“It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

People, Change

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor

Freedom

“Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

People, Time, Clothes

“One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see.”

Ezra Jack Keats book The Snowy Day

Source: The Snowy Day

Winter, Night

“Violence has never prospered, you can't remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

World, Fools, Change

“Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I'm like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn't know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Life, Dreams, Way, Search

“For her, choices were simple; either there was an action she could take to improve the situation, in which case she took it, or there was not, and everything else said on the subject was so much meaningless noise.”

Christopher Paolini book Brisingr

Source: Brisingr

“Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Angels

“Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

Reading

“I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.”

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

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1663/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Context: I heard the old, old men say, 'Everything alters, And one by one we drop away.' They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn-trees By the waters. I heard the old, old men say, 'All that's beautiful drifts away Like the waters.

Men

“Some people say great God come from the sky take away everything and make everybody feel high, but if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Get Up, Stand Up (cowritten with Peter Tosh), from the album Burnin (1973)
Song lyrics

Life, God, People, Feeling

“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Way

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Fight

“People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

People, Change, Time

“I feel apart from everything and a part of everything.”

Tim Bowler book Frozen Fire

Source: Frozen Fire

Feeling, Parting

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day

Star, Reality

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

“Everything is a contest. All dealings among men are a contest in which some will succeed and others fail. And some are failing quite spectacularly.”

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

Men

“We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

God, Soul, Sense

“Since I've met you, everything I've done has been in part because of you. I can't untie myself from you, Clary- not my heart or my blood or my mind or any other part of me. And I don't want to."
~Jace Wayland”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Heart, Parting

“To understand everything is to hate nothing.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Hate, Understanding

“All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir

Learning, Reading

“The more you try to be special, the more you get hurt. Just be, just melt and become part of the wind around you, the earth around you, become a part of everything. You’re here only for a while. At least when you’re in a place like this, where nobody is going to trample on you, let your defenses down.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Mystic's Musings

Parting, Hurt

“I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.”

Hunter S. Thompson The Rum Diary

Source: The Rum Diary

“Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking, Light

“Does everybody ever want everything they can have? really?”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Spellbinder

“When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”

Victor Hugo book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Idea

“Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.”

Tim Burton (1958) American filmmaker

Source: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Education

“If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.”

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

“I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

“Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

War

“Not everything is about you," Clary said furiously.
"Possibly," Jace said, "but you do have to admit that the majority of things are.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Variant: Not everything, Jace, is," Clary said furiously.

"Possibly," Jace said, "but you have to admit that the majority of things are.
Source: City of Glass

“The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

Time

“Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it's just another job.”

Terry Pratchett book Moving Pictures

Source: Moving Pictures

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Thinking, Sense, Future, Dependency

“Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Variant: Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Source: Requiem for a Dream

“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

"The Children of the Poets," The Pall Mall Gazette http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/1307/ (October 14, 1886) Variant: One can survive everything nowadays except death.

“I hope I remember everything," said Toni.
"You won't," said Trapp. "That's how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you'll eventually get it. And then you'll make new mistakes.”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

Source: The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker

Hope, Learning, Time

“Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Life, Change, Time

“You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.”

Michael Ende book The Neverending Story

Source: The Neverending Story

Beauty, Evil

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”

Paul Celan (1920–1970) Romanian poet and translator

Loss

“Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!”

Vladimir Nabokov book The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Source: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

God, World, Beauty

“Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

Tree, Light, Grass, Winter

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n'écoute, il faut toujours recommencer. Le Traité du Narcisse https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Trait%C3%A9_du_narcisse (The Treatise of the Narcissus) Nothing is said that has not been said before. -- Terence

“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”

Bertrand Russell book A History of Western Philosophy

Source: A History of Western Philosophy

World, Science

“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling…”

V.S. Naipaul book Magic Seeds

Source: Magic Seeds

World

“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”

André Breton book Manifestoes of Surrealism

Source: Manifestoes of Surrealism

Life, Death, Imagination, Past

“The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.”

Oscar Wilde book Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)

Age, Birthday

“There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.”

Terry Pratchett book Going Postal

Source: Going Postal

Money

“Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

Source: The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

Travel, Home

“You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Happiness, Peace

“Betrayed and wronged in everything,
I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,
And seek some spot unpeopled and apart
Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart.”

Molière The Misanthrope

Source: The Misanthrope

World, Heart

“"Do you know a cure for me?" "Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." "Salt water?" I asked him. "Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea."”

Karen Blixen book Seven Gothic Tales

"The Deluge at Norderney"
Source: Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

Way, Tear, Water, Sea

“Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

“while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Feeling, Time

“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

“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)

God

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

World, Beauty, Music, Feeling

“Let nothing perturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass. God does not change. Patience achieves everything.”

Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) Roman Catholic saint

God, Change, Patience

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

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

Children, People, Books, Faith

“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything.”

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

Pain, World, Feeling, Flowers

“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

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Truth, Hope, Tear

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

World, Beauty, Singing, Dance

“The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.”

Terry Pratchett book I Shall Wear Midnight

Source: I Shall Wear Midnight

Sun

“Harry Dresden: I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family.”

Jim Butcher Proven Guilty

Source: The Dresden Files, Proven Guilty (2006)

People, Family, Hell

“This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.”

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, War, People

“For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.”

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

Never Give All The Heart http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1545/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Source: Poems Context: Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.

Love

“We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.”

Terry Pratchett book Small Gods

Source: Small Gods

Way

“That's what I don't like about magic. It does everything by magic.”

Terry Pratchett Thud!

Source: Thud!