Quotes about following
page 9

Maureen Johnson photo
Nora Ephron photo
Flannery O’Connor photo
Wally Lamb photo
Robin McKinley photo
Bill Cosby photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Oprah Winfrey photo

“In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Heart of the Matter

Guillermo del Toro photo
Richelle Mead photo

“Giving advice was a lot harder than following it.”

Source: Shadow Kiss

Charles Bukowski photo
Tristan Tzara photo

“I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way."

- Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1910s, Dada Manifesto', 1918
Context: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now... Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:* Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere... Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.

Maureen Johnson photo
Marcus Aurelius photo
Alison Goodman photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Joel Osteen photo

“You need to follow your own heart in light of God’s word and do what you feel is right and good for you.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Brandon Sanderson photo
Charles Baudelaire photo
Rick Riordan photo

“But yes. Come, faulty dragon people. Follow us.”

Source: The Lost Hero

Rosalynn Carter photo
Erica Jong photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

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

1963, Speech at Amherst College
Context: If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
Context: If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

Charles Darwin photo

“I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“Pull the string and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)
Ned Vizzini photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Richard Siken photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Nausea (1938)
Source: Nausea, The Wall and Other Stories

Candace Bushnell photo
Victor Hugo photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Edward Gorey photo

“There was a young lady named Mae
Who smoked without stopping all day;
As pack followed pack,
Her lungs first turned black,
And eventually rotted away.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator

Source: Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer

Cassandra Clare photo

“Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Source: The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

Joseph Campbell photo
Tanith Lee photo
Gordon Korman photo
Gustave Flaubert photo
John Steinbeck photo
Erich Fromm photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo

“The wise man tests before he talks. The critic but follows the fad of a cynical and apathetic age.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Brené Brown photo
Alice Sebold photo
Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)
Context: Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
Context: Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Immanuel Kant photo

“But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience.”

Introduction I. Of the Difference Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Variant: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.
Context: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of them selves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)... It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight,—whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience.

Erica Jong photo

“For surely a king is first a man. And so it must follow that a king does as all men do: the best he can.”

Cameron Dokey (1956) American writer

Source: The Storyteller's Daughter: A Retelling of the Arabian Nights

“If you're bored, one thing is for sure: You're not following in the footsteps of Christ.”

Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer

Source: In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

Sarah Dessen photo
Alan Bennett photo
Jasper Fforde photo

“If it's a chimera alert, we just follows the screams.”

Source: Something Rotten

Cassandra Clare photo
Anne Sexton photo
Milan Kundera photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“In a hundred years time, perhaps, a great man will appear who may offer them (the Germans) a chance at salvation. He'll take me as a model, use my ideas, and follow the course I have charted.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in “Der Führer als Redner,” Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers" (The Fuhrer as a speaker) by Joseph Goebbels
Other remarks

James A. Garfield photo

“In these facts we discover the cause of the popular discontent and outbreaks which have so frequently threatened the stability of the British throne and the peace of the English people. As early as 1770 Lord Chatham said, 'By the end of this century, either the Parliament must be reformed from within, or it will be reformed with a vengeance from without.' The disastrous failure of Republicanism in France delayed the fulfillment of his prophecy; but when, in 1832, the people were on the verge of revolt, the government was reluctantly compelled to pass the celebrated Reform Bill, which has taken its place in English history beside Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. It equalized the basis of representation, and extended the suffrage to the middle class; and though the property qualification practically excluded the workingman, a great step upward had been taken, a concession had been made which must be followed by others. The struggle is again going on. Its omens are not doubtful. The great storm through which American liberty has just passed gave a temporary triumph to the enemies of popular right in England. But our recent glorious triumph is the signal of disaster to tyranny, and victory for the people. The liberal party in England are jubilant, and will never rest until the ballot, that 'silent vindicator of liberty', is in the hand of the workingman, and the temple of English liberty rests on the broad foundation of popular suffrage. Let us learn from this, that suffrage and safety, like liberty and union, are one and inseparable.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Andrew Sullivan photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Discontent follows ambition like a shadow.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 137

William James photo

“Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Statement of 1902 quoted in The William James Reader (2007), Vol I, p. 264
1900s

Jane Collins photo
Pauline Kael photo

“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

John F. Kennedy, address at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1963-10-26).
Misattributed

Martin Heidegger photo
Confucius photo

“When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

§ 21, as translated by James Legge
Variant translations:
When I walk along with two others, from at least one I will be able to learn.
Walking among three people, I find my teacher among them. I choose that which is good in them and follow it, and that which is bad and change it.
The Analects, Chapter I, Chapter VII

Alan Moore photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic. Because they're people that can't get the job done. But the future belongs to the dreamers, not to the critics. The future belongs to the people who follow their heart no matter what the critics say.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Liberty University commencement speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B421uhrOV-o&feature=youtu.be&t=12m34s (13 May 2017)
2010s, 2017, May

Firuz Shah Tughlaq photo

“The Hindus and idol-worshippers had agreed to pay the money for toleration (zar-i zimmiya) and had consented to the poll-tax (jizya) in return for which they and their families enjoyed security. These people now erected new idol-temples in the city and the environs in opposition to the Law of the Prophet which declares that such temples are not to be tolerated. Under divine guidance I destroyed these edifices and I killed those leaders of infidelity who seduced others into error, and the lower orders I subjected to stripes and chastisement, until this abuse was entirely abolished. The following is an instance:- In the village of Maluh there is a tank which they call kund (tank). Here they had built idol-temples and on certain days the Hindus were accustomed to proceed thither on horseback, and wearing arms. Their women and children also went out in palankins and carts. There they assembled in thousands and performed idol-worship' When intelligence of this came to my ears my religious feelings prompted me at once to put a stop to this scandal and offence to the religion of Islam. On the day of the assembly I went there in person and I ordered that the leaders of these people and the promoters of this abomination should be put to death. I forbade the infliction of any severe punishments on Hindus in general, but I destroyed their idol-temples, and instead thereof raised mosques. I founded two flourishing towns (kasba), one called Tughlikpur, the other Salarpur. Where infidels and idolaters worshipped idols, Musulmans now, by God's mercy, perform their devotions to the true God. Praises of God and the summons to prayer are now heard there, and that place which was formerly the home of infidels has become the habitation of the faithful, who there repeat their creed and offer up their praises to God…..'Information was brought to me that some Hindus had erected a new idol temple in the village of Salihpur, and were performing worship to their idols. I sent some persons there to destroy the idol temple, and put a stop to their pernicious incitements to error.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Delhi and Environs , Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. Elliot and Dowson. Vol. III, p. 380-81
Quotes from the Futuhat-i-Firuz Shahi

Talcott Parsons photo
Julia Gillard photo

“We cannot have the government or the Labor party go to the next election with a person leading the party and a person floating around as the potential alternative leader. Anybody who enters the ballot tonight should do it on the following conditions: that if you win you're Labor leader, that if you lose you retire from politics.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Calling for a vote of confidence

"Australia politics: Gillard, Rudd in leadership vote" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23058602, in BBC News website, 26 June 2013

Zeev Sternhell photo
Donald J. Trump photo