Quotes about happening (6021 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“How to be sure that nothing will happen, when you don't always need a reason to become one of those cursed and deceptive beings, those entities thrown from the cradle of God.”

José Baroja book Un hijo de perra y otros cuentos

God

“…this is a story and, therefore, "something must happen", "something" bad, "something" that breaks your safe journey towards the bookstore and, surely, towards "love", because love is the last refuge left in my head or in the depths of any fucking soul.”

José Baroja book Sueño en Guadalajara y otros cuentos

Soul , Love

“I think of the northern country, the United States, where they are specialists, very good at what they do, but sometimes, many times, they have no memory of the things that have happened, because they are so interested in raising money that the past is blurred and give meaning to ignorance on the basis of consumption.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: https://www.peruinforma.com/entrevista-cultural-al-escritor-chileno-jose-baroja/

Money , Memory , Time , Country

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful. There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry about what they will think of you because they love you for who you are. The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn’t exist at all. A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conversation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby. Things that never interested you before become fascinating because you know they are important to this person who is so special to you. You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do. Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.”

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

love , Love , Life , People

“I'd like to overcome more barriers. I'd like to be in the position where, no matter what happens - even if they skate their free skate clean - if I skate clean, I will win.”

Yuzuru Hanyu (1994) Japanese figure skater (1994-)

Quote from the same article on the Olympic Channel linked above, published 3 April 2019.
Other quotes, 2019

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Variant: I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.

For women , Attitude , Hope , Positive

“Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Often attributed to Dr. Seuss without citation; also cited as an anonymous proverb.
This quote has also been attributed to Gabriel García Márquez, in Spanish: "No llores porque ya se terminó, sonríe porque sucedió."
Compare lines from In Memoriam A.H.H. of Tennyson:
&emsp;&emsp;'Tis better to have loved and lost
&emsp;&emsp;Than never to have loved at all.
Disputed
Variant: Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.

Happy , Smile , Cry , Sad

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook:Part Two
No Longer Human

Dreams , Failure , Suffering , Chance

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

from poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing.

Appears in movie Jojo Rabbit.
Variant: Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

Beauty

“Percy, let me go" she croaked. "You can't pull me up."
His face was white with effort. She could see in his eyes that he knew it was hopeless.
"Never," he said. He looked up at Nico, fifteen feet above.
"The other side, Nico! We'll see you there. Understand?"
Nico's eyes widened. "But-"
"Lead them!" Percy shouted. "Promise me!"
"I-I will."
Below them, the voice laughed in the darkness. Sacrifices. Beautiful sacrifices to wake the goddess.
Percy tightened his grip on Annabeth's wrist. His face was gaunt, scraped and bloody, his hair dusted with cobwebs, but when he locked eyes with her, she thought he had never looked more handsome.
"We're staying together," he promised. "You're not getting away from me. Never again."
Only then did she understand what would happen. A one-way trip. A very hard fall.
"As long as we're together," she said.
She heard Nico and Hazel still screaming for help. She saw sunlight far, far above- maybe the last sunlight she would ever see.
Then Percy let go of his ledge, and together, holding hands, he and Annabeth fell into the endless darkness.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Beauty , Way , Understanding , Effort

“Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Inspirational , Attitude , Deep , Leadership

“You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move on.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Variant: You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the f**k on.

Moving On

“Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.”

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

Reported in Yolanda Brooks, Do Animals Have Rights? (2008), p. 23

Powerful , People , Change

“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Variant: Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, and others make it happen.

Motivational , For Team , Attitude , Success

“It seems like every time you come up something happens to bring you back down.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Time

“But then of course everything always happens for a reason”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

Mockingbird
2000s, Encore (2004)

“No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.”

Xenophon (-430–-354 BC) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Truth , Chance

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

Franz Kafka book The Metamorphosis

Source: The Metamorphosis (1915)

Understanding , Sad

“Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Inspirational , For women , Deep , Life

“Get going. Move forward. Aim high. Plan for a takeoff. Don't just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won't happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you'll love it up here.”

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

Trump: How to Get Rich (2004), p. 74
2000s

Love , Hope , Change

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

People , Learning , Change

“Life is suffering, and suffering can make you resentful, murderous, and then genocidal, if you take it far enough. So you need an antidote to suffering. And maybe you think that you can build walls of luxury around yourself, and that that will protect you from the suffering. Good luck with that. That isn't going to work. Maybe you think that you could build a delusion and live inside that. Well, that's going to fall apart. What is there, then, that's going to help you fight against suffering? That's easy: It's the Truth. The Truth is the antidote to suffering. The reason for that is because the Truth puts reality behind you, so that you can face the reality that's coming straight at you without becoming weak and degenerating and becoming resentful and wishing for the destruction of Being, because that's the final Hell. The final Hell is your soul wishing for the destruction of everything, because it's too painful, and you're too bitter. And that happens to people all the time.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Life , Pain , People , Truth

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Context: Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Life , Thinking , Time

“Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

Death , Hate

“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”

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

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Hope , Back To Work , World , Hope

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”

Charles Bukowski book Ham on Rye

Source: Ham on Rye

People , Thinking , Time

“You could spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future but all there will ever be is what's happening here and the decisions we make in this moments which are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect so we never dared the universe for it. I'm saying I'm the proof that you can ask the universe for it. My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn't believe that that was possible for him and so he made a conservative choice instead, he got a safe job as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could do to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you could fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

Jim Carrey (1962) Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer

Love , Life , Fear , Family

“As there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises from too great confidence of inexperience; you trust a man and think him altogether true and good and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially within the circle of his most trusted friends, as he deems them, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. …The reason is that a man, having to deal with other men, has no knowledge of them; for if he had knowledge he would have known the true state of the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval between them.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Men , Hate , World , Faith

“Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth. And it happens every few minutes.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

As quoted in New Musical Express (1991-11-23).
Interviews (1989-1994), Print

“These problems do not disappear just because we do not hear about them. There is so much more happening around the world than what is communicated to us about the top stories we do hear.”

Angelina Jolie book Notes from My Travels

Notes from My Travels: Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan and Ecuador(2006)
Context: These problems do not disappear just because we do not hear about them. There is so much more happening around the world than what is communicated to us about the top stories we do hear. We all need to look deeper and discover for ourselves.... What is the problem? Where is it? How can we help to solve it?

World , Communication , Problem

“Each of us has a particular way of looking at the world, of interpreting events and the actions of people around us. This is our attitude, and it determines much of what happens to us in life. If our attitude is essentially fearful, we see the negative in every circumstance. We stop ourselves from taking chances. We blame others for mistakes and fail to learn from them. If we feel hostile or suspicious, we make others feel such emotions in our presence. We sabotage our career and relationships by unconsciously creating the circumstances we fear the most. The human attitude, however, is malleable. By making our attitude more positive, open, and tolerant of other people, we can spark a different dynamic—we can learn from adversity, create opportunities out of nothing, and draw people to us. We must explore the limits of our willpower and how far it can take us.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 8 : Change Your Circumstances by Changing Your Attitude
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Life , Chance , Drawing , Hostility

“Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

p205
Variant: Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.
Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 11, Ritual

“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Courageous , Faith , Faith , Hope

“Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.”

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

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

People , Heart

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

“We learned not to meet anymore,
We don't raise our eyes to one another,
But we ourselves won't guarantee
What could happen to us in an hour.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Learning

“No matter what happens, always be yourself.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

For Team , Success , Motivational , Deep

“Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Way , Dead

“And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.”

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

“There's a lot of things blamed on me that never happened. But then, there's a lot of things that I did that I never got caught at.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

“There are three types of people in this world: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.”

Mary Kay Ash (1918–2001) Entrepreneur

People , World

“Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.”

Louis Zamperini (1917–2014) Italian-American middle distance runner

Source: Devil at My Heels

Life , God , Hope , Fight

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

“If there's one thing I believe, its that I don't know anything and anything can happen”

Amy Lee (1981) American singer-songwriter and pianist

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Tom (As Narrator Scene One)
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Music , Memory

“The will for victory which gives a commander the strength to see a grave crisis through is something very different from Hitler's will, which in the last analysis stemmed from a belief in his own 'mission'. Such a belief makes a man impervious to reason and leads him to think that his own will can operate even beyond the limits of hard reality - whether these consist in the presence of far superior enemy forces, in the conditions of space and time, or merely in the fact that the enemy also happens to have a will of his own.”

Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) German general

Lost Victories, Hitler As Supreme Commander

Thinking , Reality , Time , Victory

“Even the Russians are fighting us. They've brought in Jewish pilots, nurses, and doctors. Everybody's ganging up on us. We didn't think it would happen this way.”

Josef Mengele (1911–1979) Nazi officer and physician

As quoted in Defy the darkness: A Tale of Courage in the Shadow of Mengele (2000) by Joe Rosenblum and David Kohn, p. 192

Way , Thinking , Fight

“It's so overwhelming. It's almost better than winning the lottery, because you worked for it. It's like something you want all your life, but you never thought it would happen, and all of a sudden it did.”

Ronnie Coleman (1964) American bodybuilder

On his reaction being named the top professional bodybuilder in the world — reported in Nancy Kruh (October 3, 1999) "Ronnie Coleman- Nobody messes with this Arlington cop, a.k.a. Mr. Olympia", The Dallas Morning News, p. 1E.

Life

“As to what happened next, it is possible to maintain that the hand of heaven was involved, and also possible to say that when men are desperate no one can stand up to them.”

Xenophon (-430–-354 BC) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Hellenica Bk. 7, as translated by Rex Warner in A History of My Times (1979) p. 398.

Men

“People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship, and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say, 'We want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Interview, MSNBC, UNKNOWN DATE

People

“Well it's a risk to do a movie of this calibre on a subject matter and a point in history people are not very familiar with. It's a tough subject to sell - so salary-wise you have to make sacrifices to make a certain film happen. I would have been an idiot to pass up the opportunity to work with Mr Scorsese.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

People , History

“Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 26

Children , Beauty , Parting

“I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

Radio Interview, July 6 2001 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_18_1.MP3
2000s

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.”

Michael Jackson book Dancing the Dream

Dancing the Dream (1992), also used in his funeral invitation. Quoted in "Dead stars and classic art will surround Michael Jackson" in CNN.com/entertainment (3 July 2009) http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/03/michael.jackson.funeral/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

Relationship , Love , World

“Lovely is the feeling now,
Fever, temperature's rising now,
Power is the force, the vow,
That makes it happen,
It asks no questions how.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Off the Wall (1979)

Love , Feeling , Question

“Words are life. Words are light. Words are power. Words are energy. Words are truth. Words can enliven and words can also kill. Words can give hope, or plunge us into despair. People use words to build peace, and use words to make war. Words can create walls between cultures, religions, and nations. And words can also build bridges. The existence of an individual, a family, a community, a country, and our planet is being led to good or to evil through the power of the words we speak. The words we speak are responsible for everything that happens in this world. We, therefore, must be responsible for the words we speak. On behalf of future generations, I hope that each of us will do all we can to speak only bright, light-filled words, so that one day, our descendants will be born into a world filled with light. There is no time to lose. Starting at this very moment, I hope all of us will take a close look at the words we have been using and make constant efforts to fill them with brightness.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14108295.alexis_karpouzos

Despair , Family , Peace , Religion

“As an author, my goal is to spread and make sure that the message gets to you. Just like the person who invented the calendar, could not predict what will happen tomorrow.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Personality

“Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

A New Earth (2005)
Variant: Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now, and if the past cant prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Past

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)
Variant: Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

Life

“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

Nature , Past , Drawing

“…'I thought the rule was that all monks were shaved.'

'Oh, Soto says he is bald under the hair,'said Lu Tze. 'He says the hair is a separate creature that just happens to live on him.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

History

“But in the loneliest desert happens the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becomes a lion; he will seize his freedom and be master in his own wilderness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Freedom

“One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Life , Childhood , Happiness

“The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.”

Louis Zamperini (1917–2014) Italian-American middle distance runner

Source: Devil at My Heels

Forgiveness , Past , Personality

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

Drink , Problem , Forgetting

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

British Telecom advertisement (1993), part of which was used in Pink Floyd's Keep Talking (1994) and Talkin' Hawkin'<nowiki/> (2014)
Context: For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Imagination , Learning , Animals

“If I were to say, "God, why me?" about the bad things, then I should have said, "God, why me?" about the good things that happened in my life.”

Arthur Ashe (1943–1993) American tennis player

Life , God

“Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.”

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) Italian politician, Writer and Author

World

“Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don't have to like it… it's just easier if you do.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Inspirational , Life

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

Time

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Change

“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

“Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

“If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Stupidity , World , Way , Star

“Unless you do the right things, the right things will not happen to you.”

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

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

“Someday, everything will make perfect sense. So for now, laugh at the confusion, smile through the tears, be strong and keep reminding your self that everything happens for a reason.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Smile , Sense , Tear , Strong

“Sunlight comes into your house not because you want it. It happens because you open the windows.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

Housing

“Last year nothing happened
The year before nothing happened
And the year before that nothing
happened.”

Osamu Dazai book The Setting Sun

Source: The Setting Sun

“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Dance

“I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in Paul and Joanne: A Biography of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward by Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein (1988), p. 157

Marriage , Home

“Mary is the great mother. She is the mother. That's what Mary is. Whether she existed or not, is not the point. She exists at least as a hyper-reality. She exists as the mother. What's the sacrifice of the mother? That's easy: if you're a mother who's worth her salt, you offer your son to be destroyed by the world. That's what you do. And that's what's going to happen. He's going to be born, he's going to suffer, he's going to have his trouble in life, he's going to have his illnesses, he's going to face his failures and catastrophes, and he's going to die. That's what's going to happen, and if you're awake you know that, and then you say, 'well, perhaps he will live in a way that will justify that.' And then you try to have that happen. And that's what makes you worthy of a statue like [The Pieta]. 'Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world?' Well, every woman asks herself that question. Some say no, and they have their reasons. Mary answers 'yes' voluntarily. Mary is the archetype of the woman who answers yes to life voluntarily. Not because she is blind. She knows what's going to happen. So, she's the archetypal representation of the woman who says yes to life knowing full well what life is. She's not naive. She's not someone who got pregnant in the backseat of a 1957 Chevy during one night of half-drunk idiocy. Not that. She does so consciously. Consciously, knowing what's to come. And then she allows it to happen, which is a testament to mothers.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Bible Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers
Concepts

Life , World , Way , Failure

“You almost create this infinite universe for the character that you’re playing and then you’re compromising it into the story that you’re doing. Whatever character you’re playing, you kind of explore endlessly more than what’s on the page. You use that exploration to do the performance that’s in the film, but hopefully, people will see all that work and preparation in those little glimpses of scenes and moments. Oh, there’s something there. There’s so much more happening with this character.”

Bill Skarsgård (1990) Swedish actor

Bill Skarsgard on ‘IT’ and Tapping into His Fears to Create a Terrifying New Pennywise http://collider.com/bill-skarsgard-pennywise-it-movie-interview/#images (July 28, 2017)

People , Universe

“What is destined to happen will happen. Victory and defeat are like light and darkness.”

N. T. Rama Rao (1923–1996) Indian actor and Andhra Pradesh former chief minister

His own family toppled him, quoted in Obituary: N. T. Rama Rao, 19 January 1996, 8 January 2014, Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-n-t-rama-rao-1324748.html,

Light , Victory

“So much is happening on earth that cannot be fixed or explained, but it can be felt and suffered. I think a Christian is one who, along with Jesus, agrees to feel, to suffer the pain of the world.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (1999), p. 129

Pain , World , Feeling , Thinking

“What is at first small is often extremely large in the end. And so it happens that whoever deviates only a little from truth in the beginning is led farther and farther afield in the sequel, and to errors which are a thousand times as large.”

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) Austrian philosopher

Was klein ist im Beginn wird oft am Ende überaus groß sein. Und so geschieht es, das wer im Anfange auch nur um ein Weniges von der Wahrheit abweicht, im Verlauf immer weiter und weiter und zu tausendmal größern Irrthümer fortgeführt wird.
On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862)

Truth , Error , Time

“With Romeo and Juliet, you're talking about two people who meet one night, and get married the same night. I believe in love at first sight-but it hasn't happened to me yet.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

Love , People , Night

“On the surface it may seem that wars are caused by economic and political questions, but in fact they are caused by our wholesale slaughter of animals. The laws of justice are inexorable, and human beings are going to have to pay with their own blood … We kill animals, but nature is an organic whole, and by killing animals we are, as it were, affecting certain glands in that organism. When this happens, the balance of the organism is disrupted, and it is not surprising that before long war breaks out among men. Yes, human beings have slaughtered millions of animals for their meat, without realizing that on the invisible plane those animals are linked to other human beings, and it is they who will now have to share the fate of the animals. When we slaughter animals we are slaughtering human beings. Everybody agrees that it is time to establish the reign of peace in the world, that there must be no more wars. Yes, but war will go on just as long as we continue to slaughter animals, because by destroying them we are destroying ourselves.”

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (1900–1986) Bulgarian philosopher

The Yoga of Nutrition, Editions Prosveta, 2012 ebook edition, pp. 24 https://books.google.it/books?id=jnoVCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT24-25.

Men , Fate , War , World

“We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

Jean-Claude Juncker (1954) Luxembourgian politician

referring to his colleagues in the European Council
Jean-Claude Juncker, quoted by Dirk Von Kock 'Die Brüsseler Republik' http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-15317086.html in Der Spiegel (2000), then by Florian Eder 'Junckers Tricks in den langen Brüsseler Nächten' http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article112948572/Junckers-Tricks-in-den-langen-Bruesseler-Naechten.html in Die Welt (2012).
1999

People , Lying , Understanding , Waiting

“I have not written all this to complain: I have simply written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger. May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

As quoted in The Baburnama : Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, as translated by Wheeler M. Thackston (2002), p. xxvii

Truth , History , Reality , Evil

“Whatever has happened to Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union.… You are responsible, and your forebears, for 60 million to 100 million black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations, and don’t ask me about anybody, please.”

Paul Robeson (1898–1976) American singer and actor

HUAC Testimony

People , Question

“One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the S. S. men. We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else. What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture: otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be tough and heartless where it is not necessary, that is clear. We, Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes up to me and says: 'I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them,' then I have to say: 'You are the murderer of your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood….”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Our concern, our duty, is our people and our blood. We can be indifferent to everything else. I wish the S.S. to adopt this attitude towards the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians....
The Posen speech to SS officers (6 October 1943)
1940s

Death , Women , Men , Children

“I don't know what's gonna happen to you, baby,
But I do know that I love you,
You walk around this town with your head all up in the sky,
And I do know that I want you.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Destiny (1977)

Love , Baby

“Most people depend on the internet and cellphones to survive, but what happens when they stop working? I wanted to create a mother and child who wouldn't be defeated by life without them.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

(2009) Independent News article 2009 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/hayao-miyazaki-modern-movies-are-too-weird-for-me-1678129.html
On Ponyo

Life , People , Dependency

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

"Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)"; similar expressions were used by others prior to Lennon's use of this line, and have been attributed to Betty Talmadge, Thomas La Mance, Margaret Millar, William Gaddis, and Lily Tomlin, but the earliest known published occurrence was the 1957 attribution of "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." to Allen Saunders in Reader's Digest, according to The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes
Lyrics, Double Fantasy (1980)
Variant: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
Variant: Life is what happens while you are making other plans.

Life , Business