“If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.”
"Selections from the Allen Notebooks".
Without Feathers (1975)
Quotes about making
page 69
“You cannot thrash the person who makes you coffee. It's a rule somewhere.”
Kim Harrison
(1966) Pseudonym
Source: Ever After
“Anger as soon as fed is dead-
'Tis starving makes it fat.”
Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886) American poet
Source: Selected Poems
“Pursuing your passions makes you more interesting, and interesting people are enchanting.”
Guy Kawasaki
(1954) American businessman and author
“Meeting someone you like and dating him is supposed to make you feel better, not worse.”
Greg Behrendt
(1963) American comedian
Source: He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
“Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean.”
Haruki Murakami
(1949) Japanese author, novelist
Source: Wind/Pinball: Two Novels
“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”
Toni Morrison
(1931–2019) American writer
Song of Solomon (1977)
“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”
Gertrude Stein
(1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564)
Context: Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.
“The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?”
Robin McKinley
book
Sunshine
Source: Sunshine
Jenny Colgan
(1972) British writer
Source: The Little Shop of Happy Ever After
“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
Woodrow Wilson
(1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
Address to World's Salesmanship Congress http://books.google.com/books?id=w0IOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA286&dq=%22want+to+make+enemies,+try+to+change+something%22, Detroit (10 July 1916)
1910s
“I know all about dreams that make you want to scream.”
Michael Thomas Ford
(1968) American writer
Source: Suicide Notes
Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter XI: Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them
Source: Up from Slavery
Wilhelm Reich
(1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst
Source: Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology
Source: The Serpent's Shadow
“God leads us. God will do the right thing at the right time. And what a difference that makes.”
Max Lucado
(1955) American clergyman and writer
Source: Traveling Light: Releasing the Burdens You Were Never Intended to Bear
“Nothing will stop you being creative more effectively as the fear of making a
mistake.”
John Cleese
(1939) actor from England
“To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear.”
Avital Ronell
(1952) American philosopher
“Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
Alfred Hitchcock
(1899–1980) British filmmaker
Interview on CBS TV (20 February 1977).
Ilona Andrews
American husband-and-wife novelist duo
Source: Magic Burns
“Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!”
Warren Ellis
(1968) English comics and fiction writer
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”
Euripidés
(-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright
Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides. The version here is quoted as a "heathen proverb" in Daniel, a Model for Young Men (1854) by William Anderson Scott. The origin of the misattribution to Euripides is unknown. Several variants are quoted in ancient texts, as follows.
Variants and derived paraphrases:
For cunningly of old
was the celebrated saying revealed:
evil sometimes seems good
to a man whose mind
a god leads to destruction.
Sophocles, Antigone 620-3, a play pre-dating any of Euripides' surviving plays. An ancient commentary explains the passage as a paraphrase of the following, from another, earlier poet.
When a god plans harm against a man,
he first damages the mind of the man he is plotting against.
Quoted in the scholia vetera to Sophocles' Antigone 620ff., without attribution. The meter (iambic trimeter) suggests that the source of the quotation is a tragic play.
For whenever the anger of divine spirits harms someone,
it first does this: it steals away his mind
and good sense, and turns his thought to foolishness,
so that he should know nothing of his mistakes.
Attributed to "some of the old poets" by Lycurgus of Athens in his Oratio In Leocratem [Oration Against Leocrates], section 92. Again, the meter suggests that the source is a tragic play. These lines are misattributed to the much earlier semi-mythical statesman Lycurgus of Sparta in a footnote of recent editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and other works.
The gods do nothing until they have blinded the minds of the wicked.
Variant in 'Dictionary of Quotations (Classical) (1906), compiled by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 433.
Whom Fortune wishes to destroy she first makes mad.
Publilius Syrus, Maxim 911
The devil when he purports any evil against man, first perverts his mind.
As quoted by Athenagoras of Athens [citation needed]
quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius.
"Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first sends mad"; neo-Latin version. Similar wording is found in James Duport's Homeri Gnomologia (1660), p. 234. "A maxim of obscure origin which may have been invented in Cambridge about 1640" -- Taylor, The Proverb (1931). Probably a variant of the line "He whom the gods love dies young", derived from Menander's play The Double Deceiver via Plautus (Bacchides 816-7).
quem (or quos) Deus perdere vult, dementat prius.
Whom God wishes to destroy, he first sends mad.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
This variant is spoken by Prometheus, in The Masque of Pandora (1875) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
As quoted in George Fox Interpreted: The Religion, Revelations, Motives and Mission of George Fox (1881) by Thomas Ellwood Longshore, p. 154
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
As quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 16th edition (1992)
Nor do the gods appear in warrior's armour clad
To strike them down with sword and spear
Those whom they would destroy
They first make mad.
Bhartṛhari, 7th c. AD; as quoted in John Brough,Poems from the Sanskrit, (1968), p, 67
vināśakāle viparītabuddhiḥ
Sanskrit Saying (also in Jatak katha): "When a man is to be destroyed, his intelligence becomes self-destructive."
Modern derivatives:
The proverb's meaning is changed in many English versions from the 20th and 21st centuries that start with the proverb's first half (through "they") and then end with a phrase that replaces "first make mad" or "make mad." Such versions can be found at Internet search engines by using either of the two keyword phrases that are on Page 2 and Page 4 of the webpage " Pick any Wrong Card http://www.bu.edu/av/celop2/not_ESL/pick_any_wrong_card.pdf." The rest of that webpage is frameworks that induce a reader to compose new variations on this proverb.
Misattributed
Yann Martel
book
Life of Pi
Variant: I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
Source: Life of Pi
Source: The Feminine Mystique
Heinrich Von Kleist
(1777–1811) German poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer
Source: On a Theatre of Marionettes
Calvin Trillin
(1935) American journalist
Cookbook Corner: Healthy meals from health care workers, The Land Online, Sarah Johnson, 2008-10-17, 2008-12-19 http://www.thelandonline.com/l_home_hearth/local_story_297150955.html,
“The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.”
Anderson Cooper
(1967) journalist and author
Source: Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
Source: The Wasp Factory
Source: No Country for Old Men
Gena Showalter
(1975) American writer
Source: Catch a Mate
“Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine.”
Source: Keeping the Moon
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)
Context: "You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on."
"And what do you find on the other side? When you go on?"
"Your life again. What else?"
"Is that a promise?"
"It's an inevitability. No trick. No choice. You just go on."
Melina Marchetta
(1965) Australian teen writer
Source: Saving Francesca
“You must do something to make the world more beautiful - Ms. Rumphius”
Barbara Cooney
(1917–2000) American writer and illustrator of children's books
“Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men's souls.”
Spencer W. Kimball
(1895–1985) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Richard Ames; chapter 3, p. 27
Source: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
Ally Carter
(1974) American writer
Source: Uncommon Criminals
Mortimer J. Adler
(1902–2001) American philosopher and educator
Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information
“We all make mistakes but one has to move on.”
Jeffrey Archer
(1940) English author and former politician
“At my age, if I make it up, it’s still an old saying.”
Lini
(15 October 1993)
Source: The Fires of Heaven
“common enemies make enemies become friends!”
Eric Jerome Dickey
(1961) American author
Resurrecting Midnight
