Quotes about most
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“Real courage is not to give up hope, even in the most terrible darkness, and to carry on. That if courage and love is deep as despair, deeper, then light may come again”

David Clement-Davies book Fell

Source: Fell

Love, Hope, Courage, Light

“Never miss an opportunity to show your love, especially to those close to you, because we are always at our most cautious with them for fear of being hurt.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

Love, Fear, Hurt

“It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.”

Jennifer Haigh (1968) Novelist

Source: The Condition

Life, Friendship, People, Learning

“The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mould”

Oswald Chambers book My Utmost for His Highest

Source: My Utmost for His Highest

People, Star

“my grandmother has given me her own version of the precious gift: the most precious gift any teenager coul ask for:
MY GRANDMOTHER HAS GIVEN MY MY OWN SEX PLACE!!!!!”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Princess on the Brink

Sex

“When we truly need to do is often what we most feel like avoiding.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

Source: Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done

Feeling

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

In Defense of Women (1918)
1910s
Variant: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Source: In Defense Of Women
Context: Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

“Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"The Black Cottage" (1914)
1910s

Life, Truth, Thinking, Change

“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, 2002 edition, page 15

People, Thinking, Freedom

“I shall think of you
Whenever I am most happy, whenever I am Most sad, whenever I see a beautiful thing.
You are a burning lamp to me, a flame
The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you High in my hand against whatever darkness.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Collected Poems

Happiness, Sadness, Beauty, Thinking

“The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.”

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

Death, Fear, Dead

“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Introduction to Blast Off : Rockets, Robots, Ray Guns, and Rarities from the Golden Age of Space Toys (2001) by S. Mark Young, Steve Duin, Mike Richardson, p. 6; the quote on hydrogen and stupidity is said to have originated with an essay of his in the 1960s, and is often misattributed to Frank Zappa, who made similar remarks in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989): "Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."
Context: NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are..."
(Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke.

Stupidity, Universe, Funny

“I love reading another reader’s list of favorites. Even when I find I do not share their tastes or predilections, I am provoked to compare, contrast, and contradict. It is a most healthy exercise, and one altogether fruitful.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Love, Exercises, Reading

“It is the same way with dating. The time you are most prepared for dating is when you don't need anyone to complete you, fulfill you, or instill in you a sense of worth or purpose.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: Waiting and Dating

Way, Sense, Time

“Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; In this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

Love

“One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Love, World, Feeling, Joy

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Freedom

“My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest. page 40000”

Sarah Dessen book That Summer

Source: That Summer (1996)

Boy, Understanding, Sister, Wedding

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Variant: The true thoughts that go on inside us are just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of, at most, one tiny little part of us at any given instant.
Source: Oblivion

Parting

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

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

Source: The World As I See It

Beauty, Art, Science, Beauty

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

Gilles Deleuze book Dialogues

Source: Dialogues

Way

“… because where we are is always the most important place.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Amber Spyglass

“My heart shatters. My world shatters.

you will lose what you value most.

It wasn't my life or even Dimitri's life.

what you value most

It was his soul.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Variant: You will lose what you value most...

It hadn't been me that Rhonda was talking about. It hadn't even been Dimitri's life.

What you value most.

It had been his soul.
Source: Spirit Bound

Life, World, Soul, Heart

“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Nature

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

Lie, Books, Flowers

“I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: All These Things I've Done

Feeling

“Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.”

Jeannette Walls book Half Broke Horses

Source: Half Broke Horses

Life, Learning, For Him

“Sometimes we have to face the things that hurt us most. Maybe you won’t heal till you do. You haven’t yet.” They both knew that was true. “You can’t move ahead until you bury the past.”

Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels

Past, Hurt

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

Source: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
Context: Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.

Fear, Suffering, Hurt

“Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.”

Mary Kay Ash (1918–2001) Entrepreneur

People, Music

“You're quite wrong, you know. I am the most permanent person that you will eve meet," said Magnus, his voice breathless with laughter and his eyes stung a little by tears. "It is only that it never makes a difference.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Tear, Laughter, Personality

“Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition… must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Courage, Suffering

“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”

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

Love, Light

“Life without playing music is inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music, I get most joy in life out of music.”

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

Life, Music, Joy

“Life isn't only about the big moments whether they be good or bad. Maybe it’s about the small things that stretch out to strengthen the most tenuous bound.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Life

“Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior.”

Steven Brust book Jhegaala

Source: Jhegaala

People, Pleasure, Feeling

“If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Life

“He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

People, Light

“The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/16/he-knew-he-was-right-2 note: Our Short National Nightmare note: The New Yorker note: In The New Yorker, October 16, 2006 note: 2000s, 2006

Life, Sex

“It was just a normal day, a day like any other. But most of all it was a day in which everything was exactly the way it should be.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

Source: The Choice

Way

“It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

People, Thinking, Universe, Time

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. VI: England and Italy.

People, World, Thinking

“The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

The Decider (21 July 2007)

People, Idea, Problem

“Most good judgement comes from exprerience, most experience comes from bad judgement”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Variant: Asteros's Motto: "Most experience comes from bad judgement.
Source: Acheron

“Men are cheaters.
Women are not to be trusted.
And most people are dumb.”

Jackie Collins (1937–2015) British-American novelist and writer

Source: Married Lovers

Women, Men, People

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

For Men

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight — how to get from shore to food and back again.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Food, Learning

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

People, Parting

“don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) American poet

Art, Question, Thinking

“Of all treasures of knowledge, the most vital is the knowledge of God, his existence, powers, love, and promises.”

Spencer W. Kimball (1895–1985) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Source: Faith Precedes the Miracle

Love, God, Knowledge

“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Way, Support

“We're [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we're just praying we won't screw up too badly.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Parent, Time

“It was unfair that people who longed for love the most, searched the hardest for it, found it so elusive.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Tempt Me at Twilight

Love, People, Search

“Most people with low self-esteem have earned it.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Source: Napalm & Silly Putty

People

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Source: Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose

Life, People, World, Thinking

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")”

Ray Bradbury book Long After Midnight

Source: Long After Midnight

Hunger, Drink, Time, Madness

“It’s probably unfair to expect the world at large, or even most people, to see us for all we are. It is essential, however, that we see ourselves for all we are. (413)”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Source: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit

People, World

“The thing about nightmares was that you couldn't prepare for them. They sneaked up on you when you were most vulnerable.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

“The most dangerous flaws are those which are good in moderation.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

“our can'ts were born to happen

our mosts have died in more”

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

“Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”

Ben Okri (1959) Nigerian writer

Love, Suffering, Inspirational

“But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Life, Way

“Even though we often mess up, most of us are doing the best that we know how with the circumstances that surround us.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Source: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and it's all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

"Taboo and Metaphor"
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)
Context: The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.