Quotes about most
page 39

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

“That's the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it's set in stone.”

Jeffery Deaver book Edge

Source: Edge

Time, Past

“The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby's birth, a couple engaged, a tragic car accident on a late night highway - most milestones of the human journey, good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of a ringing.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Life, Cars, Birth, Baby

“One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

World

“A woman who’s lived in a cage all her life. And hates it. Bored in there, aren’t you. Waiting for life to happen. And when it finally does, it steals from you what you loved most. So take back. Explode. Lash out. Blow up”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: The Alpha Alternative: JZB Sex Scene

Love, Life, Hate, Waiting

“The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.”

Katharine Graham (1917–2001) American publisher

Personality, Anger

“As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things”

Kazuo Ishiguro book A Pale View of Hills

Source: A Pale View of Hills

“I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Ch. 35

Girl

“You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Life, Pain, Personality

“Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood… blood… blood… blood…”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You become what you think about most.. But you also attract what you think about most. (John Assaraf)”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Thinking

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Ch. II
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Life

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.”

Paula Danziger (1945–2004) American children's writer

Pain, People, Truth, Forgetting

“Women want the fairytale. Not all women, of course, but most women grow up dreaming about the kind of man who would risk everything for them, even knowing they might get hurt.”

Nicholas Sparks book True Believer

Source: True Believer

Women, Dreams, Fairytale, Hurt

“Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

“time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Variant: Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.
Source: As quoted in LIFE magazine (22 April 1957), p. 152; also in Letters and Papers from Prison (1967), p. 47.
Context: Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.

Time

“One minute was enough, Tyler said, "A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Effort, Personality, Perfection

“Sometimes life will make you give up what you love most.”

Danielle Steel book The Gift

Variant: She didn't want to let go of him, or the baby, but sometimes life made you give up what you loved most.
Source: The Gift

Love, Life

“The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.”

Will Ferguson (1964) Canadian writer, especially humor about Canada

Source: Happiness

Past

“In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

The Books in My Life (1952) Preface (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 12)

Age, Way, Learning

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Soul

“We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”

Cynthia Ozick (1928) American writer

Gratitude, Teachers' Day, For Mother

“Most people would rather be sheep than stand on their own with antlers on.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

People

“Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

People, Feeling, Dead

“I'd sell my soul to have you. In my whole life, you'll always be what I wanted most."

~ Hardy Cates”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Life, Soul

“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

Richard Yates (1926–1992) Novelist, short story writer

“Too often they don't realize what they have until it's gone.
… they're too stubborn to say, 'Sorry, I was wrong'
they hurt the ones closest to their hearts,
and we let the most foolish things tear us apart”

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

Tear, Heart, Hurt

“If you find one true friend in life, you're richer than most. If that one true friend is your husband, you're blessed.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Life

“This is a giant block of whatever is most difficult for you to carry & trust me on this, you'll carry it more times than you can count until you decide that's exactly what you want to do most & then it won't weigh a thing anymore”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Time

“Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you're being lifted you don't worry about plummeting.”

Elizabeth Wein book Rose Under Fire

Source: Rose Under Fire

World, Hope

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)
Context: Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! — and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person — ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Justice

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

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

Variant translations: The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.
As quoted in After Einstein : Proceedings of the Einstein Centennial Celebration (1981) by Peter Barker and Cecil G. Shugart, p. 179
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
As quoted in Introduction to Philosophy (1935) by George Thomas White Patrick and Frank Miller Chapman, p. 44
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Context: 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. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.

Beauty, Knowledge, Sense