Quotes about nail

A collection of quotes on the topic of nail, likeness, doing, use.

Quotes about nail

Gavrilo Princip photo

“There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom.”

Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918) Bosnian assassin

Said to the prison warden on being moved to another prison; as quoted by Borivoje Jevtic (1914) http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand

Aleksandr Pushkin photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“Christ is the genius of love and as such the most diametric antipole to Jewry, which is the incarnation of hate. … Christ was the first anti-Jewish opponent of stature. … The Jew is the lie that became flesh. He nailed Christ to the cross, and thus for the first time in history nailed the eternal truth to the cross.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Christus ist das Genie der Liebe, als solches der diametralste Gegenpol zum Judentum, das die Inkarnation des Hasses darstellt. … Christus ist der erste Judengegner von Format. … Der Jude ist die menschgewordene Lüge. In Christus hat er zum erstenmal vor der Geschichte die ewige Wahrheit ans Kreuz geschlagen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

John Green photo

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Ronald Reagan photo
The Mother photo
George Orwell photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Mark Twain photo
Óscar Romero photo
Statius photo

“Hear oh hear, if my prayer be worthy and such as you yourself might whisper to my frenzy. Those I begot (no matter in what bed) did not try to guide me, bereft of sight and sceptre, or sway my grieving with words. Nay behold (ah agony!), in their pride, kings this while by my calamity, they even mock my darkness, impatient of their father's groans. Even to them am I unclean? And does the sire of the gods see it and do naught? Do you at least, my rightful champion, come hither and range all my progeny for punishment. Put on your head this gore-soaked diadem that I tore off with my bloody nails. Spurred by a father's prayers, go against the brothers, go between them, let steel make partnership of blood fly asunder. Queen of Tartarus' pit, grant the wickedness I would fain see.”
Exaudi, si digna precor quaeque ipsa furenti subiceres. orbum visu regnisque carentem non regere aut dictis maerentem flectere adorti, quos genui quocumque toro; quin ecce superbi —pro dolor!—et nostro jamdudum funere reges insultant tenebris gemitusque odere paternos. hisne etiam funestus ego? et videt ista deorum ignavus genitor? tu saltem debita vindex huc ades et totos in poenam ordire nepotes. indue quod madidum tabo diadema cruentis unguibus abripui, votisque instincta paternis i media in fratres, generis consortia ferro dissiliant. da, Tartarei regina barathri, quod cupiam vidisse nefas.

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 73

Daniel Handler photo
Trent Reznor photo
Aleksandr Pushkin photo

“What grace could all your worldly power bring
To One whose crown of thorns has made him King,
The Christ who gave His body to the flails,
Who humbly bore the lance and piercing nails?
Or do you fear the rabble might disgrace The One.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Secular Power
as quoted in Pushkin, Alexander (2009). Selected Lyric Poetry. Northwestern University Press, p. 121.

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall - and the failure to nail current jelly to a wall is not due to the nail; it is due to the currant jelly.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Letter to William Roscoe Thayer (2 July 1915)
1910s

Henri Barbusse photo
Socrates photo
Frances Farmer photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Cyril Connolly photo
Antonin Scalia photo

“Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; "for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost" is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Holmes v.SIPC, 503 U.S. 258 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&court=US&case=/us/503/258.html#286 (1991) (concurring).
1990s

Voltaire photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Jack Kerouac photo

“He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor.”

The Town and the City (1950)
Context: He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.

Jennifer Donnelly photo
Stephen King photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Graham Greene photo
Ian McEwan photo
Rachel Caine photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Dave Eggers photo
Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Richelle Mead photo
Tim Burton photo

“The Boy with Nails in His Eyes
put up his aluminum tree.
It looked pretty strange
because he couldn't really see.”

Tim Burton (1958) American filmmaker

Source: The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories

Warren Ellis photo

“I held a nail in place and slammed it with the hammer. Best. Chore. Ever.”

Cate Tiernan (1961) American novelist

Source: Immortal Beloved

Richelle Mead photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
George Carlin photo

“I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood. Especially if it's me!”

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

"Interview With Jesus"
A Place for My Stuff (1981)

Colum McCann photo
John Waters photo
Charlaine Harris photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Jenny Han photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”

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

Inès reiterating to Garcin that they cannot ignore one another, Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)
Source: No Exit and Three Other Plays

China Miéville photo
Susan Elizabeth Phillips photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Rachel Caine photo
Michael Badnarik photo
John Vance Cheney photo
Pete Doherty photo
Jonathan Swift photo

“He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders.”

On the Emperor of Lilliput, in Voyage to Lilliput, Ch. 2
Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Ricky Hatton photo

“He was very awkward, he was swaying back from the punches and that made it very difficult to nail him.”

Ricky Hatton (1978) English former professional boxer

Ricky Hatton on his fight with Colombian Carlos Maussa. http://www.tamesideadvertiser.co.uk/sport/s/206/206746_a_stitch_in_time.html
Ricky on other boxers (Sourced)

James Russell Lowell photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Cesare Pavese photo
Daniel Handler photo
Václav Havel photo

“Man is in fact nailed down — like Christ on the Cross — to a grid of paradoxes... he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

As quoted in "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy" by Richard L. Stanger in Christian Century (11 April 1990)

Robert Kagan photo

“When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.”

Alternate version: If you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.
Of Paradise and Power, p. 26
According to Kagan, this is a variation of the proverb "When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails." (p. 25 of the same book)

Kent Hovind photo
Peter Weiss photo
Kurt Schwitters photo

“My name is Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters... I'm a painter and I nail my pictures... I'd like to be accepted into the Dada Club”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Quote in his letter to Hans Richter, c. 1916; as quoted in 'Hannover-Dada' by Hans Richter; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned by w:Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 151
1910s

“Arms trade. If there was a legitimate trade, they'd sell those things - guns and bombs - in a supermarket. It would be like a cosmetics demonstration, and you'd have a little bit of shopping music in the background. And so, here's our arms trade demonstrator. 'Hello, and welcome to our new "Twilight of the World" range - our stunning new collection for nuclear winter. Now, for those persistent racial problems, why not try our new ethnic cleanser, "Pogrom"? Apply vigorously to the affected area, and then wipe off the face of the earth. For persistent outbreaks, to eliminate those last spots of resistance, why not try our new "I Can't Believe It's Not a Kalashnikov"? Go on, leaders, treat yourself. Tell yourself "I want it, I need it, I'll have it". Now, for those particularly sensitive areas, why not try our new range, "U. N."? It's entirely cosmetic; it does nothing. Apply half-heartedly with our new hand-wringing cream. Now, people often come up to me and say "Can you save my face?" Well, I can. So for those secret little deals - those secret little Iraqi liaisons - why not try "Embargo", the mark of the middleman? Now, for a touch of mystery, why not visit the "Missing Body Shop"? Collect your free nail remover and watch your problems disappear. Now, you're probably sitting there thinking "Oh, I'm such a hideous old blood-soaked dictator of a thing; nobody will deal with me". How wrong you are! We are sole suppliers to the US government of "Turn-a-Blind-Eye Liner" - use always in conjunction with "Oil of Kuwaiti", a touch of "Massacre" and blusher. Oh, you won't need that. I'm Marlene from the House of Charnel. Thank you for your time and patience. And for that finishing touch - for those romantic evenings when you really want to take the enemy out - why not try our stunning new nerve gas, "Paralyse" by Calvin Klein.' (Linda Live 1993)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

Elie Wiesel photo
Bono photo

“Its no secret that a Conscience can sometimes be a Pest, Its no Secret that Ambition bites the Nails of Success”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"The Fly"
Lyrics, Achtung Baby (1991)

Ogden Nash photo
Russell Brand photo
William H. Gass photo
Alexander Blok photo
Emily St. John Mandel photo
Michael Chabon photo
Vytautas Juozapaitis photo

“Most noteworthy was Vytautas Juozapaitis in the title role. He nailed the role with his well projected baritone.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

"Don Giovanni showcases singers", The Desert Sun (November, 2004) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_mozart_review.htm

Aldo Capitini photo

“I wanted to go away, in the midst of something entirely different,
I had been there, in the house of torture,
I have seen people being kicked, men’s bodies scorched,
nails pulled out with pliers.
Armed with flame and cudgels, grinning men in shirt sleeves.
Where I could hear my friends being thrown headlong
down the stairs.
Night was as day, and long shrieks wounded me.
In vain I tried to think of wooded lanes and flowers,
a serene life and human words.
The thought seized up, it was as if a wound were opened up
again and again and endlessly searched.
From the mouth struck, teeth and blood came out,
and lamenting moans from the deep throat.
Away, away from that house, from that street and town,
from anything similar to it.
I must save myself, keep up my mind,
that I should not be led to madness by these memories.
Oh, if we could go back to a void, from which a new order,
a maternal opening could come forth,
if I hear a certain tone of voice even in jest, I shudder.
My unhappiness is that I avoid the sight of suffering,
hospitals and prisons.
I have yearned for high solitudes, lands of still sunshine
and sweet shadows,
but I would always be pursued by the ghosts of human beings.
All of a sudden I feel the need of distraction and play,
to lose myself in the noise of the fairground.
I remain with you, but forgive me
if you see me sometimes act like a madman.
I try to heal myself by myself, as an animal,
trusting that the wounds will close.
I stop to listen to the simple conversations of the women
in the marketplace, with their dialectical lilt.
I rejoice at the footsteps of running children,
their overpowering calls.
Because you do not know the absurdity of my dreams,
the fixed expressions, the incomprehensible gestures.
There is turmoil inside me, which seems to ridicule me.
And I cannot cry out, not to be like them.
Tomorrow I will go towards some music, now I am getting ready.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist
Czeslaw Milosz photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“I was in the streets marching for civil rights while asshole southern sheriffs were swinging nail studded baseball bats at blacks' heads. Two things you can always count on: I will defend my record on race to no one (sic), under any circumstances and, I will call out any racist, any time without regard to who they are... and that includes our half white, racist President.”

Mark Williams American conservative activist, radio talk show host and author

Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/05/21/2010-05-21_nothing_is_out_of_bounds_for_national_tea_party_express_foulmouthed_leader_mark_.html#ixzz0oxS7r1Rj

Albert Barnes photo
Robert Jordan photo

“It is better to be the hammer than the nail.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Egwene al'Vere
(15 October 1991)

Baldur von Schirach photo

“If today he descended from Heaven, the great warrior who struck the moneychangers. You would once again shout crucify! And nail him to the cross that he himself carried. But he would gently laugh at your hatred. The truth remains even when your bearers are passed. Faith remains, because I give my life… And the fighter of all the world towers on the cross.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

About Christ, Evangelium im Dritten Reich, July 1, 1934. Quoted in "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945" by Richard Steigmann-Gall - Religion - 2003

Willem de Kooning photo
Nadine Dorries photo

“Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor… using your own front teeth. Do you get that?”

Nadine Dorries (1957) British politician

Tweet sent to Ben Glaze, a journalist on the Sunday Mirror newspaper, reported by Darren Boyle "Tory MP tells Sunday Mirror reporter 'I'll nail your balls to the floor' in Twitter rant" http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/tory-mp-tells-sunday-mirror-reporter-ill-nail-your-testicles-floor-twitter-rant-over-doorstep, Press Gazette, 24 November 2013

“I came to the subject a True Believer in dark matter, but it was MOND that nailed the predictions for the LSB galaxies that I was studying (McGaugh & de Blok, 1998), not any flavor of dark matter. So what I am supposed to conclude?”

Stacy McGaugh (1964) American astronomer

[Stacy McGaugh, http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/burn1.html, Why "Consider MOND?"] at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014.