Quotes about refusal
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“Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

“There was a sound like a human yawn, and then the skull turned slightly toward me and asked, "What's up, boss?"

"Evil's afoot."

"Well, sure," Bob said, "because it refuses to learn the metric system. Otherwise it'd be up to a meter by now.”

Jim Butcher book White Night

Source: White Night

Learning, Evil

“I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

World

“Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Pain, Heart

“Sometimes humans hit on a moment of profundity more complete than their dim minds could comprehend, and they took that nugget of truth and dumped it in the refuse for the bards and the poets to find, and mangle into yodeling paeans of love.”

Kelley Armstrong book Haunted

Source: Haunted

Love, Truth

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address on Courage (1965)
Context: Deep down in our nonviolent creed is the conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they’re worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life, some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right, he’s afraid his home will get burned, or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot or beat down by state troopers. He may go on and live until he’s 80, but he’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. He died...
A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.
So we're going to stand up right here amid horses. We're going to stand up right here, in Alabama, amid the billy-clubs. We're going to stand up right here in Alabama amid police dogs, if they have them. We're going to stand up amid tear gas! We're going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the world know that we are determined to be free!

“I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

“The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.”

Thomas Keneally book Schindler's Ark

Source: Schindler's List

Death

“Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched….”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

Source: Paint it Black

Lovers, Sleep

“the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

Evil, Personality

“All I refuse and thee I choose.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Hunter

“You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 8 : 'Beyond the Beauty Myth', p. 290

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Maya Angelou book Letter to My Daughter

Source: Letter to My Daughter

Motivational, Success, Deep, Inspirational

“I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 15 (p. 235)
Source: Shards of Honour

“He said you couldn't pretend the terrible things in life didn't happen. You can't clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It's how you learn. And try to make improvements.”

Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Life, Learning

“Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Guardian Camwar, in Ch. 4 : the cooper
Source: The Visitor (2002)
Context: You asked for wisdom? Hear these words. Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.

Intelligence, Reality

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Love, Jealousy

“Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life. Work's important, family's important, but without excitement, you have nothing. You're cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what's coming.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Source: Three Weeks With My Brother

Life, Family, Parting, Cheating

“I seriously needed an extra-strength magic pillow, because my ba refused to stay put. [And no, Sadie, I don't think wrapping my head in duct tape would've worked either. ]”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Thinking

“There are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")”

Maya Angelou book Letter to My Daughter

Source: Letter to My Daughter

Change

“A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.”

Tobsha Learner (1959) British writer

Source: The Witch of Cologne

Life, Knowledge, Past, Future

“I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.”

Patti Smith (1946) American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus The New Colossus

The New Colossus (1883)

“What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?”

Richard Russo Empire Falls

Source: Empire Falls

World

“I told my brain., said my brain. My brain refused to get out of my head. Inconsiderate brain.”

Rick Riordan book The Hammer of Thor

Source: The Hammer of Thor

“poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Source: Drum Taps

Boy, Thinking

“You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

“You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Here I Am

Source: Here I Am

“As a matter of fact, she has refused to marry me.”
“So when's the wedding?” Ramsey asked.”

Julie Garwood (1946) American writer

Source: Ransom

Wedding

“raking a hand through his hair, he forced his attention to the text she'd left on the coffee table, refusing to dwell on the disconcerting fact that a part of him had taken one look at the lass in such proximity to his bed and said simply: Mine”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: The Dark Highlander

Coffee, Parting

“As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Killing Rage: Ending Racism

People, Color

“It's often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

Truth

“One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems… wars, nations, destructions… to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: One

War, Parting, Dead

“Why no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make
comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse
to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Thinking, Parting

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

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

Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

Life, Way, Distant

“I refuse to let the past find me here.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Past

“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

Men, Fear, Help

“This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Source: Surfacing

“Oh confound that gray-and-scarlet suit!" Sophie said. "I refuse to believe that I was the one that got caught with it!”

Diana Wynne Jones book Howl's Moving Castle

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

“[W]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

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

Miscellaneous

“But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Life, Dreams

“The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 23.
Context: To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.

Education

“Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

World, Way, Time, Help

“She’d tried to program it when they’d gotten into the Toyota, but it had refused to turn on. Once, the GPS had only spoken in a heavy German accent for weeks. Julian had decided it was possessed.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

“Some people are settling down, some people are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.”

Candace Bushnell book Sex and the City

Source: Sex and the City

People

“Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.”

Jeff Lindsay book Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Life, Hate, Stupidity, Dreams

“I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces

Optimism, Universe

“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Guilty

Life, Laughter, Universe

“It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”

Tom Perrotta book Little Children

Source: Little Children

Hunger, Cheating

“I am your Prince and you will marry me," Humperdinck said.
Buttercup whispered, "I am your servant and I refuse."
"I am you Prince and you cannot refuse."
"I am your loyal servant and I just did."
"Refusal means death."
"Kill me then.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Death

“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”

Thomas Bernhard book Gargoyles

Source: Gargoyles

Sadness

“God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God's refusals are always merciful -- "severe mercies" at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Love, Wisdom, God, Time

“I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.”

Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) American dramatist and screenwriter

As quoted in Untamed Tongues : Wild Words from Wild Women (1993) by Autumn Stephens, p. 132

People

“The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Suffering

“My hate is general, I detest all men;
Some because they are wicked and do evil,
Others because they tolerate the wicked,
Refusing them the active vigorous scorn
Which vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.”

Molière The Misanthrope

Source: The Misanthrope

Men, Hate, Evil

“I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Six Rules of Maybe

People, Truth

“This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Passion, Evil

“I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Love

“Pity does not get you aid. Admiration at your refusal to give in does.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

World, Girl, Tear

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Composition as Explanation (1926)
Context: For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
Context: No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

Time

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

Sadness, Time

“Accept this: your mortal is doomed."

"Please, Aric. I'm begging you!"

He whirled around, fury in his expression. "You refused - twice - to beg me for your own life, but you'd beg for his?"

I whispered, "Yes.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Endless Knight

Life

“I'm not short," Daisy muttered. "Short women are never mysterious, or elegant, or pursued by handsome men. And they're always treated like children. I refuse to be short.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Secrets of a Summer Night

Women, Men, Children

“She refused to think of Neil, brave and quiet, whose reward for a heroic rescue was to be slowly devoured by strange cave balloons.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Thinking

“Just because you refuse to acknowledge something, refuse to look at it or think about it, doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it doesn’t affect you and the choices you make in your life.”

Rachel Gibson (1961) American writer

Source: Tangled Up In You

Life, Thinking

“You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.”

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

Life, Chance

“What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love.”

Théophile Gautier book Mademoiselle de Maupin

Source: Mademoiselle de Maupin

Love, Life, Heart, Gratitude

“You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes

School

“A crafty nightrunner died of late,
And found himself at Bilairy’s Gate.
He stood outside and refused to knock
Because he meant to pick the lock.”

Lynn Flewelling Shadows Return

Source: Shadows Return

“We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.”

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

Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Sun

“The wound you refuse to dress is one that will never heal. You gush lifeblood and never even know why. It will make you weak at a critical moment when you need to be strong.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

Strong

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Way

“I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.”

Julia Glass book Three Junes

Source: Three Junes

Solitude, Joy

“I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

“It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.”

Helen Oyeyemi (1984) British author

Source: What is Not Yours is Not Yours

Love

“Why would you do that? Why would you act like you didn't know how to drive?"
"Isn't it obvious, Sage? No, of course it isn't. I did it so I'd have a reason to be around you - one I knew you couldn't refuse”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

“The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.”

Bruce Coville (1950) American writer

Teachers' Day, Lie, Teachers, Dead

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

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

Letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, professor emeritus of philosophy at the College of the City of New York, defending the appointment of Bertrand Russell to a teaching position (19 March 1940).
1940s
Variant: Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form.

Courage, Understanding

“There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.”

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

Variant: There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think.
Source: Atlas Shrugged: Wer Ist John Galt?

Thinking, Evil

“LIVE. If you live, god will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

God, Distant

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Suffering

“I refuse putting from me the best that I am.”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Source: Leaves of Grass

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) American author and Unitarian clergyman

Statement published in A Year of Beautiful Thoughts‎ (1902) by Jeanie Ashley Bates Greenough, p. 172, Third statement for June 11. This has often been misattributed to Helen Keller in some published works since at least 1980, perhaps because she somewhere quoted it.
Variant:
I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
The Book of Good Cheer : A Little Bundle of Cheery Thoughts‎ (1909) by Edwin Osgood Grover, p. 28; also in Masterpieces of Religious Verse (1948) by James Dalton Morrison, p. 416, where it is titled "Lend a Hand"
Variant: I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.