Quotes about sake
page 3

Meg Cabot photo
Harper Lee photo
Michael Ondaatje photo
Steven Pressfield photo

“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Walt Whitman photo
Cressida Cowell photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence”

Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Context: Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

Diana Gabaldon photo
David Sedaris photo
D.H. Lawrence photo
Cressida Cowell photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Swami Vivekananda photo
Aleister Crowley photo

“I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.”

I:29.
Source: The Book of the Law (1904)

Albert Einstein photo
George Sand photo

“Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence. Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good — that is the creed I seek.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

L'art pour l'art est un vain mot. L'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche....
Letter to Alexandre Saint-Jean, (19 April 1872), published in Calmann Lévy (ed.) Correspondance (1812-1876). Eng. Transl by Raphaël Ledos de Beaufort in Letters of George Sand Vol. III, p. 242

Leo Tolstoy photo
Jim Butcher photo
E.M. Forster photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
David Sedaris photo
Hiro Mashima photo

“Come on, Jellal! You can't let yourself get taken away from you! For Erza's sake! So come here! We'll be with you too! We're on the same team, right?! Jellal!”

Hiro Mashima (1977) Japanese manga artist

Source: フェアリーテイル 20 [Fearī Teiru 20]

Henry Miller photo
Juliet Marillier photo
Robert Frost photo
Chelsea Handler photo
Herman Melville photo

“For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Arthur Cecil Pigou photo
Joseph Lewis photo

“[Atheism] believes that truth for truth's sake is the highest ideal and that virtue is its own reward.”

Joseph Lewis (1889–1968) American activist

The Philosophy of Atheism

Benjamin Franklin photo
Murasaki Shikibu photo

“To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do: whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?”

trans. Richard Bowring
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Walt Whitman photo

“I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.”

Starting from Paumanok. 7
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Tony Snow photo

“One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you've got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling, you've got a better chance of getting hired. I'm a white guy named Tony Snow, for heaven's sake. That's as white as it goes.”

Tony Snow (1955–2008) American White House Press Secretary

Quoted in Al Kamen, "You Can Quote Them on That, Maybe," http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/06/AR2006070601551.html washingtonpost.com (2006-07-06).

Lord Randolph Churchill photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Lucy Aharish photo

“One of the topics [on the show last week] was the murder of women in the Arab sector, what is referred to, unfortunately, […] as 'honor killing' and has nothing to do with [anything worthy of] honor. The guest in the studio was a woman who had 20 years of experience working for the sake of those same women who die for no good reason, a woman whose everyday job was a holy work for the sake of thousands of Arab women who need a voice that will shout out and cry out their cries. After she had accused the government and the police and everyone of incompetence, I asked her, in a somewhat aggressive manner, as it were, '[…] Where are we in all of this? Where are we Arab women to teach and discipline our sons that a man has no right over a woman? […]' During the commercial break, she got up and told me that I had to learn how to talk to Arabs because the tone that I adopted and the things that I said were said to gain approval from Jews. So I've come to tell you today that I haven't come for approval from you; that I haven't come for approval from anyone; and this is the message that I want you to digest very, very well. In my life I have been accused of many things: that I am the fifth column; that an Arab will always stay an Arab, no matter how liberal he may look; that I bring shame on my family for being in a relationship with a person outside my religion. I've received threats after asking Palestinian residents live on the show why they don't go out against Hamas men, who use them and bring them to their slaughter; I've been attacked on Yom ha-Shoah and Yom ha-Zikaron that the managers at Arutz 2 dared to put an Arab on a show such as that as the host on a day such as that; I've been told that I make Arab women stray off the path of proper behavior; and that I've forgotten where I come from being an 'Ashkenazified', 'Judaized' Arab. So they blamed and they talked—as if that, in itself, made them right.”

Lucy Aharish (1981) Arab-Israeli journalist

Source: Lucy Aharish's campus speech http://www.onlife.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94/%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%94%D7%99%D7%92%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9D-%D7%90%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%97%D7%A8/85312/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A9-%D7%9C%D7%90-%D7%91%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%90-%D7%97%D7%9F-%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%A3-%D7%90%D7%97%D7%93 at "מנהיגות היום את המחר". Onlife. 9 November 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2015. Video available.

Thomas Browne photo
Jennifer Beals photo

“[About compassion] You can have the ‘golden rule’—do unto others as you would have others do unto you. But then you take it one step farther—where you just do good unto others, period. Just for the sake of it.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview on WCIU (4 May 2011) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns735UPlxKM/.

Henry Burchard Fine photo
Paolo Bacigalupi photo
Max Horkheimer photo
William Ellery Channing photo

“Did any man at his death ever regret his conflicts with himself, his victories over appetite, his scorn of impure pleasure, or his sufferings for righteousness' sake?”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 536

Walter Benjamin photo

“If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Besteht das Original nicht um dessentwillen, wie ließe sich dann die Übersetzung aus dieser Beziehung verstehen?
The Task of the Translator (1920)

Harlan Ellison photo
Alan Keyes photo
Robert Fisk photo
Vitruvius photo

“The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 24
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.

Nigel Cumberland photo

“Thinking and doing the opposite of what the majority is doing isn’t about being different for the sake of being different. There are lots of times when the well-trodden path is the right one to take. Your challenge is to know when it will be in your interest to do the opposite.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Chris Cornell photo

“RockNet: Were you terribly uncomfortable at the recent Grammy Award Show?
Cornell: I don't know. It's just a strange subject. It's almost as if the music industry is patting itself on the back in a way. This was the seventh Grammy nomination for us and had we won one for our first nomination I would have had a really cool attitude about it because it would have meant that the people who were actually voting were paying attention to music for music's sake as opposed to some other reason.
I was happy that we were nominated because it was an independent record company and it was a low-profile record. We didn't win a Grammy until we'd sold several millions and it seems that what sells a lot is what wins, even though the record may or may not be any good, but that seems to be the requirement.
I'm not critical of the people who work in the music industry, and I appreciate the Grammy. (But) to me it's their party and it's not really mine. It's not for the musicians. It has more to do with the industry. You can tell after a Grammy period all the record labels and artists who won a bunch take out full-page ads in the trades gloating. That's fine. That's what they do, they sell records and they work really hard to develop careers. If they're into it, I'm not going to be disrespectful, but I'd hate for anyone to think that it's something that was a necessity for me or the rest of the band, or that it was a benchmark to us of legitimacy for us because it's not. It doesn't really matter that much to us. It seems like it's for someone else. I'd never get up and say that. If I was totally not into it, the best thing to do is to not show up.
Maybe ten years from now I'll reflect and say "wow, that happened and it was pretty unusual. Not every kid on the block gets to go up and pick up a Grammy Award."”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

It's just one more thing to take the focus away from what we like to do, which is to write music and make records and try not to think about anything whether it's how many records we sell or what people think of us.
For us, I think the key to success for being a band and always making good records is always going to be forgetting about everything else outside our own little band.
RockNet Interview: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, May 1, 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19961114054327/http://www.rocknet.com/may96/soundgar.html,
Soundgarden Era

Everett Dean Martin photo
Richard Cobden photo
Miyamoto Musashi photo
Robert Falcon Scott photo

“Scott Statue, Christchurch, New Zealand]]For God's sake look after our people.”

Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) Royal Navy officer and explorer

Journal, 29 March 1912 http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/diaries/scottslastexpedition/, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition (1913) vol.1, ch.20

Morarji Desai photo

“Things should be done for their own sake. I accept that I will never understand reality, so I concentrate on action, dharma [duty] and commitment.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

As quoted in "Morarji Desai: The Ascetic Activist" by Lawrence Malkin and William Stewart, in TIME (4 April 1977) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,947858-2,00.html

Reggie Fils-Aimé photo
Edwin Arnold photo
Donald Barthelme photo
Jopie Huisman photo

“In 1946 it was the first time I saw a Van Gogh, a painting from his years in France. It was excactly what I had always felt here [in the fields of Friesland]: infinity, the unimaginable. I was bewildered and thought: who has been painting here for God's sake? Pink stripes in a green sky, you can't imagine! Ultramarine and carmine in the soil with a big yellow sun behind it..”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: In 1946 zag ik voor het eerst een Van Gogh, uit z'n Franse tijd. Dàt was wat ik hier [in Friesland] altijd gevoeld had: de oneindigheid, het onvoorstelbare. Ik was verbouwereerd, [en] dacht: wie is hier in godsnaam bezig geweest? Roze strepen in een groene lucht, moet je es nagaan. Ultramarijn en karmijn in de bodem, een grote gele zon erachter..
Mens & Gevoelens: Jopie Huisman', 1993

“Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live.”

[Walth, Brent, McCall never looked so good. But let's move on., The Oregonian, November 5, 2006, http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/editorial/1162598153219630.xml&coll=7, 2006-11-15]

Sam Houston photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“His [the Philistine’s] existence is not animated by any keen desire for knowledge and insight for their own sake, or by any desire for really aesthetic pleasures which is so entirely akin to it. If, however, any pleasures of this kind are forced on him by fashion or authority, he will dispose of them as briefly as possible as a kind of compulsory labour.”

Kein Drang nach Erkenntniß und Einsicht, um ihrer selbst Willen, belebt sein [des Philisters] Daseyn, auch keiner nach eigentlich ästhetischen Genüssen, als welcher dem ersteren durchaus verwandt ist. Was dennoch von Genüssen solcher Art etwan Mode, oder Auktorität, ihm aufdringt, wird er als eine Art Zwangsarbeit möglichst kurz abthun.
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 344
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Hans Haacke photo

“A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg,… is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example of art for art's sake.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

1990s, Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere, 1998

Marston Morse photo

“Discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and in which unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.”

Marston Morse (1892–1977) American mathematician

Attributed in Princeton & Mathematics: A Notable Record, Chaplin, Virginia, Princeton Alumni Weekly, May 9, 1958 http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pmcxpaw.htm,

William Morley Punshon photo
Desmond Tutu photo

“For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

As quoted in The New York Times (3 January 1985)

Isaiah Berlin photo

“Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Introduction (1969)

Bram van Velde photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Maneka Gandhi photo

“Let me clarify at the outset that this decision to permit hunting of wild boars and blue bull in the wild is not taken for the sake of farmers, but to benefit those private forest lodge operators who have clients from Middle East and other countries.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

Criticising Madhya Pradesh government's move to simply hunting rules, as quoted in "Maneka miffed with MP govt's move to simplify hunting rules" http://www.firstpost.com/india/maneka-miffed-with-mp-govts-move-to-simplify-hunting-rules-188695.html, First Post (20 January 2012)
2011-present

Ben Witherington III photo
Max Barry photo
Wisława Szymborska photo

“For the sake of research,
the big picture
and definitive conclusions,
one would have to transcend time,
in which everything scurries and whirls.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"We're Extremely Fortunate"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The End and the Beginning (1993)

Sun Myung Moon photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Eric Holder photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“He had a power; in his eye
There was a quenchless energy,
A spirit that could dare
The deadliest form that Death could take,
And dare it for the daring's sake.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Crescentius from The London Literary Gazette (19th July 1823) Execution of Crescentius
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Aldous Huxley photo

“There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Silence is Golden,” p. 55
Do What You Will (1928)

Alphonse de Lamartine photo
Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo

“If I was accused of neglecting my art, or sacrificing my ideas for the sake of stupid ambition, then I would understand the critics; but as that isn't the case, there is nothing to be said. I sent a picture to the Salon for purely commercial reasons. Anyway, it is like some medicines – even if it does no good, it does no harm.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

other impressionist artists then refused to send in their work to the Salon
Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 128 : in a letter to art-dealer Durand-Ruel, March 1881

Theodore Dreiser photo
Giorgio Morandi photo
Stephen Fry photo

“He takes coke and has slept with a prostitute - but he's a TV presenter for God's sake!”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

On the sacking of Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You.
Quoted in The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/stephen-fry-a-restless-soul-546925.html
2000s

George Holmes Howison photo
Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo
Ahad Ha'am photo
Jack Vance photo
Alberto Gonzales photo
Chen Shih-chung photo

“It's every country's responsibility to cooperate with one another for the sake of their citizens' health, and I believe that it is the international society's responsibility to make sure that Taiwan is not excluded from the global health system.”

Chen Shih-chung politician

Chen Shih-chung (2017) cited in " Taiwan’s minister of health to attend bilateral meetings during WHA http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3169404" on Taiwan News, 22 May 2017