Quotes about second

page 7

“We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?”

“Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn't breathe God would grant her another day with Jalil.”

“Sweetest baby ever,” my mother said with a sigh.
“You mean second sweetest, right?” I corrected.”

“I thought the morning would bring change. But I should have known that it doesn't take that long for change to happen - it takes a second. A moment. In a single breath, reality as you know it can simply fall away.”

“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.”

“It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”

“Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves.
They flickered out saying:
"It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.”

“When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.”

“Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, 'Did you bring joy?' The second was, 'Did you find joy?”

“Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”

“Witihin seconds the headhunter had lost control of his car and it squealed, sliding sideways right into several other cars.
Cool!' said the Gasman.”

“The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.”

“Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

“Second, and far more important: tuck your chin. You're going to get hurt, so expect it and be ready. You may as well see it coming.”

“I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.”

“Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire.”

“… small helpings, no seconds, no snacking, and a little bit of everything. - Julia Child”

“A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.”

“And don't you let your guard down for a second because you think anything's inevitable.”

“Adrian!" Something inside of me burst. "Will you shut the hell up for five seconds?”

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”

“I'm tired of being your best friend. I'm tired of being second best. I won't settle for that anymore. It's all or nothing, Schuyler. You have to decide. Him or me.

- Oliver Hazzard-Perry”

“Smile. it's the second best thing you can do with your lips.”

“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.”

“It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.”

“It all seems so sad, so unbearably sad for a second, to think of the lovely old maple with the swing. We never told the tree how much we loved it. We never gave it a name, never did anything for it.”

“Do you think 'Duke' is a good name?' she asked.

His face blanked for a second before it cleared. He glanced at the dog in consideration. 'I don't think so. He would outrank me.”

“One second he was in my face, making me feel stupid and useless. The next he was like this: hovering, concerned, worried.”

“Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.”

“Laughter rarely lasts longer than a few seconds, it's true. But how enjoyable those few seconds are.”

“I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.

Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said: “It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.”

“You'll seldom experience regret for anything that you've done. It is what you haven't done that will torment you. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it! Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it.”

“If I’d just listened—just taken one second to listen—it wouldn’t have happened”

“For any of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred of years from now. You can never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.”

“That will be her undoing," gasped Artemis, already suffering under the weight of the flak jacket. "Artemis Fowl will never be."
"I thought you were Artemis Fowl the Second?" said Holly.”

“God always offers us a second chance in life.”

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”

“I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.”

“A remarkable thing about me is that the time that elapses between a sad thought and a flood of tears is three or four seconds.”

“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”

“Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.”

“As the old saying goes, when seconds count the police are just minutes away.”

“Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.”

“There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.”

“Mirabelle is attractive; it's just that she is never the first or second girl chosen.”

“You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time…”

“The inspector ate only two of my tiny sandwiches: the first because he hadn't expected it to taste so awful; the second, I think, because he'd thought surely the first must have been a mistake.”

“The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.”

“In the first few seconds an aching sadness wrenched his heart, but it soon gave way to a feeling of sweet disquiet, the excitement of gypsy wanderlust”

“Max: "Fang! This is a huge break! Of course we should go check it out!"
Fang: "But we're grounded."
Max and Fang: (stare at each other for a second and burst out laughing)”

“"Wait a second."
"I never understand why people say that," Luke said, to no one in particular. "I wasn't going anywhere."”

“He turned, registering a face with blond hair, and for a split second he thought it was Will Solace. When Nico realized it was Jason, he was disappointed. Then he felt angry with himself for feeling that way.”

“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”

“If this is your idea of glamour, I'm having second thoughts about letting you make me over.”

“The seconds tick. They always do. The power of an entire sun cannot stop them even for a moment, and so death comes between the moments, like a thief of light in the dark.”

“I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.”

“The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.”

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.”

“Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.”

“Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.”

“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

“Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.”

“On second thought she hoped she never met a woman that attractive.. If she did, she would be morally obligated to run her over with her car.." Bride”

“My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.”

“Calvin: As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.
p25”

“In the final seconds before sleep, I wish I could go back and undo everything, give those little girls another chance.”

“Once, in second grade, Kate drew a picture of a firefighter with a halo above his helmet. She told her class that I would only be allowed to go to Heaven, because if I went to Hell, I'd put out all the fires.
~Brian Fitzgerald”

“To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.

[author's dedication]”

“They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other”

“Even a second of freedom is worth more than a lifetime of bondage.”

“Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.”

“I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.”

“Damn right I begrudge! I grudge every memory of yours that doesna hold me, and every tear ye've shed for another, and every second you've spent in another man's bed!”

“Now, see," Wes said, nodding at my plate, "this is going to blow your mind."
I looked at him. "It's a waffle, not the second coming.”

“We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.”

“That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.”

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

“This is not to say that I wasn't completely repulsed. I mean, I wasn't exactly proud that my stepbrother
was in there tongue wrestling with the second stupidest person in our class, after himself.”

“The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.”

“Just wait a second. We can't leave it like this." But this too, wasn't true. Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so damned hard.”

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

“Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.”

“The occupation of Iraq is completely self-perpetuating: The worse things get the more we are obliged to stay. And the longer we stay the worse things get. Wonderful, no? Being trapped in Iraq, moreover, has clearly prevented us from tackling Iran with any traction. One argument commonly made for staying in Iraq makes no sense to me at all. It's McCain's "if we leave, they will follow us home." But if we stay, they can follow us home as well. And by staying, we have clearly created more of them to follow us. The second argument that fails to convince is that by leaving, we give al Qaeda a propaganda coup. Yes, we would, and it would be intellectually dishonest to deny that. Any argument for withdrawal needs to take that into account. But by staying and losing, we also give al Qaeda a propaganda coup. And by constantly giving al Qaeda an anti-imperial narrative, we also prevent Muslims and Arabs from recognizing them for what they are: not anti-imperial liberators but theo-fascists.
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that if we want to win this long war, we have to leave Iraq. Sooner rather than later.”

“My work has a strong negative element. I have my own inner demons to deal with. Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp. What I don't want to do, what I dread more than anything, is to leave a legacy of crap. I don't want my work to be tossed in the dustbin of history, and become more of the second rate, mediocre junk that future connoisseurs will have to move out of the way so they can get at the good stuff.”

“Communism further alleges that religion is not of divine origin but is simply a man-made tool used by the dominant class to suppress the exploited class. Marx and Engels described religion as the opiate of the people which is designed to lull them into humble submission and an acceptance of the prevailing mode of production which the dominant class desires to perpetuate. Any student of history would agree that there have been times in history when unscrupulous individuals and even misdirected religious organizations have abused the power of religion, just as all other institutions of society have been abused at various times. But it was not the abuse of religion which Marx and Engels deplored as much as the very existence of religion. They considered it a creation of the dominant class, a tool and a weapon in the hands of the oppressors. They pointed out the three-fold function of religion from their point of view: first, it teaches respect for property rights; second, it teaches the poor their duties towards the property and prerogatives of the ruling class; and third, it instills a spirit of acquiescence among the exploited poor so as to destroy their revolutionary spirit. The fallacy of these allegations is obvious to any student of Judaic-Christian teachings. The Biblical teaching of respect for property applies to rich and poor alike; it admonishes the rich to give the laborer his proper wages and to share their riches with the needy.”

“The first sign of senility is that a man forgets his theorems, the second sign is that he forgets to zip up, the third sign is that he forgets to zip down.”

“Although the roots of geography, as a field of study, reach back to Classical Antiquity… its establishment as a modern science was essentially the work of the century from 1750 to 1850. The second half of this period, the time of Humboldt and Ritter, is commonly spoken of as the "classical period" of geography.”

“We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.”

“The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.”

“I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.”

“Old age is second childhood.”

“The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.”

“Brexit means Brexit. The campaign was fought, the vote was held, turnout was high, and the public gave their verdict. There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it through the back door, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government and of Parliament to make sure we do just that.”

“No, no. Bill should play two or three more years. Talk to him. Tell him he can get in shape. I know he can play better second base than anybody. He is two years younger than I am. He is the greatest second baseman of all time, a real super star. But people forget too fast what he has done for the Pirates. Nobody I ever saw could field with him. He won the World Series with his home run against the Yankees. I don't like to see him retire.”

“Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
…
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.”

“The world's best swordsman doesn't fear the second best; he fears the worst swordsman, because he can't predict what the idiot will do.”

“Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all “aliens”, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!"”

“To appreciate the nature of fractals, recall Galileo's splendid manifesto that "Philosophy is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which one wanders about in a dark labyrinth." Observe that circles, ellipses, and parabolas are very smooth shapes and that a triangle has a small number of points of irregularity. Galileo was absolutely right to assert that in science those shapes are necessary. But they have turned out not to be sufficient, "merely" because most of the world is of infinitely great roughness and complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands: one of Euclidean simplicity, and also a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present, but is the same at all scales.”