Quotes about something
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Joan Rivers photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Terry Pratchett photo

“Everywhere I look, I see something holy.”

Source: Carpe Jugulum

Fernando Pessoa photo
Marina Abramović photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Mark Twain photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Terry Pratchett photo
C.G. Jung photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
Aristotle photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Jim Butcher photo
Joanne Harris photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Rebecca Stead photo
Erich Maria Remarque photo
Lee Iacocca photo
Meg Cabot photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Jawaharlal Nehru photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Arthur Miller photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Nora Ephron photo
John Wooden photo

“You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

They Call Me Coach (1972)
Variant: You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you

Hunter S. Thompson photo
Terence McKenna photo

“If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience and this is, I think much, of the problem of the modern dilemma, is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kind of belief systems have been erected... If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.

Blaise Pascal photo
Sylvia Plath photo

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

Mark Twain photo
Mark Twain photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo

“Dear Jesus, do something.”

Source: Pale Fire

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. photo
Lewis Carroll photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
Lewis Carroll photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Unpopular Essays (1950)

Muhammad Ali photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Sigrid Undset photo
Andy Rooney photo
Terry Pratchett photo
David Lynch photo

“Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor
Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.”

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 216

Vladimir Nabokov photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Lorrie Moore photo
Albert Schweitzer photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“Is standing by the window muttering about blood something he does all the time?"
"No, sometimes he sits on the couch and does it.”

Simon and Jace. pg. 139
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Tennessee Williams photo

“Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else.”

Variant: Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.
Source: The Glass Menagerie

W.B. Yeats photo
Abbie Hoffman photo

“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

Source: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (1980), p. 297.
Context: Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. When all today's isms have become yesterday's ancient philosophy, there will still be reactionaries and there will still be revolutionaries. No amount of rationalization can avoid the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on the planet. I still believe in the fundamental injustice of the profit system and do not accept the proposition there will be rich and poor for all eternity.

Barack Obama photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“I am a man" he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown.”

Isabelle and Jace, pg. 534
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Glass (2009)
Context: "I think it's strawberry juice," Isabelle said. "Anyway, it's yummy. Jace?" She offered him the glass.
"I am a man," he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone, woman, and bring me something brown."
"Brown?" Isabelle made a face.
"Brown is a manly color."

Ann Brashares photo
Sadhguru photo
Cecelia Ahern photo

“Nothing is never nothing. It's always something.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Jodi Picoult photo
Rabindranath Tagore photo
Paul Gallico photo
John Wayne photo

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.”

John Wayne (1907–1979) American film actor

Playboy interview, May 1971
Context: There's a lot of things great about life. But I think tomorrow is the most important thing. Comes in to us at midnight very clean, ya know. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.

Malcolm X photo
Scott Adams photo
Franz Kafka photo
Robert Fulghum photo
C.G. Jung photo
Franz Kafka photo

“By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a couple other publications since, this is actually from Report to Greco (1965) by Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 434
Misattributed

Noam Chomsky photo
James Baldwin photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: Unpopular Essays

William Shakespeare photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Erich Maria Remarque photo
Mark Twain photo

“When I was a boy a farmer's wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a faith-doctor—that was what she called herself. Sufferers came to her from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, "Have faith—it is all that is necessary," and they went away well of their ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers. She said that the patient's faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. My mother was the patient. In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this sort of industry, and has both the high and the low for patients. He gets into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma, but his business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work is unquestionably successful and keeps his reputation high. In Bavaria there is a man who performed so many great cures that he had to retire from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the demand of his constantly increasing body of customers. He goes on from year to year doing his miracles, and has become very rich. He pretends to no religious helps, no supernatural aids, but thinks there is something in his make-up which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it is this confidence which does the work, and not some mysterious power issuing from himself.”

Source: Christian Science (1907), Ch. 4

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo

“Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 36
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Gloria Estefan photo

“How can we expect something positive to come from all the negative that we put into this world?”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

speech at Florida International University, "Live, Art and Spirituality" (October 14, 2006)
2007, 2008