Quotes about something
page 8
“The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.”
“A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.”
“Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.”
Source: I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections
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
Source: Northern Farm
“Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.”
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.
Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition
“Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.”
“Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.”
Source: 1950s, Unpopular Essays (1950)
“I'm so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 216
Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”
Source: The Collector
“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
“When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.”
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.
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."
“Nothing is never nothing. It's always something.”
Source: The Book of Tomorrow
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.
“If you dont stand for something you fall for everything.”
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
Source: Unpopular Essays
Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
E 36
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)
“How can we expect something positive to come from all the negative that we put into this world?”
speech at Florida International University, "Live, Art and Spirituality" (October 14, 2006)
2007, 2008