Quotes about something
page 8

“I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make
it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll
make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark
the present.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.”

Terry Pratchett book Sourcery

Source: Sourcery

Life, Thinking, Loss

“Everywhere I look, I see something holy.”

Terry Pratchett book Carpe Jugulum

Source: Carpe Jugulum

“There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Men, Sadness, Universe

“The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.”

Marina Abramović (1946) Yugoslav-American artist

“It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

Mark Twain book Life on the Mississippi

Source: Life on the Mississippi

Science

“You don't have to believe in my miracles. You can call them accidents or coincidences, if you must. But don't pity me for my faith. And don't presume that you're better, just because you believe something different.”

Brandon Sanderson book Warbreaker

Source: Warbreaker

Faith

“When people say "clearly" something that means there's a huge crack in their argument and they know things aren't clear at all.”

Terry Pratchett book The Truth

Source: The Truth

People

“Sometimes it's better to end something & try to start something new than imprison yourself in hoping for the impossible.”

Karen Salmansohn American writer

Hope

“Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Support

“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

“Take a note: it usually works better if you wait until I do something stupid before getting mad at me.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

Stupidity, Waiting, Madness

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

Aristotle book Politics

Source: Politics

Life, God, Nature, Animals

“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Sense

“Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.”

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

People, History, Time

“You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.”

Joanne Harris book Blackberry Wine

Source: Blackberry Wine

Life, Hope

“Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Teachers

“Who's the real you? The person who did something awful, or the one who's horrified by the awful thing you did? Is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?”

Rebecca Stead (1968) American children's writer

Source: Goodbye Stranger

Forgiveness, Parting, Personality

“It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Source: Flotsam

World, Thinking

“So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late. - Lee Iacocca”

Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) American businessman

Waiting

“Being brave is when you have to do something because you know it is right, but at the same time, you are afraid to do it, because it might hurt or whatever. But you do it anyway.”

Meg Cabot book All American Girl

Source: All-American Girl

Time, Hurt

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Heart, Dead

“You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Source: Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Girl, Personality

“A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies
that have moulded them”

Jawaharlal Nehru book The Discovery of India

Source: The Discovery of India

“"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Source: Death of a Salesman

Dreams, Christ

“Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Fight

“Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

Heart

“I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up….

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

Life, Search, Question, Forgetting

“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

Perfection

“I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman's relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance… When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature, of which we are inescapably a part.”

Henry Beston book Northern Farm

Source: Northern Farm

Nature, Parting

“Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Freedom

“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.

Freedom

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

“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

Smile, Beauty

“Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

Passion, Success

“Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Pain

“Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Lying, Waiting

“Dear Jesus, do something.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

“Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

Love

“You're thinking about something, and it makes you forget to talk.”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

Thinking, Forgetting

“The bottom line in both cases is that people don't change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into something she's not.”

Jodi Picoult book Sing You Home

Source: Sing You Home

Love, People, Change, Personality

“I want to do something splendid…
Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead…
I think I shall write books.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) American novelist

Books, Thinking, Dead

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

Sense, Change

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“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)

Animals

“Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill, and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Dreams

“No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I'm in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current's too overpowering; I don't have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Love

“It’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.”

Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) Norwegian writer

Source: The Wreath

Thinking

“The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.”

Andy Rooney (1919–2011) writer, humorist, television personality

Chance

“The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used itadded the rider 'and that someone is me'.”

Terry Pratchett book Hogfather

Source: Hogfather

People, Help

“I gave up what I can't keep for something I can never lose.”

Francine Rivers book A Voice in the Wind

Source: A Voice in the Wind

“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

Sex, Way

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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

Love

“When you come to the edge of all the light you know,
and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown,
FAITH is knowing one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on
or you will be taught how to fly.”

Barbara Winter (1944)

Faith, Light, Flying

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Children, World, Soul

“When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with…”

Lorrie Moore Birds of America

Source: Birds of America

Way

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.”

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

Feeling, Imagination, Intelligence, Learning

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”

John Fowles book The Collector

Source: The Collector

Drawing

“Seek always to do some good, somewhere… Even if it's a little thing, so something for those that need help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Help

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

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

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

Time

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

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

Disappointment

“When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Happiness, Star

“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”

Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

“Always have something to say. The man who has something to say and who is known never to speak unless he has, is sure to be listened to.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

“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.

Fashion

“It's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

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

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

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."

Men

“She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn't going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn't going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Sadness, Waiting

“The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. You either line yourself up with the Son of God…or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Life, God, World

“Even if I say something, do not believe this nonsense, but do not disbelieve it either. Just see, "Someone is willing to sit in front of so many people and talk absolute nonsense, something that is totally absurd. Let me see what this is about." If you keep that much openness, the possibility is alive in your life. If you believe it, you will kill it. If you disbelieve it, you will kill it.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Life and Death in One Breath

Life, People

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

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

“Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

The Story Teller ISBN: 978-1-4767-2783-7 (2013)
Source: The Storyteller

“My dearest life, I know you are not mine forever; but do love me even if it’s for this moment. After that I shall vanish into the forest where you cast me, I won’t ask anyone for anything again. Give me something that can last me till I die.”

Rabindranath Tagore book Chokher Bali

Source: Chokher Bali

Love, Life

“By hook or by crook this peril too shall be something that we remember”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

“You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.”

Paul Gallico (1897–1976) American writer and journalist

Learning

“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.

Life, Hope, Learning, Perfection

“Nothing goes perfectly for us. But… being incomplete is what pushes us onward to the next something… If we were even perfectly satisfied, what meaning would the rest of our lives hold, right?”

Takehiko Inoue (1967) Japanese artist

“If you dont stand for something you fall for everything.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

“The first time you see something that you have never seen before, you almost always know right away if you should eat it or run away from it.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Time

“Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

31
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

“How clever you are, to know something of which you are ignorant.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Peace is not something you wish for, it is something you make, something you are, something you do, and something you give away.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Peace, Peaceful

“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”

C.G. Jung book Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Source: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Life

“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

Passion