Quotes about spending
A collection of quotes on the topic of spending, time, timing, life.
Quotes about spending
“What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway!”
Variant: You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the f**k on.
Variant: Zero wasnt worried, " When you spend your whole life living in a shole", he said, "the only way you can go is up.
Source: Holes
Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."
Misattributed
"Speaking of Love, No Love, and Other Nuisances" (23 December 1995) in Our Word Is Our Weapon
A speech after Bryant's last game, 13 April 2016, posted on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg0mxPXIpLY&t=5s.
“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”
Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Source: Handle with Care
“Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?”
Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star
“I've got so much work to do today, I'd better spend two hours in prayer instead of one.”
Variant: I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.
“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”
Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Source: Norwegian Wood
On Wii
Source: November 16, 2006 Business Week interview http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc20061116_750580.htm
Variations of this piece have also been misattributed to Andy Rooney and Woody Allen. The original source is a variation on a piece by Sean Morey. ( "snopes.com: Andy Rooney on Everything", Snopes.com, 2012-09-09 http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/rooney3.asp, )
Misattributed
Cf. LOOK Magazine 1957: Actor Walter Slezak's version of "keeping up with the Joneses": "Spending money you don't have for things you don't need to impress people you don't like." p. 10 books.google http://books.google.com/books?id=-NERAQAAMAAJ&q=slezak.
Misattributed
Extract from an interview by James Francis Cooke, as given in the 1999 edition of Great Pianists on Piano Playing (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999) p. 217.
“Those who spend too fast never grow rich.”
Qui dépense trop n’est jamais riche.
La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Maison_du_chat-qui-pelote [At the Sign of the Cat and Racket] (1830), translated by Clara Bell
Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17
General
Quantes femmes est il qui usent leur vie au lien de mariage par la durte de leurs maris en plus grant penitence que se elles feussent esclaves entre les sarazins.
Part II, ch. 13, pp. 118-19.
Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (c. 1405)
Source: The Book of the City of Ladies
Book II, 1109a.27.
Variant translation: Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
As quoted in The Child: At Home and School (1944) by Edith M. Leonard, Lillian E. Miles, and Catherine S. Van der Kar, p. 203
Nicomachean Ethics
“I'm not close to people, I am close to myself. I spend a lot of time inside.”
Source: Black Coffee Blues
“I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Context: I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.
Chapter 11, paragraph 59 http://www.uri.edu/library/inscriptions/almamater.html
Source: George Carlin Reads to You: An Audio Collection Including Recent Grammy Winners Braindroppings and Napalm & Silly Putty
On Functional Finance: (1943, pg.354) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174849
Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)
Commenting on Tanzania's withdrawal from COMESA. 2000-09-04 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/909933.stm
2000
Source: Fiction, Zendegi (2010), Ch. 1
The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)
In: Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi: January 1, 1982-October 30, 1984 http://books.google.com/books?id=ndA3AQAAIAAJ, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1986, p. 495.
Her last speech delivered in Orissa on 30 October 1984 before she was assassinated.
On "Bozo", in Ch. 30
Down and out in Paris and London (1933)
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 173.
1. America's Search for a Public Philosophy
Public Philosophy (2005)
Attributed to Cosimo de' Medici by Salviati; as cited in Taylor, F.H. (1948). The taste of angels, a history of art collecting from Rameses to Napoleon. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 65–66.
Sahih Muslim, Book 001, Number 0142
Sunni Hadith
Context: It is narrated on the authority of 'Abdullah b. Umar that the Messenger of Allah observed: O womenfolk, you should give charity and ask much forgiveness for I saw you in bulk amongst the dwellers of Hell. A wise lady among them said: Why is it, Messenger of Allah, that our folk is in bulk in Hell? Upon this the Holy Prophet observed: You curse too much and are ungrateful to your spouses. I have seen none lacking in common sense and failing in religion but (at the same time) robbing the wisdom of the wise, besides you. Upon this the woman remarked: What is wrong with our common sense and with religion? He (the Holy Prophet) observed: Your lack of common sense (can be well judged from the fact) that the evidence of two women is equal to one man, that is a proof of the lack of common sense, and you spend some nights (and days) in which you do not offer prayer and in the month of Ramadan (during the days) you do not observe fast, that is a failing in religion. This hadith has been narrated on the authority of Abu Tahir with this chain of transmitters.
Gramophone
Context: I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity.
"Beggars in London", in Le Progrès Civique (12 January 1929), translated into English by Janet Percival and Ian Willison
Context: Spending the night out of doors has nothing attractive about it in London, especially for a poor, ragged, undernourished wretch. Moreover sleeping in the open is only allowed in one thoroughfare in London. If the policeman on his beat finds you asleep, it is his duty to wake you up. That is because it has been found that a sleeping man succumbs to the cold more easily than a man who is awake, and England could not let one of her sons die in the street. So you are at liberty to spend the night in the street, providing it is a sleepless night. But there is one road where the homeless are allowed to sleep. Strangely, it is the Thames Embankment, not far from the Houses of Parliament. We advise all those visitors to England who would like to see the reverse side of our apparent prosperity to go and look at those who habitually sleep on the Embankment, with their filthy tattered clothes, their bodies wasted by disease, a living reprimand to the Parliament in whose shadow they lie.
The National Times, Australia, (March 1, 1977)
Source: “Bookshop Memories” in Fortnightly (November 1936)
A comment he made in persuading John Sculley to become Apple's CEO, as quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple: A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (1987) by John Sculley and John A. Byrne
1980s
Educational Thinkers http://books.google.com/books?id=O6Fp2zaQVVMC&pg=PA151&dq=Muhammad+Iqbal+Brahmin&hl=en&ei=hJQaTKPPKMewcfnqzIEK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Muhammad%20Iqbal%20Brahmin&f=false
Source: Alice in Zombieland
“You spend your life getting walked on, you learn to recognize the tread.”
Variant: Raven: So Alexander, now we know what we do all day. What do you do?
Alexander: I spend it thinking about you.
Source: Love Bites
1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?
Sec. 232
Variant: We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way — not at all or in an interesting manner.
Source: The Gay Science (1882)
“Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.”
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Source: " The Writing Life http://www.tikkun.org/mediagallery/download.php?mid=20090505114218282" (link is to PDF download), Tikkun magazine, Volume 3, Number 6, 1988
Source: Moab Is My Washpot
“The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.”
Source: Circle of Flight
“There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
Where the Blue Begins (1922)
Variant: Then she kissed him. Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 11
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
Variant: Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
Source: Fire from Within
“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
Source: Five Finger Exercise
Source: Peaches for Monsieur le Curé
Source: The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Variant: If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 43
Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 1982
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)
“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
