Quotes about still
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“Destiny is smiling at the people who are going to become successful, but are still struggling in the present moment.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Do good deeds while you are still alive. Otherwise, there will be no VIP place for you in heaven.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Wealth can still bring you much closer to your Creator. Since you will have plenty of time to worship and relax, instead of sweating just to create daily cash flow.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Time, Wealth

“Verona is full of pictures which have never been painted. Every step excites emotion and gives rise to unaffected reflection. In the course of a short stroll, you may pass by a Roman amphitheatre, still used, then the castle of some petty prince of the Middle Ages, and while you are contrasting the sublime elevation of antiquity with the heterogeneous palace of a Scaliger your eyes light on a gate of Oriental appearance and fantastic ornament... The illusion is perfect, the eye rests with pain on the passing citizens in their modern costumes; you look for black velvets and gold chains, white feathers and red stockings.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 107

Pain, Age, Light, Appearance

“They take your heart and steal your life
And it's as though you feel you've died
‘Cause you've been killed inside
But yet you're still alive
Which means you will survive”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Beautiful Pain"
2010s, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

Life, Feeling, Heart

“I can't change the way I am… but if I offended you, good, 'cause I still don't give a fuck!”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Still Don't Give A Fuck"
1990s, The Slim Shady LP (1999)

Way, Change

“And I still won't grow up, I'm a grown-ass kid
Swear I should be locked up for stupid shit that I did
But I'm a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph
Make music that's fire, spit my soul through the wire.”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Through the Wire
Lyrics, The College Dropout (2004)

Stupidity, Music, Soul

“To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Fate, Evil, Time

“I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Peace, Feeling

“If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet
highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you're back in time.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Time

“Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more,—Macbeth shall sleep no more!”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

Sleep, Housing

“If you can be still enough and common enough, then it's really easy to be invisible.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

“Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Variant: One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Star, Birth, Dance

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Life

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“Being human means having doubts and yet still continuing on your path.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”

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

Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 16: Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete, p. 158
Source: 1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)

Stupidity, Democracy, Nature, Thinking

“And once again I believe that nothing that's important really becomes lost. We just delude ourselves, thinking that we own the things, the moments and the others. Still with me are all the dead persons who I loved, all the friends who turned away, all the happy days that faded. I lost nothing but the illusion that everything could be mine forever.”

Miguel Sousa Tavares (1952) Portuguese writer

Love, Happiness, Thinking, Personality

“You've got to have something to eat, and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.”

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) American jazz singer and songwriter

Love, Life

“I am still of [the] opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.”

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

Sex, Mood, Dead

“If you trust in yourself… and believe in your dreams… and follow your star… you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Variant: Now... if you trust in yourself... and believe in your dreams... and follow your star... you'll still get beaten by people who spenttime working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.
Source: The Wee Free Men

People, Dreams, Star, Learning

“Despite all my rage
I am still just a rat in the cage.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

Rage

“The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine - love returned.”

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

Love, Time

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

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

"Earth, Fire and Water" from The Celtic Twilight (1893)
Source: The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

Life, Water

“I don't want to die now!" he yelled. "I've still got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The blood of Abraham,1 God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

God, Peace, Cry

“We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Change, Time

“no matter what bullshit you heard, hes still mine! he'll always be mine”

P. C. Cast book Marked

Source: Marked

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.”

William Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost

Source: Love's Labour's Lost

Women, Books, World, Art

“I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart. Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

John Tyree, Prologue, p. 4
Source: 2000s, Dear John (2006)

Love, Way, Parting

“There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Freedom (1908)
Source: Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes

Age, Solitude, Freedom, Wine

“God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”

Friedrich Nietzsche God is dead

Gott ist tot! aber so wie die Art der Menschen ist, wird es vielleicht noch Jahrtausende lang Höhlen geben, in denen man seinen Schatten zeigt.
Und wir — Wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen.
Sec. 108
Quotes about quotes: see also God is dead.
The Gay Science (1882)
Source: The Portable Nietzsche

Men, God, Way, Dead

“Happy endings are still endings.”

Gregory Maguire book Son of a Witch

Source: Son of a Witch

Happiness

“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.”

Stephen King book Pet Sematary

Source: Pet Sematary (1983)
Context: It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls - as little as one may like to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

Question

“I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.”

Nick Cave book The Death of Bunny Munro

Source: The Death of Bunny Munro

World

“Love has nothing to do with someone else. It is all about you. It is a way of being. It essentially means you have brought sweetness into your emotion. If a loved one travels to another country, would you still be able to love them? You would. If a loved one passed away, would you still be able to love them? You would. Even if a loved one is not physically with you anymore, you are still capable of being loving. So, what is love then? It is just your own quality. You are only using the other person as a key to open up what is already within you.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Love, Way, Travel, Personality

“For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Cats, Dead

“Books are still the main yardstick by which I measure true wealth.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Books, Wealth

“If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

101 Best Ways to Get Ahead: Solid Gold Advice from 101 of the World's Most Successful People (2004) by Michael E. Angier and Sarah Pond, p. 30
1990s

“I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world is still asleep.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

This derives from a comment about him written by Sigmund Freud, in Leonardo Da Vinci (1916): He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep.
Misattributed
Source: Leonardo's Notebooks

World

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Bertrand Russell book A History of Western Philosophy

Source: A History of Western Philosophy

Age, Study

“When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Training

“Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.”

Paul Brunton (1898–1981) British philosopher

Source: The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

Law, Universe, Heart, Patience

“But let me tell you this: sometimes at night, when I look up at the stars, an see the whole sky jus laid out there, don't you think I ain't rememberin it all. I still got dreams like anybody else, an ever so often, I am thinkin about how things might of been. An then, all of a sudden, I'm forty, fifty, sixty years ole, you know?
Well, so what? I may be a idiot, but most of the time, anyway, I tried to do the right thing-- an dreams is jus dreams, ain't they? So whatever else has happened, I am figgerin this: I can always look back an say, at least I ain't led no hum-drum life.
You know what I mean?”

Winston Groom Forrest Gump

Source: Forrest Gump

Life, Dreams, Star, Thinking

“Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.”

William Shakespeare Henry IV, Part 2

Source: Henry IV, Part 2

Jealousy

“109. "Still never had any friends because I hate everyone for they were so phony.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Hate

“We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Preface to the first edition
Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

Truth, Selfishness

“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. / What matter where, if I be still the same…”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

i.254-255
Paradise Lost (1667)
Variant: The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
Source: Paradise Lost: Books 1-2

Hell

“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.”

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) French writer of Swiss origin

Love, World, Soul, Despair

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Thinking, For women

“It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

Change

“In the beginning there was nothing. God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

God, Light

“The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.”

Harlan Coben (1962) Author

Truth

“You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.”

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) Italian author and poet

Way, Reading, Perseverance, Night

“Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Life, Wisdom, People

“As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.”

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

Star, Knowledge

“… Any fool can love somebody who's perfect, somebody who does everything right. But that doesn't stretch your soul. Your soul only gets stretched when you can still love somebody after they've hurt you.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Hot Shot

Love, Fools, Soul, Hurt

“Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

The Unity of India : Collected Writings, 1937-1940 (1942), p. 280
Context: Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

Evil, Past

“If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.”

Gary Paulsen book The Winter Room

Source: The Winter Room

Books, Light

“Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

Idea

“No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Source: Beware of Pity (1939)

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book Interpreter of Maladies

Source: Interpreter of Maladies

Travel, Imagination, Appearance, Time

“I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Three Men in a Boat

Source: Three Men in a Boat

Nature, Help

“I can tell you that you will have your hearts broken more by the people you love than by the people you hate. But you must still dare to love. The rewards are worth far more than the risks.”

Margaret Peterson Haddix book Into the Gauntlet

Source: Into the Gauntlet

Love, Hate, People, Heart

“To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand; therefore, if tou art mov'd, thou runst away. (To be angry is to move, to be brave is to stand still. Therefore, if you're angry, you'll run away.)”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Art

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Music, Way

“If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Variant: .. the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and [that] thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Memory, Past, Heart

“Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.”

Harlan Coben Hold Tight

Source: Hold Tight