Eckhart Tolle book A New Earth
A New Earth (2005)
Variant: All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.
Quotes about thing page 12
“It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.”
Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889), p. 5
Source: Lady Windermere's Fan
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
“If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
Variant: If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e
John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic
Source: My Father's Tears and Other Stories
“The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”
William Golding book Lord of the Flies
Source: Lord of the Flies
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
“A boy admiring a pretty girl. A rare thing to be certain. But love—true love—is something else.”
Alex Flinn (1966) American children's writer
Source: A Kiss in Time
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
“Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.”
John Locke (1632–1704) English philosopher and physician
Source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 2
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
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
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
As quoted by Thomas A. Bruno in Take your dreams and Run (South Plainfield: Bridge, 1984), p. 2-3. Source: Dr. Preston Williams (2002): By the Way - A Snapshot Diagnosis of the Inner-City Dilemma, p. 38-39. Xulun Press, Fairfax, Virginia http://books.google.de/books?id=Xn9jxqatFecC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=woodrow+wilson+We+Grow+Great+By+Dreams%27&source=bl&ots=TtioQ-yO0-&sig=qHWPj4-8g3hSjcV-qJTbzNg6nuI&hl=de&sa=X&ei=1QZ0U4DBOaf80QWSqYDQAw&ved=0CHYQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=woodrow%20wilson%20We%20Grow%20Great%20By%20Dreams'&f=false <br class="br">1880s
“All good things are wild and free.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
“If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.”
"Fra Lippo Lippi", line 217.
Men and Women (1855)
Source: The Poems of Robert Browning
“Few things are hidden from a quiet child with good eyesight.”
Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author
George Eliot book Adam Bede
Source: Adam Bede (1859)
Context: These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
“Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.”
Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia
Trotzky's Diary in Exile — 1935 (1958)
Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird
Variant: You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
Elliott Erwitt (1928) American photographer
“How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet
Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night
Page 63 (Act 2, Scene 1)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Context: But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.
David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor
Source: Lynch on Lynch
Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
Source: Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest PHilosophers (1926), reprinted in Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, ISBN 0-671-73916-6], Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VI: Psychology and the Nature of Art: "Artistic creation, says Aristotle, springs from the formative impulse and the craving for emotional expression. Essentially the form of art is an imitation of reality; it holds the mirror up to nature. There is in man a pleasure in imitation, apparently missing in lower animals. Yet the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is their reality.
“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself”
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Context: But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
Source: Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
“Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Variant: The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher
Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.”
Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time
Source: Thief of Time
Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer
Variant: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Letter to Isham Reavis (5 November 1855)
1850s
Context: If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anyone or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.... Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
“As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.”
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer
Source: Time Cat
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer
Source: The Walk
“As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Variant: I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man's got to fake just to stay alive.”
Osamu Dazai book The Setting Sun
Source: The Setting Sun
“There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.”
Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ch 43
Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
“Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.”
Terry Pratchett book A Hat Full of Sky
Source: A Hat Full of Sky
“One day all of us will die but - and this is the important thing - we are not dead yet.”
Terry Pratchett book I Shall Wear Midnight
Source: I Shall Wear Midnight
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1962, Rice University speech
“Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Jean De La Fontaine book Parole de Socrate
"Parole de Socrate", as quoted in The Wordsworth Book of Humorous Quotations (1998), edited by C. Robertson
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
Letter to S. Stanwood Menken, chairman, committee on Congress of Constructive Patriotism (January 10, 1917). Roosevelt’s sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, read the letter to a national meeting, January 26, 1917. Reported in Proceedings of the Congress of Constructive Patriotism, Washington, D.C., January 25–27, 1917 (1917), p. 172
1910s
Context: Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.