Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Quotes about thing
page 19
“There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”
Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 1.
Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Context: You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
Jack Kerouac
(1922–1969) American writer
This is not a quote by Kerouac. It's a quote by CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt who used to present a TV news segment called 'On the Road' (which is probably how the confusion arose). This particular statement by Kuralt was made in May 1996 to students of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19960527&id=yf8yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yQcGAAAAIBAJ&pg=3106,5606314
Misattributed
“A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.”
Banksy
pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter
Source: Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall (2001)
Saul Bellow
(1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer
Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
General sources
“There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.”
Bette Davis
(1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States
Henry Beston
(1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Source: Beyond Good and Evil
“I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.”
Sylvia Plath
(1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
“That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.”
Source: If You Could See Me Now
Henry Beston
(1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
“The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.”
Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Source: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
(1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator
Quotes from Bill Maher show website, quotes of the show, Google searches showing poor results before February 4th (pages which were updated since their original, pre-feb. 4th posting date).
Why would-be engineers end up as English majors, May 21, 2011 http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/index.html,
Skeptic Blog: "Reality Check", April 20, 2011 http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/04/20/reality-check/,
Google Search for quote prior to Feb. 4th, only results are from pages which were updated after the "posted" date https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+good+thing+about+science+is+that+it%E2%80%99s+true+whether+or+not+you+believe+in+it.%22&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&sa=X&ei=m8AwU9KKNc_8oASnhYCoAg&ved=0CBoQpwUoBjgU&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2000%2Ccd_max%3A2%2F3%2F2011&tbm=,
2010s
Blaise Pascal
(1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
“How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.”
Mark Twain
(1835–1910) American author and humorist
Source: The Diaries of Adam and Eve
“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..”
Pablo Casals
(1876–1973) Catalan cellist and conductor
“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”
Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941) English writer
Source: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915-1919
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.”
Source: Wyrd Sisters
Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”
Mark Twain
(1835–1910) American author and humorist
Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings
Source: Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), p. 381
"Bishop Blougram’s Apology", line 395; cited by Graham Greene as the epigraph he would choose for his novels.
Men and Women (1855)
Eleanor Roosevelt
(1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”
Alan Dean Foster
(1946) American fiction writer
“I have seen so many extraordinary things, nothing seems extraordinary any more”
Lewis Carroll
(1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer
“Tantrums are seldom about the thing they appear to be about.”
Source: Howl's Moving Castle
“In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you”
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”
Mark Twain
(1835–1910) American author and humorist
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”
Source: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Source: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
“Love can make you do things that you never thought possible.”
Phil Collins
(1951) English musician, songwriter and actor
“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”
W.B. Yeats
(1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright
“Sometimes our best action result in things that are most regrettable.”
Diana Gabaldon
book
Outlander
Source: Outlander
Isabelle and Jace, pg. 337
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)
“The most interesting thing about artists is how they live”
Marcel Duchamp
(1887–1968) French painter and sculptor
Source: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
“Nobody can be bad at everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.”
Jim Butcher
book
Mean Streets
Source: Mean Streets
“Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.”
Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941) English writer
Source: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
Source: Lady Windermere's Fan
Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
As quoted in The Reader's Digest, Vol. 37 (1940), p. 90; no specific source given.
Disputed
Variant: In all affairs – love, religion, politics, or business – it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
“Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
Isaac Newton
(1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics
Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120, as quoted in Socinianism And Arminianism : Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, And Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2005) by Martin Mulsow, Jan Rohls, p. 273.
As quoted in God in the Equation : How Einstein Transformed Religion (2002) by Corey S. Powell, p. 29
Variant: Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Steven Weinberg
(1933) American theoretical physicist
Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
This comment is modified in a later article derived from these talks:
:Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
:* "A Designer Universe?" at PhysLink.com http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm
“What do you think about me is not my business the important thing is what I think about myself…”
Robert T. Kiyosaki
(1947) American finance author , investor
Source: Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom
Source: A Room of One's Own
“For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.”
Book II, 1103a.33: Cited in: Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:9
Nicomachean Ethics
Source: The Nicomachean Ethics
Pt. 1, ch. 10
Atticus Finch & Maudie Atkinson
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
“Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
“Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.”
Yukio Mishima
(1925–1970) Japanese author
“A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.”
Daniel Wallace
(1959) American author
Source: The Kings and Queens of Roam
“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed…”
Julian Barnes
(1946) English writer
Source: Levels of Life
“Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.”
Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
"Don't Be Too Certain!"
1940s, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm (1947)
Source: Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?
“There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.”
Jean Cocteau
(1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.”
Stephen King
book
Duma Key
Source: Duma Key
“I want you to believe… to believe in things that you cannot.”
Bram Stoker
book
Dracula
Source: Dracula
Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Pt. I, st. 7.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Source: The Ballad Of Reading Gaol
Klaus Kinski
(1926–1991) German actor
Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 72-73
Context: At a performance everything works out on its own. I've solved the mystery: You have to submit silently. Open up, let go. Let anything penetrate you, even the most painful things. Endure. Bear up. That's the magic key! The text comes by itself, and its meaning shakes the soul. Everything else is taken care of by the life one has to live without sparing oneself. You mustn't let scar tissue form on your wounds; you have to keep ripping them open in order to turn your insides into a marvelous instrument that is capable of anything. All this has its price. I become so sensitive that I can't live under normal conditions. That's why the hours between performances are worst.
Pythagoras
(-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
As quoted in The Biblical Museum: A Collection of Notes Explanatory, Homiletic, and Illustrative on the Holy Scriptures, Especially Designed for the Use of Ministers, Bible-students, and Sunday-school Teachers (1873) http://books.google.com/books?id=aJ8CAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA331&dq=%22only+necessary+to+make+war+with+five+things%22&ei=8jG1SZKiIIGklQTL0KHHDg by James Comper Gray, Vol. V
Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 7: Time
Source: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol