“If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.”
“Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”
Source: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657 note: 1940s, Male and Female (1949)
Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You
Final words, January 22, 2010 TV Guide news http://www.tvguide.com/News/Conans-Words-Tonight-1014105.aspx
The Tonight Show
Context: Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can't say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, the Late Night show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we're going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible. Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I've had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we'll find a way to make it fun. And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the Internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational. To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism - it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now. Here to close out our show, are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell…
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching.”
“The end justifies the means. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get the right result.”
Source: Splitter
“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”
Source: The Stand
"The Art of Living", interview with journalist Gordon Young first published in 1960
Variant: [T]here are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Variant translation: The only way to truly know a person is to argue with them. For when they argue in full swing, then they reveal their true character.
28 September 1942
Variant: I've learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl (1942 - 1944)
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns
Variant: The only thing that stands between you and your well-being is a simple fact: you have allowed your thoughts and emotions to take instruction from the outside rather than the inside. On
Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy
“It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.”
Source: Marjorie's Three Gifts
Source: The Wise Man's Fear (2011)
Context: We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
“It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.”
“If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.”
“Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?”
Source: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
“It's much easier not to know things sometimes.”
Variant: It’s much easier not to know things sometimes.
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Source: On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
Self-Pity (1929)
Source: The Complete Poems
Two Precepts of Charity (1273)
Sermons on the Ten Commandments (Collationes in decem praeceptes, c. 1273), Prologue (opening sentence)
Variant translation: Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.
Original: (la) Tria sunt homini necessaria ad salutem: scilicit scientia credendorum, scientia desiderandorum, et scientia operandorum.
Source: A Living Nightmare
“The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.”
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”
Source: Final message to the church (n. d.)
Variant: When each day is the same as the nest it's because people fail to reconize the good things that happen in thier lives everyday the sunrises
Source: The Alchemist
“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
Source: The Collected Poems
Picasso quoted in 'TIME'; quoted in: The Atlantic, Vol. 214 (1964), p. 97.
Picasso commented on his ambiguous style, or use of multiple styles.
1960s
“Sad thing is, you can still love someone and be wrong for them.”
“Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.”
Source: The Happy Prince and Other Tales
“Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.”
Lord Goring, Act II
Source: An Ideal Husband (1895)
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
Context: Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
"In Front of Your Nose" http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose, Tribune (22 March 1946)
Context: The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
IV, 43
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV
“Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.”
Ziglar has often used this saying, but it originates with Phillips Brooks, as quoted in Primary Education (1916) by Elizabeth Peabody.
Misattributed
“I guess that's part of growing up, too--saying goodbye to the things you used to love.”
Source: Always and Forever, Lara Jean
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 14
Context: One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. … All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there's one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.
"Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)
“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
Dick the Butcher, Act IV, scene ii.
Henry VI, Part 2 (1592)
Source: King Henry VI, Part 2
Variant: If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
I.580
Human, All Too Human (1878)
“We are too young to realize that certain things are impossible… So we will do them anyway.”
“Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.”
As quoted by John M. Kost http://www.mackinac.org/bio.aspx?ID=104 (25 July 1995) in S. 946, the Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1995: hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the District of Columbia of the Committee on Governmental Affairs (1996).
This appears to derive from a 1910 advertisement by writer Alfred Henry Lewis for a forthcoming series of biographical articles about Roosevelt: "All activity, Mr. Roosevelt has often shown that it is better to do the wrong thing than do nothing at all. In politics this last is peculiarly true. The best thing is to do the right thing; the next best is to do the wrong thing; the worst thing of all things is to stand perfectly still". (e.g. in La Follette's Magazine https://books.google.com/books?id=RV4CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA183&dq=%22best+thing%22+%22right+thing%22+%22worst+thing%22+nothing&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNksu-nZrMAhVDy2MKHSl1Df8Q6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=%22the%20best%20thing%20is%20to%20do%20the%20right%20thing%22&f=false (28 May 1910)
Disputed
