Quotes about use
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“They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

Death, Hell, Understanding

“Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.”

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

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Heart

“And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Night

“A naked lunch is natural to us
We eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Nature, Reality, Madness

“Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Mandarins

Source: The Mandarins

Effort

“Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

Lie, Grass, Time

“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Way, Literature

“Live in the Moment", "Empty Your Mind of the Trash"
Wisdom is the Use of Knowledge”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Wisdom, Knowledge

“In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

“It is much easier to put existing resources to better use, than to develop resources where they do not exist.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“We are ever striving after what is forbidden, and coveting what is denied us.”
Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata.

Ovid book Amores

Variant translation: We hunt for things unlawful with swift feet, / As if forbidden joys were only sweet.
Book III; iv, 17
Amores (Love Affairs)

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

Michel Foucault book The Archaeology of Knowledge

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon)

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby (1925), ch. 9

Cute, Friendship, Dead, Learning

“Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed…
This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Death

“The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace

Communication

“I waited for my thighs and butt to uncramp. Of course, they didn't know the loosening rule. They were screaming things like *Are you crazy? Do you know we're thirty-five years old? Sit down and feed us a Twinkie!”

P. C. Cast book Divine By Mistake

Source: Divine By Mistake

Waiting

“The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Life

“THERE'S NO JUSTICE, said Mort. JUST US.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

Justice

“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Fools

“Life cheats us with shadows.
We ask it for pleasure.
It gives it to us with bitterness
and disappointment in its train.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life, Pleasure, Disappointment, Cheating

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

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

Feeling, Happiness

“Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe”

William Shakespeare Richard III

Source: Richard III

Strong

“When we were kids we always used to say, ‘Okay, whoever dies first, get a message through.’
When John died, I thought, ‘Well, maybe we’ll get a message,’ because I know he knew the deal. I haven’t had a message from John.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

“I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

Effort

“In truth, how much time do any of us really have?”

Lurlene McDaniel (1944) American writer

Source: Telling Christina Goodbye

Truth, Time

“Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Understanding, Perfection

“You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew… God doesn't make the world this way. We do.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

God, Fate, World, Dogs

“I testify that He is utterly incomparable in what He is, what He knows, what He has accomplished and what He has experienced. Yet, movingly, He calls us His Friends”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

“A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Learning

“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book Voices of the Night

St. 7.
A Psalm of Life (1839)
Source: Voices of the Night

Men, Time

“Do you think there’s anything to eat in this forest?”
“Yes,” said the wizard bitterly, “us.”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

Thinking

“I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.”

Marjane Satrapi (1969) Artist

Source: The Complete Persepolis

Women, God, Problem

“There is nothing impossible with God. All the impossibility is with us when we measure God by the limitations of our unbelief.”

Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) British evangelist

Source: Ever Increasing Faith

God

“And make death proud to take us.”

William Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra

Source: Antony and Cleopatra

Death

“Knowledge is a great gift, and the thirst to seek it even greater. Use what you know… Head and heart… You are not made to give greater weight to one than the other.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Valley of Silence

Knowledge, Heart

“What makes us the most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not normal.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Life

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Love, Death, Books, Suicide

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy

Source: The Problems of Philosophy

Life, Nature

“Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.”

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

Law, Hope, Idea

“Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a country of small peasant economy, and it is up to us to realize this quite clearly.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

New External and Internal Position and the Problems of the Party (1920); as quoted in The Soviet Power : The Socialist Sixth Of The World (1940) by Hewlett Johnson.
1920s

Communication, Country

“Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Stupidity, Hurt

“We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Music, Understanding, Thinking

“We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”

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

Future

“I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Way, Cooking, Clothes

“It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

Douglas Adams book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)
Context: The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.

“You have little time left, and none of it for crap. A fine state. I would say that the best of us always comes out when we are against the wall, when we feel the sword dangling overhead. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Source: Tales of Power

Way, Feeling, Time, Personality

“Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Women, Reading

“If God sends us on strong paths, we are provided strong shoes.”

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

God, Shoe, Strong

“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.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

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."

People, Music, Singing, Heart

“I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman's relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance… When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature, of which we are inescapably a part.”

Henry Beston book Northern Farm

Source: Northern Farm

Nature, Parting

“Do you see that out there? The strange, unfamiliar light? It's called the sun. Let's go get us a little.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: The Hollow

Light, Sun

“I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death…. is the true measure of the Divine within us.”

Alan Brennert (1954) American writer

Source: Moloka'i

Death, Pain

“Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Freedom

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Change

“To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Source: Cutting for Stone

Confidence, Self-confidence

“I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

For Parents, Thinking, Parent

“Reading activates and exercises the mind.
Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts.
Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Exercises, Imagination, Reading

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”

Mark Twain book Tom Sawyer Abroad

Source: Tom Sawyer Abroad

Home, Cats, Knowledge, Personality

“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.”

William Shakespeare Richard III

Source: Richard III

Law, Hell, Strong

“No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) Norwegian writer

Source: The Wreath

Love, Fear

“Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise Physician prescribes because we need them; and he proportions the frequency and weight of them to what the case requires. Let us trust his skill and thank him for his prescription.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

“Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity

Nature, Selfishness

“There is no man on the face of the earth who can satisfy the deepest longings of a woman's heart--God made us in such a way that we can never be truly satisfied with anything or anyone less than Himself”

Nancy Leigh DeMoss (1958) American radio host

God, Way, Heart

“Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Cats, Thinking

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Two, Ch. 8
Source: On the Road (1957)

Goodbye, People, World, Feeling

“The truth of God's love is not that He allows bad things to happen, it's his promise that he will be there with us--when they do.”

Janette Oke (1935) Canadian writer

Source: Love Comes Softly

Love, God, Truth

“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Source: State of Exception

Children, Law

“Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“The world is full of people who are determined to be somebody or to give trouble. They want to get ahead, to stand out. Such ambition has no use for a gung fu man, who rejects all forms of self-assertiveness and competition”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

People, World

“I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be. It's impossible not
to remember wild an want it back.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Personality

“Sensation tell us a thing is.
Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Feeling, Thinking

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym‎ [O Demônio e a srta Prym] (2000), p. x; this has also been misquoted as "A moment is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny."
Context: When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

Courageous, Business, Life, Courage

“Without enemies around us, we grow lazy. An enemy at our heels sharpens our wits, keeping us focused and alert. It is sometimes better, then, to use enemies as enemies rather than transforming them into friends or allies.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

“Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Source: Principle-Centered Leadership (1992), Ch. 11
Context: Unless we exercise our power to choose wisely, our actions will be determined by conditions. Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

Freedom