Quotes about well
page 4

“To begin well is not a trifling thing, but yet not far from a trifling thing.”
Diogenes Laertius

“First, do it. Second, do it well. Third, do it well and fast — that means you're a professional.”
http://www.americanparkour.com/content/view/680/243/


“I've got the economy set up well for him. No facts, no consequences, they can just have a cartoon.”
In response to Donald Trump's election victory https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/us/politics/obama-reaction-trump-election-benjamin-rhodes.html. (November 2016)
2016

Source: "As I Please," Tribune (3 March 1944)
http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/

Source: Pop Chronicles, Show 7 – The All American Boy: Enter Elvis and the rock-a-billies. Part 1 http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19754/m1/; C. Robert Jennings, " Elvis Lives! http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/doc/155809300.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&type=historic&date=Feb+18%2C+1968&author=Jennings%2C+C+Robert&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+%281923-Current+File%29&edition=&startpage=M28&desc=ELVIS+LIVES%21", 1968-Feb-18, L.A. Times Magazine, p. M28.

Source: Diary entry while in Aix (c. 16 August 1824), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), pp. 52-53

Source: Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band (2014), Ethik, § 11 ISBN 978-1494963262

Source: In an interview with Paolo Giordano, 100 anni di futuro, Wired, n. 1, marzo 2009.
Source: Cited by Elisabetta Intini, Addio alla signora della scienza, le sue frasi più belle http://www.focus.it/scienza/addio-alla-signora-della-scienza-le-sue-frasi-piu-belle, Focus.it, 31 dicembre 2012.
Source: Cited in Addio Rita Levi Montalcini, le frasi più belle di un genio gentile http://www.vanityfair.it/news/italia/12/12/30/rita-levi-montalcini-morta-frasi, VanityFair.it, 30 dicembre 2012.

1993 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. As quoted in: Olivia Waxman (August 2, 2018): Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wishes This Case Had Legalized Abortion Instead of Roe v. Wade. In: Time Magazine. Archived https://web.archive.org/web/20220527151841/https://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/ from [hhttps://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/ the original] on May 27, 2022. As quoted in: Louise Melling (Deputy Legal Director and Director of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Center for Liberty, ACLU) (September 23, 2020): For Justice Ginsburg, Abortion Was About Equality. In: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Archived https://web.archive.org/web/20220527144342/https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/for-justice-ginsburg-abortion-was-about-equality from the original https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/for-justice-ginsburg-abortion-was-about-equality on May 27, 2022.
1990s

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

“I think we have different value systems." —Arthur
"Well mine's better." —Ford”
Source: Mostly Harmless

“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.”
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2"<!-- 255 -->
Source: The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Speech before the Colorado Live Stock Association, Denver, Colorado (August 29, 1910); in The New Nationalism (1910), p. 52; also inscribed on Cox Corridor II, a first floor House corridor, U.S. Capitol.
1910s

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.”
Source: Tender Is the Night

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.

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”

“Well, when one's lost, I suppose it's good advice to stay where you are until someone finds you.”

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 15: Hetch Hetchy Valley
1910s
Variant: Everybody needs beauty... places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.

Source: Pierre or the Ambiguities

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
Source: Women and Economics (1898), Ch. 8.
Source: Second Chance

Source: Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

Source: The Sorrows of Satan or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire

“Well, label me very impressed and ship me to Carthak!”
Source: First Test

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
Variant: To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.
Source: Discours de réception, Séance De L'académie Française (introductory speech at a session of the French Academy), 24th December 1896, on Ferdinand de Lesseps' work on the Suez Canal.
Context: To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: You need a great many qualities to make a successful man on a nine or an eleven; and just so you need a great many different qualities to make a good citizen. In the first place, of course it is al most tautological to say that to make a good citizen the prime need is to be decent, clean in thought, clean in mind, clean in action; to have an ideal and not to keep that ideal purely for the study to have an ideal which you will in good faith strive to live up to when you are out in life. If you have an ideal only good while you sit at home, an ideal that nobody can live up to in outside life, then I advise you strongly to take that ideal, examine it closely, and then cast it away. It is not a good one. The ideal that it is impossible for a man to strive after in practical life is not the type of ideal that you wish to hold up and follow. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground. Be truthful; a lie implies fear, vanity or malevolence; and be frank; furtiveness and insincerity are faults incompatible with true manliness. Be honest, and remember that honesty counts for nothing unless back of it lie courage and efficiency. If in this country we ever have to face a state of things in which on one side stand the men of high ideals who are honest, good, well-meaning, pleasant people, utterly unable to put those ideals into shape in the rough field of practical life, while on the other side are grouped the strong, powerful, efficient men with no ideals: then the end of the Republic will be near. The salvation of the Republic depends the salvation of our whole social system depends upon the production year by year of a sufficient number of citizens who possess high ideals combined with the practical power to realize them in actual life.

“I do love nothing in the world so well as you- is not that strange?”
Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

Context: (Answering "What made you step up to making your own record?") I felt like I may not get opportunities to do this ever again, so it’s about time—it’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now. And you may as well do it now. I mean, I say that confidently as if I’m about to go bungee jumping or something—I’m not. I’m not a crazed risk taker. But I do think that, generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

“Well, everybody does it that way, Huck."
"Tom, I am not everybody.”
Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth

“Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain”, p. 133.
This is a paraphrase of Thoreau: see explanation by the Walden Woods project http://www.walden.org/Library/Quotations/The_Henry_D._Thoreau_Mis-Quotation_Page).
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"

“Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.”

As quoted in The Christian Leader, Vol. 37, Issue 7 (17 February 1934)

Source: Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass

“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”
Comment to James Longstreet, on seeing a Union charge repelled in the Battle of Fredericksburg (13 December 1862)
1860s

“Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.”

Variant: Nothing will surprise us more than when we get to heaven and see the Father and realize how well we know Him and how familiar His face is to us.

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”
Source: Walden: Or, Life in the Woods