Amounted To Quotes

#1. What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.

David Eugene Smith

#2. To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.

Albert Camus

#3. Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing.

D.H. Lawrence

#4. Queen Victoria was a woman of peerless common sense; her common sense, which is a rare gift at any time, amounted to genius. She had been brought up by her mother with the utmost simplicity, and she retained it to the end, and conducted her public and private life alike by that infallible guide.

E.F. Benson

#5. Devoid of any real liberty or justice, America and her children had fallen prey to what amounted to little more than a thinly veiled dictatorship. She now represented not the proud citadel of freedom, but the failed experiment of democracy.

Eric J. Martindale

#6. There are more people at Obama's table offering ideas than there were five years ago, but when it came to facing up to the Republicans' threat to force a double-dip recession if they didn't get their millionaires' tax cut, they still amounted to nothing. And therein lies our fundamental problem.

Eric Alterman

#7. I basically went into business for myself. But it never amounted to anything. I learned a lot about editing and dubbing by watching all the professionals do it, but I never got a job out of my imposition.

Steven Spielberg

#8. He was a dork, but at least he was totally comfortable in social situations, like Dad. Comfortable, or oblivious, which amounted to the same thing.

Jennifer Echols

#9. In the twelve months immediately preceding the outbreak; of war, the quantity of spirits, both domestic and imported released for sale in Canada, amounted to over three and a half million proof gallons.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

#10. Perhaps if you'd been willing to experience love and had had a few years of happiness, you might have amounted to something. As it is, your life is rather pathetic. What a waste.

Colleen Houck

#11. Wherever life and knowledge seemed to contradict each other, there was never any serious struggle: in such cases, denial and doubt amounted to madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#12. At Clochemerle, the greater number of the men put up with their wives, and the great majority of the women with their husbands. If this hardly amounted to adoration, in the majority of homes at any rate the men and women found each other very nearly endurable.

Gabriel Chevallier

#13. What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.

H.G.Wells

#14. Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

Megan Abbott

#15. Women giving birth seemed very often to lose any sense of fear or misgiving ... exhibiting an absorption that amounted to indifference-simply because they had no attention to spare for anything beyond the universe bounded by their bellies.

Diana Gabaldon

#16. Of course the play as I wrote it amounted to nothing; but in weaving the plot through successive scenes, and in writing out some of the dialogues, I enjoyed the full bliss of literary creation. Never to have tasted this delight is never to have known one of the greatest joys of life.

Carl Schurz

#17. Figure out what past efforts amounted to nothing and label them your "not to do" list. Post the list where you'll see it.

Barbara Corcoran

#18. narrowly missed connections. They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running. It had all amounted to nothing, in the end.

Anne Tyler

#19. In the 1940s, cigarettes would be shown in classy situations, endorsed by celebrities - real A-list Hollywood stars in America - the ads would make claims about tobacco quality or manufacturing science and, bizarrely, some brands had what almost amounted to health claims.

Peter York

#20. The web of influence which News Corporation spun in Britain, which effectively bent politicians, police and many others in public life to its will, amounted to a shadow state.

Thomas Watson Jr.

#21. Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

Susan Sontag

#22. If one reads the biographies of physicists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrashekhar, and Bethe, one gets the impression that without hikes in the mountains and the vision of night skies their science would not have amounted to much.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#23. The ancients, even though they believed in destiny , believed primarily in nature , in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

Albert Camus

#24. The only customers they'd get on a day like this were lunatics
well, lunatics and hopeless romantics with a fetish for the smell of dusty old books, which in their eyes probably amounted to the same thing.

Katherine Pine

#25. The actors of the era knew they were excommunicated. Entering the profession amounted to choosing Hell. And the Church discerned in them her worst enemies.

Albert Camus

#26. Thus the total armada amounted to 5,333 ships and craft of all types,

Stephen E. Ambrose

#27. There were no more choices, no more options, no more clever ways out of a tough situation. And the rush, I realized in a brutal wash of despair, is a false god I've chased my entire life. One that cost me everything in the blind search for sensation. My entire existence amounted to nothing.

Kim Harrison

#28. So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

Justin Cronin

#29. As for consulting a dentist regularly, my punctuality practically amounted to a fetish. Every twelve years I would drop whatever I was doing and allow wild Caucasian ponies to drag me to a reputable orthodontist.

S.J Perelman

#30. He manifested a resolution which amounted to sternness.

Thomas Keneally

#31. One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.

Sebastian Horsley

#32. Taking Flora to his room, rather than any other, amounted to a public declaration of his intentions. She was his, and he was saying as much.
Lachlan didn't give a damn what anyone thought, he wanted her with him. It was as simple as that.

Monica McCarty

#33. Once when Gold was visiting in Florida,his father drew him across the street just to meet some friends and introduced him by saying,"This is my son's brother.The one that never amounted to much.

Joseph Heller

#34. People say you shouldn't marry for looks but I disagree: if I tot up all the pleasure I got from looking at David over the years I'd say it amounted to a very substantial hill of beans.

Lynn Barber

#35. I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone ... I didn't ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else.

Steve Wozniak

#36. Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful.

Jesse Stone

#37. It seems to me that my mother was the most splendid woman I ever knew ... I have met a lot of people knocking around the world since, but I have never met a more thoroughly refined woman than my mother. If I have amounted to anything, it will be due to her.

Charlie Chaplin

#38. And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.

Catherine Lacey

#39. I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something.

Frank Oz

#40. That's what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Chemical insanity, celebrated by poets.

Tess Gerritsen

#41. My father always said working for somebody else never amounted to anything. You have to be an entrepreneur

Wayne Huizenga

#42. Simmy entertained slippery thoughts about identity and the meaning of any individual's span on earth. When it came right down to it, she supposed that all a person really amounted to was the sum of their memories.

Rebecca Tope

#43. New steps. That's what it amounted to. The two of them were learning the steps that would bring them together, a dance that would take them into forever. A dance that could be nothing less than God's plan for their lives.

Karen Kingsbury

#44. The modern woman is the curse of the universe. A disaster, that's what. She thinks that before her arrival on the scene no woman ever did anything worthwhile before, no woman was ever liberated until her time, no woman really ever amounted to anything.

Adela Rogers St. Johns

#45. Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.

Neal Stephenson

#46. And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.

Margaret Atwood

#47. Natural erosion had reduced the critical barrier islands in the Gulf, the result of the destruction of some 300,000 acres of wetlands. This amounted to 30 miles of marshlands.

Mortimer Zuckerman

#48. We knew nothing of loss. Nobody has taught us about pain. Until that moment, death had just amounted to a scary sound.

Francesca Marciano

#49. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. Over

Michel Houellebecq

#50. How could he say all this? It amounted to a lifetime. He could try to find the words, but they would never hold the same meaning for her that they did for him. "My house," he would say; and the image that would spring to her head would be of her own. There was no saying it.

Rachel Joyce

#51. Today we are here, and tomorrow we are gone, amounted to a handful of memories. It's freaking depressing.

Tarryn Fisher

#52. Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.

Anna Funder

#53. Lag ... occurred between an initial discovery and its effective clinical application. We analyzed 111 such lags: 8% amounted to 0.1 to 1 year; another 18% were 1 to 10 years; 17% (lagged) 11-20 years; ... 39% (lagged) 21-50 years; only 18% required more than 50 years for application.

Julius H. Comroe Jr.

#54. The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.

Wesley Morris

#55. To be anorexic ... she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

Meg Wolitzer

#56. I'm sure you know a lot of people who were born into privilege and amounted to absolutely nothing. We all have greatness within us. So it is really important for everyone to figure out what God put us on Earth to do, and steer clear of the seven pervasive lies that often blindside people.

Farrah Gray

#57. My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money.

James Green Somerville

#58. Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best.
-Deuce, (183)

Ann Aguirre

#59. I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.

Anne Tyler

#60. was proud of them because he himself had painted them. The order for the seats amounted to $90,000. Who do you suppose got the order - James Adamson or one of his competitors? From the time of this story until Mr. Eastman's death,

Dale Carnegie

#61. Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line
even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.

Isaac Asimov

#62. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.

Orhan Pamuk