Top 100 It Not The Quotes
#1. Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!
Carol Emshwiller
#2. Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?
Dorothy Norman
#3. The person who commits an action is the one responsible for it, not the people he commits the action upon.
Tamora Pierce
#4. Of course quality is important but is it not the quality of an individual's originality that is most important?
Robert Owen
#5. It's the love you had that matters, isn't it, not the pain.
Robert Lacey
#6. Yet is it not the heart but the members of play that elevate us above the beasts: the fingers with which we touch the clavichord or the flute, the tongue with which we jest and lie and seduce. Lacking members of play, what is there left for beasts to do when they are bored but sleep?
J.M. Coetzee
#7. Truly it it not the tragedies that destroy us, but the memories of them.
Christopher Pike
#8. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.
Vladimir Nabokov
#9. There must be love, and understanding, to betray. Most men haven't the wit or the honor for betrayal: not to know it when they see it; not the stomach to apprehend it as they do it. Most men, blind and dumb in their self-centeredness, don't betray: they merely disappoint.
Janet Morris
#10. The river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
Hermann Hesse
#11. Sister Georgina had studied at Cambridge or, as she put it, 'Not-the-one-in-Massachusetts-Cambridge-Universitythe-real-one-you-know-in-England.
Terry Pratchett
#12. But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
Harriet Martineau
#13. Is it not the same distance to God everywhere?
Epictetus
#14. O ye that dwell on earth! The religion of God is for love and unity; make it not the cause of enmity or dissension.
Baha'u'llah
#15. It was always the secrets that hurt us, wasn't it? Not the telling of them.
Betsy Cornwell
#16. These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.
Rachel Friedman
#17. I'm not ready to be that guy who can meet with world leaders and all that. It's tremendous what Bono does. I don't know if I could do it, not the way he does. I don't think many people could.
Eddie Vedder
#19. Is it not the case that many a life journey starts out in the opposite direction to its destiny?
Sena Jeter Naslund
#20. What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?
Larry Wall
#21. What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
Arthur Miller
#22. What music "means" is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.
Chuck Klosterman
#23. I write the script; nobody sees it, not the people that put the money in the picture. I cast who I want, and make the film. That's why I've always felt the only thing standing between me and greatness, is me. There's no excuse for me not to be great except that I'm not.
Woody Allen
#24. Parkour belongs to the ones who live it, not the ones who want to live thanks to it
David Belle
#25. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?
Thomas Carlyle
#26. We are graduating members from the class of we made it, not the faded echoes of voices crying out names will never hurt me. Of course they did. But our lives will ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty.
Shane Koyczan
#27. Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?
Charles Olson
#28. Is it not the worst pain to know there is a cure for your child's illness and then not be able to obtain it? Oh it must be the one of the worst types of pain in the world ...
Nnedi Okorafor
#29. It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk-cartons
although I can't remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk-carton
and on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me?
Neil Gaiman
#30. Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?
Plato
#31. Is it not the best pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all?
Victor Hugo
#32. The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.
Bonnie Friedman
#33. I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
William Devane
#34. And what is liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, or labor, or trade?
Frederic Bastiat
#36. This child, who is grasping the stone, facing the tank, is it not the greatest message to the world when that hero becomes a martyr? We are proud of them.
Yasser Arafat
#37. O ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not! The best may err, but you are good.
Joseph Addison
#38. It was the feel of it, the love of it, not the thought: it was instinct and reflex and knowing the wind, and Maris was the wind.
Lisa Tuttle
#39. There is always a realistic way to fulfill any dream. There has never been a dream that you can't have - at least, not the heart of it, not the part you love the most.
Barbara Sher
#40. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?
Thomas Carlyle
#41. The eye-is it not the mirror of the soul in all living creatures?
Rosa Bonheur
#42. Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books?
J. Arthur Thomson
#43. Our job is to leave the world a little better than we found it. Not the same ... not worse ... better.
Gene Simmons
#44. It couldn't last of course. They both knew it. Not the evening, Not the holiday.
Elizabeth Noble
#45. She simply cannot let go of love- and who can blame that? Is it not the hardest thing in the world to relinquish, once you have it?
Jude Morgan
#46. I envied it; not the idea of having so much money that you could throw it away, but the thought of growing up in a world where someone cared so much about your happiness and so little about what you accomplished in life.
Kelley Armstrong
#47. Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.
Cynthia Ozick
#48. When I make a feast, I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks.
John Harington
#49. Is it not the disparity of wealth that consumes the willing soul. Rather, the golden keys of opportunity clamor softly with fraught anxiety of things which may never come.
Joel T. McGrath
#50. In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it - not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.
Bill Bryson
#52. There is no other immortality:
in the cold spring, the purple violets open.
And yet, the heart is black,
there is its violence frankly exposed.
Or is it not the heart at the center
but some other word?
Louis Gluck
#53. For is it not the common experience of all of us - you and I - that we do no incorporate the truth of these propositions in our lives? We say we know, but we do not do as we know. We say we believe, but we do not act like it.
James W. Sire
#54. Ultimately, criticism that 'The Real World' has devolved into a lesser enterprise comes from the viewers who came of age alongside it, not the teens of the moment that MTV has always existed for.
Andrea Seigel
#55. The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?
Henry David Thoreau
#56. We are superior to government and should remain master over it, not the other way around.
Ezra Taft Benson
#57. No, my friend, I am not drunk. I have just been to the dentist, and need not return for another six months! Is it not the most beautiful thought?
Poirot
Agatha Christie
#58. President Obama is the kind of politician who puts promises on the record, and then calls that the record. But we are four years into this presidency. The issue is not the economy as Barack Obama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but this economy as we are living it.
Paul Ryan
#59. There's a theory that if we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it. Not the other way around.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#60. Life operates by deserve. So, in leading people, learn to work with the people who deserve it, not the people who need it.
Jim Rohn
#61. The unending chase for money, I believe, threatens to steal our democracy itself. I've used the word 'corrupting,' and I want to be very clear about it: I mean by it not the corruption of individuals, but a corruption of a system itself that all of us are forced to participate in against our will.
Scott Peters
#62. What is the meaning of Resurrection? ... is it not the exorcism of crippling unbelief, which renders us dead in life (Mark 9:22) rather than alive in our dying (8:35)?
Ched Myers
#63. Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence.
Alexander Hume
#64. The Church tries to fit Christ into it, not the Church into Christ.
Swami Vivekananda
#65. If it is the devil that tempts the young to enjoy themselves, is it not the same personage that persuades the old to condemn their enjoyment? And is not condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to old age?
Bertrand Russell
#66. Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?
John Philip Sousa
#67. And, anyway it's not always about fitting in."
"It's not?"
"Nope. Sometimes, it's about reading your environment real quick, and then finding the bits that fit you.
Melissa Keil
#68. Third Covenant "monosacredness" is not a break with the earlier covenants; it transcends and includes them all.
Albert J. LaChance
#69. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.
Alfred Stieglitz
#70. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
#71. Use Time. Make it easy. Get your money to work for you. The key is to get in the market, as it is not about timing the market, but time in the market that matters.
Ann Wilson
#72. I'm not a freak. That's a horrible thing to say."
"That's where you're going. A special school for freaks. You and that Snape boy ... weirdos, that's what you two are ... "
"You didn't think it was such a freak's school when you wrote the headmaster and begged him to take you.
J.K. Rowling
#73. I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.
George Packer
#74. Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. We're all tormented by that same destructive feeling, the sense that no one else on the planet cared about us
Paul Coelho
#75. Having reached the term of his natural life; Mwould it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life?
Henry David Thoreau
#76. The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.
Kenneth Clark
#77. Early in my business career I learned the folly of worrying about anything. I have always worked as hard as I could, but when a thing went wrong and could not be righted, I dismissed it from my mind.
Julius Rosenwald
#78. ****NOTE 6-30-2015 --Something weird is going on w/my GR profile. This one isn't attached to INTO THE DIM any more, and the one that is by INTO THE DIM doesn't have any of my friends/comments/info. Not to worry, GR is working on it!! In the meantime...CUPCAKES FOR ALL!!****
Janet B. Taylor
#79. The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
#80. We all have to start with ourselves. It is time to walk the talk. Take the journey of making very difficult decisions. Start removing things from your life that are not filling your cup and adding things that bring joy in to your life.
Lisa Hammond
#81. I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.
Sharon Horgan
#82. Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
P. J. O'Rourke
#83. The biggest issue of the twenty-first century is not necessarily the "decline" of neighborhood. It may be that we have all moved to a new neighborhood and have not learned how to get along with the new neighbors.
Diana Butler Bass
#84. There's no way that I could do a 9 to 5 job. There's no way. I was not cut out for that. You come in and you work for three months on the one job. They say, 'Great,' you know, and you're on to the next one - and you never even got fired. It's wonderful.
Dennis Quaid
#85. something glorious a minute later. How could anyone not have an orgasm? While she didn't ask for his cock, her mouth opened as she gulped in air. Perhaps it was when she dropped her head back that he understood she was ever so close, because he shut off the vibrator and pulled it out.
Vella Day
#86. The institutions of psychiatry, law enforcement, and goverment have proved that no matter what our resources, you cannot reliable control the conduct of CRAZY PEOPLE. It is not fair, but it is so
Gavin De Becker
#87. It is a horrible, terrible thing, the worst thing, to watch somebody you love die right in front of you and not be able to do nothing about it.
Kate DiCamillo
#89. It's as if the universe has a sense of humor, since at a deep level it's impossible not to lead a spiritual life ...
the universe is living through you at this moment. with or without belief in god, the chain of events leading from silent awareness to physical reality remains intact.
Deepak Chopra
#90. Acheron: You're really not right, are you?
Nick: Yeah. I know. It was all the paint chips I ate as a kid. They were good, but chromosomally damaging
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#91. I don't fall in love very easily. It takes a long time, and then, when I have fallen in love, I'm still not sure. I'm suspicious of myself. What if tomorrow I don't feel the same? I have to wait, to be sure. And I wait and wait.
Joey Comeau
#92. Oh! Do not excite yourself. Shall I say that he interested me because he was trying to grow a mustache and as yet the result is poor." Poirot stroked his own magnificent mustache tenderly. "It is an art," he murmured, "the growing of the mustache! I have sympathy for all who attempt it.
Agatha Christie
#94. You'll see, you'll come to understand. These big things, these terrible things, are not the important ones. If they were, how could one go on living? No, it is the small, little things that make up a day, that bring fullness and happiness to a life.
Benedict Freedman
#95. Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#96. Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on - she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better - in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.
Larry McMurtry
#97. The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.
Robert Pinsky
#98. Every kid in America dreams of playing in the big leagues and they don't, just because. It's not because they blew out their knee. It's just because they didn't make it.
Marc Blucas
#99. Could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. It
Virginia Woolf
#100. That is when the crowd really lifted me. That last 600 meters I was not running with my own legs. It was incredible.
Ashton Eaton
