Top 100 Middle Way Quotes
#1. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.
Ruth Ozeki
#2. Ruthless is the temper of royalty; How much better to live among the equals.Let me decline in a safe old age. The very name of the "middle way".
Euripides
#3. I think that whatever we encounter in life, we want to encourage a balance between the mind and the soul ... and that is to consider about 50% data from the mind and 50% data from the soul. This is what Buddhists call, "the middle way."
Neale Donald Walsch
#5. Damn'd neuters, in their middle way of steering, Are neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring.
John Dryden
#6. I've been broke more than I've been rich. I like being in the middle way better.
Reagan Gomez-Preston
#8. For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause ... There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.
Richard Perle
#9. They followed the middle way of Muhammad, which included marriage, a socially useful livelihood, and a life "in the world but not of it.
Jalaluddin Rumi
#10. Middle Way school is uncomfortable with the potentially essentialist implications of "foundational consciousness" as postulated in the eightfold system.
Dalai Lama XIV
#11. There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.
Taisen Deshimaru
#13. There's many lanes on the highway of enlightenment, they don't have to be on the razor's edge like the yellow line dotted in the middle. Balance is appropriate, not too tight, not too loose, the Middle Way as we call it in Buddhist dharma teachings.
Surya Das
#14. The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.
Eric Maisel
#15. I'm interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.
Agnes Varda
#16. It is better in the long run to be cheated than to cheat. I have learned that there is no middle way.
Phyllis Bottome
#17. Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
#18. The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless.
Sharon Salzberg
#19. Look, you're either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist: there's no middle way. Everyone who supports the state of Israel is a Zionist.
Tom Paulin
#20. In politics the middle way is none at all.
John Adams
#21. Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!
Mikhail Bakunin
#22. The intention of this way of life [voluntary simplicity] is not to dogmatically live with less. It's a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence.
Duane Elgin
#23. You will go most safely by the middle way.
Ovid
#24. Indeed, that is the nature of crowds: the mob is either a humble slave or a cruel aster. As for the middle way of liberty, the mob can neither take it nor keep it with any respect for moderation or law.
Livy
#25. In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
Stendhal
#26. Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation
Is itself the Middle Way.
Nagarjuna
#27. A lot of middle-aged women are children still trying to find their way.
Tamsin Greig
#28. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians.
Maria Semple
#29. Describing passive violence in this culture is kinda like someone who is drowning in the middle of the ocean giving you the low-down on water. The only way you can really understand passive violence is by going somewhere far, far away from phones, news, TV, the Internet.
Inga Muscio
#30. I even get tired performing standup, which is normally a low-impact exercise in futility but looks hard the way I do it. That's why I take a lot of breaks, often stopping in the middle of a joke to catch my breath, or blame the crowd for not laughing before the punchline.
Andy Kindler
#31. When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.
Richard Engel
#32. In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
Herman Melville
#33. Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleagured in the middle of the night.
Amor Towles
#34. I feel like I'm strong enough that I don't have to do anything to turn on the ball. When I do that-when I'm ready to take the ball up the middle, when I'm willing to go the other way-that's when I can turn on the ball.
Justin Morneau
#35. I often ask myself, 'Why is it that most of the lies come out of Islamic countries, and why is it that most of the social corruptions are in the Middle East and in these Islamic countries?' The answer is, when you control something, when you suppress something, people try to do it another way.
Bahman Ghobadi
#36. She is INSANE," I scream, standing in the middle of Marshall's living room.
"Of course, she's insane. That would be your genealogy by the way.
Addison Moore
#37. The middle path is a way of not getting anywhere...
Sadhguru
#38. Each way of organizing has strengths and weaknesses. Taxonomy affords a view from the top, facets help us muddle through the middle, and tags build bridges at the bottom.
Peter Morville
#39. We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.
Michael Lewis
#40. Way I see it, maybe it's not so unfair, as unfinished. If you stopped in the middle of a lot of stories, they'd seem unfair. You're still in the middle of yours.
Mia Sheridan
#41. I'm the middle man. I try to keep people happy. I go out of my way to get a smile. That's the way my mother raised me.
Donald Dunn
#42. We don't want anybody to come off half-cocked and make a decision about what we're only in the middle of doing, right? So if there's shots of me out there, then somebody's going to say, "Oh, that's not the right way. That's not this and that." It has to be seen in context.
Colm Feore
#43. I went to a Christian high school, so I went under my middle name. I don't think they would have accepted me in the school - 'This is Rebel' ... so I have two middle names, Melanie Elizabeth, and I went under those. But Rebel's way cooler.
Rebel Wilson
#44. I took my orders, too. But if i couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.
Mitch Albom
#45. Young people ... have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing
not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness
so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.
Louise J. Kaplan
#46. I think I was a behavior problem, mostly, but in a fun way. I tried to tell jokes. I was the middle kid, so I was always looking for attention and trying to be the one that equalized everything.
Timothy Simons
#47. My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.
Gail Sheehy
#48. There is one confrontation scene toward the end of the picture. In the middle of the scene, I thought, That's Sean Connery! I don't know how else to describe Sean Connery. I still feel that way.
F. Murray Abraham
#49. At seventy-four I'm getting minor raves on my looks, but I'm caught in the middle. Who knows what seventy-four looks like? Who cares? But if I'd listened to my friends, I could now lie and say I'm eighty-four. For eighty-four, the way I look is spectacular.
Ruth Gordon
#50. This is all based on a true story, gentlemen. Hollywood big shots lined up all the way to the Hills to have a diet soda with me, but I wasn't gonna let them fuck me! No, sir!" Graham flashed his middle finger to the erstwhile line of big shots. "Feel free to fuck yourselves, you bunch of Weinsteins!
Aleksandar Hemon
#51. To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reached out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.
Irena Klepfisz
#52. When you reach the middle of your career ladder, turn it the other way around and slide down to the top
Benny Bellamacina
#53. Okay, you're telling the truth. By the way, Nick, you have the most screwed-up life. You're either boring as all get out, or you're about to die. There's no middle ground with you. You might want to work on that.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#54. It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people's lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were.
Nicholas Sparks
#55. The writing process is sort of like when you've got no electricity and you've gotten up in the middle of the night to find the bathroom, feeling your way along in the dark. I can't hardly tell you what I do because I really don't know.
Carolyn Chute
#56. Middle age is when anything new in the way you feel is most likely a symptom.
Laurence J. Peter
#57. I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.
Rebecca Solnit
#59. It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
C.S. Lewis
#60. Forget black and white and try on gray. In hair color, wardrobe or life choices, it may feel more enlivening than you imagine.
Gina Greenlee
#61. There is no way of finding the middle ground, even with the best intentions of the world. Our most sensible policy is to stall.
Yitzhak Rabin
#62. It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant
often it happened in the middle of the night
and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.
Richard Ford
#63. It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.
J.G. Ballard
#64. Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.
Clare Boothe Luce
#65. I don't know what to say. This summer hasn't turned out at all the way I'd planned. I'm not supposed to be standing in the middle of a barn with a blue-eyed cowboy who's looking at me like he's about to kiss me. I shouldn't be wanting him to kiss me.
Cynthia Hand
#66. I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.
Henning Mankell
#67. It was surprisingly crowded, a bunch of middle-aged people, mostly women, moving enthusiastically, if a bit awkwardly, to Prince's "Little Red Corvette," trying to find a way back to their younger, more limber selves.
Tom Perrotta
#68. Investment in education and economic prosperity is the best way to cure fanaticism and for establishing a just peace in the Middle East.
Ahmed Zewail
#69. The idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers - that's an old idea that's failed every time it's been tried.
Marco Rubio
#70. Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#71. When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.
Cormac McCarthy
#72. I was in the middle of a crossroads, which is a nice way of saying crisis, physically, emotionally and spiritually. You know the physical part. We just talked about it.
Star Jones
#73. I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.
Scarlett Thomas
#74. But with every step, I felt my anger falling way. Underneath that anger: fear. In the middle of one of her self-help phases, Ivy had once proclaimed that all anger was fear. I'd long since wondered what, if anything, was underneath all fear.
Maria Semple
#75. I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.
Graham Swift
#76. My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.
Albert Brooks
#77. Comes a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out, 'Right this way.'
Well, here I come.
Laird Hunt
#78. With Americans worried about losing their jobs, their savings, their homes and their chance at the American Dream, the New Direction Congress will work in a bipartisan way to lift our economy and help America's middle class.
Nancy Pelosi
#79. Like most lazy upper-middle-class kids, American Studies seemed like a fun way to use your knowledge of TV to get an A.
Nick Kroll
#80. I'm a registered, vetted gun owner, but that's because I live way out in the country, like way out in the middle of nowhere.
Naomi Judd
#81. And we turned off and 30 miles south they're standing in the middle of our road blocking our way, stopped the car, got out, took us through the path in the woods, where the craft was on the ground.
Betty Hill
#82. You know who is against democracy in the Middle East? The husbands. They got used to their way of life. Now, the traditional way of life must change. Everybody must change. If you don't give equal rights to women, you can't progress.
Shimon Peres
#83. The best way to win is to play well early or late in the game. The middle part tends to take care of itself.
Tony La Russa
#84. There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures ... You're in the middle of life, you're living, making love, eating, sleeping - and photography is part of it. And I don't say this because I'm being romantic. I say this because that's just the way it happens to be.
Anders Petersen
#85. Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.
Pete Seeger
#86. I suppose it's easier to see the way out of anything when you've found your way out of that maze. When you're stuck in the middle, in a series of dead-ends making circles, it's difficult to make any sense of anything.
Cecelia Ahern
#87. Well, isn't that just like religion for you, Archie," he said. "One day it's a nice way to spend your weekends and the next you're in the middle of a righteous theological clusterfuck.
John Scalzi
#88. There is always drama and there will always be drama, but its the way its presented in my head that makes it so interesting. Everyone gets their time in the middle of the drama.
Josh Schwartz
#89. When you're the single French person in the middle of 10 Tunisians, the majority will impose their way of life on the minority.
Marion Marechal-Le Pen
#90. Most people in this country are very fair-minded; they understand we're in the middle of a very difficult journey of repairing, rescuing, restoring our British economy, and they want us, and they want particularly Liberal Democrats in government, to fight for the fairest possible way of doing that.
Nick Clegg
#91. Your work has been described as touching the soul of the reader. That's the way I felt. Feel. Honestly. You've touched my soul. I'm sorry if I sound like a middle-aged librarian at a book-autographing session.
W.P. Kinsella
#92. I mean, I do actually think there is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester, in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached.
Ayelet Waldman
#93. I've read and traveled a lot in the Middle East, and I built on eyewitness accounts of horrific executions that would shape a boy's character and beliefs if he watched his father die that way. These are the stuff of which nightmares are made.
Terry Hayes
#94. You know what they say about mistakes though,' she said, all breathy and half-lipsy. 'It's the only way you ever learn anything.' And she leant forward and kissed him. Right there, in the middle of the bar. Right there, in the middle of his lips.
Gabrielle Williams
#95. Doing the same thing in the same way year after year is like eating a quail a day for thirty days. Along toward the middle of the month a fellow begins to long for a broiled crow or a slice of cold dog.
George Horace Lorimer
#96. Sometimes the title comes to you at the beginning, sometimes it comes at the end. The very best way in my experience is when it comes in the middle.
Edward Hirsch
#97. The reality of his predicament hit him hard. There's no way out of this now, save arrest or death. Professor Ratib had made it sound so academic, but it wasn't. Regardless of whether we're attacking human- or infrastructure-related targets, it's terrorism. If Husam thinks that I'm a risk, I'm dead.
Christian F. Burton
#98. ...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.
Colum McCann
#99. We're facing a natural disaster in the middle of an economic disaster. The federal government has to balance its budget the way our families do.
Nan Hayworth
#100. When you're a kid, you always feel you have this weird kindred-spirit thing with other Jews, until you get older and you realize it's just middle-class bourgeois Jews that sort of fit a template that your family fits into one way or another.
Marc Maron
