Top 100 Most Familiar Quotes
#1. I don't know what kind of life you had, what sorts of joys and sorrows you experienced. But even if there was something that left you unfulfilled, you can't go around seeking it at other people's doors. Even if it is at the place you're most familiar with, and the sort of act that is your forte.
Haruki Murakami
#2. The project workers are the ones most familiar with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn't make sense to them, it doesn't make any sense at all.
Tom DeMarco
#3. So I pulled back from everything and everyone I'd known ... I realized I'd been changing even before we started moving,that my reinvention began when I was still in the most familiar of places. Once the setting was totally new,though, I finally could be,as well.
Sarah Dessen
#4. The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#5. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
Ambrose Bierce
#6. But he's the most familiar thing in this house, and I fall asleep better, listening to Baz breathe, than I have since winter break started.
Rainbow Rowell
#7. One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While
Mortimer J. Adler
#8. The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
Marcel Proust
#10. No instance exists of a person's writing two language perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.
Thomas Jefferson
#11. I can only speak for myself and my own music, because that is what I am most familiar with, and I write about things that I am living or experiencing.
Laura Bell Bundy
#12. Those ills are easiest to bear with which we are most familiar.
Livy
#13. The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.
Leo Tolstoy
#15. The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.
Lord Chesterfield
#16. Familiar vs. Strange [10w]
The sexiest part of strangeness is its most familiar quality.
Beryl Dov
#17. I'm here, little one," came a voice made for coaxing
secrets from the heart. "Sleep now. We'll talk when it's
time."
"Yes, sir," she said, now knowing where she was. She
surrendered to sleep again.
The most familiar darkness ... her darkness ... she was
home.
Tiffany Reisz
#18. The simplest and most familiar truth seems new and wonderful the instant we ourselves experience it for the first time.
Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach
#19. Whether we consciously realize it or not, the biodiversity with which we are most familiar, and the biodiversity with which we have most intimate historical, cultural and biological connections, is that associated with food plants.
Cary Fowler
#20. There are people, particularly in the United States with which I am most familiar, who would say how ironic that Tehran would be the sponsor of an anti-terrorism conference, because there are people who say that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism.
Cynthia McKinney
#21. People can relate to horses. Horses, I think, are basically in our genetic history. Horses were part of our culture, part of our collective society, for hundreds of years, and so, the horse is one of the most familiar animals to people of any race or culture or country.
Steven Spielberg
#22. Usually, those persons closest to the incoming President will be the main leaders of the Transition effort. They are most familiar with his policies and practices, and are able to interpret his wishes regarding the structure and staffing of the new Administration.
Richard V. Allen
#23. The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.
Anthony Giddens
#24. God is not someone you meet when you die. His smiling face will be the first and the most familiar to greet you on the other side of mortality. You'll recognize Him and know in your heart of hearts that you're not entering a new sphere, but returning home to the place you've always belonged.
Toni Sorenson
#25. We often find ourselves at ease with that with which we are most familiar, regardless of whether or not the trait serves us well in the end. Is that not yet another example of how we enslave ourselves?
Andrew Levkoff
#26. The Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation
Gretchen Rubin
#27. Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.
Wynn Bullock
#28. The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#29. Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
Twyla Tharp
#30. The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.
Henry David Thoreau
#31. The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
James G. Frazer
#32. Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar
Marshall McLuhan
#33. And to belove God, to center in God, has an additional crucial meaning. To belove God means to love what God loves. What does God love? The answer is in one of the most familiar Bible verses, John 3.16: God so loved the world ...
Marcus J. Borg
#34. The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.
Maya Angelou
#35. With respect to excellence of style and composition, it may perhaps be said that to practised ears the most pleasing music is such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance; and to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common.
Charles Burney
#36. The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#37. On days like this you can see into the bluest depth of things, their previously unknown, astonishing equations - you see them in even the most familiar everyday thing.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#38. Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.
Andrew Wyeth
#39. One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
Henry David Thoreau
#40. Collage has been one of the most relevant forms of art making. It's resonant because it is made of the stuff that we see every day. It's familiar. It reflects our reality.
Elliott Hundley
#41. PALM, n. A species of tree ... of which the familiar "itching palm" ("Palma hominis") is most widely distributed ... This noble vegetable exudes a kind of invisible gum, which may be detected by applying to the bark a piece of gold or silver.
Ambrose Bierce
#42. Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome.
Charles Mackay
#43. A plasma is the "fourth state of matter." Solids, liquids, and gases make up the three familiar states of matter, but the most common form of matter in the universe is plasma, a gas of ionized atoms.
Michio Kaku
#44. There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.
William Osler
#45. It is possible for us to live in the very sense of the Lord's presence, under even the most difficult circumstances. If you and I are going to enjoy the peace of paradise during this life we must become accustomed to a familiar, humble, and very affectionate conversation with the Lord Jesus.
Brother Lawrence
#46. God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they're so empirically familiar with how atheists think.
Criss Jami
#47. Ah, that's your problem," Riley said, relieved to be on familiar ground. "You've got a copy of Paradise Lost
in your house. Biblios hate Milton. Same with Dante, C.S. Lewis and most holy books. They'll go after those every time.
Jana Oliver
#48. The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson
#49. When you completely extract yourself from anything familiar, you start reverting back to that state of mind where you're having conversations with yourself, and that's where the weirdest and most honest ideas come from.
Alan Palomo
#50. A surprising feature of herbal research is that it is seldom the rare, exotic, and beautiful plant that proves the most interesting; more often it is some common, familiar, and despised weed that is discovered to have undreamed-of virtues.
Euell Gibbons
#51. For the most part, most people most often choose comfort - the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have ...
Peter McWilliams
#52. I wanted, then, to become what I most admired, what now seemed most real to me. I wanted to be that exalted, complicated presence in someone's life, the familiar body, the source of another's existence. But I knew what I wanted was not always what I needed.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#53. The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.
Michel De Montaigne
#54. This is home, it's the only place I want to be, but at the same time everything familiar feels strange. It's the same as it ever was except without the people who most belong here.
Jael McHenry
#55. Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile.
Robert Harris
#56. To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar misquotation.
Natalie Clifford Barney
#57. Most people aren't familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives.
Jackson Katz
#58. There is a gap between what we know and what we want to experience. Either, fear will keep us tethered to the familiar or plung us into the sea. The bridge is either God or ourselves, and with each big decision we must choose who we trust the most.
Shannon L. Alder
#59. That's why it's important to keep your distance from people who have frigid breath. Just their presence can put out the most intense fire, with results we're familiar with. If we stay a good distance away from those people, it's easier to protect ourselves from being extinguished.
Laura Esquivel
#60. Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
Martin Rees
#61. I'm familiar to people. They feel comfortable with me. I started in live television. I perform live all the time. I sing with the piano. I sing with a symphony. I can sit and ask questions. I can listen. I'm very comfortable in most situations.
Florence Henderson
#62. A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.
Andy Goldsworthy
#63. Only in acting I'm going by Joanna JoJo Levesque. In singing, just JoJo. But the reason we wanted to go with JoJo Levesque is most people know me as JoJo. People that are familiar with me would still be like, 'Oh, that's JoJo.'
Jojo
#64. As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.
Charlie Pierce
#65. This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division?
Eric Maskin
#66. Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them.
Terry Teachout
#67. Some of the most frequently heard reasons for not establishing an effective digital governance might sound familiar:
Lisa Welchman
#68. The world is a more mysterious place than it seems to be most of the time, when we're plodding along from breakfast to bedtime in a reassuringly familiar routine.
Dean Koontz
#69. Oddly, I'd been to most of the locations where I started photographing slavery many times before. I even considered some of them homes-away-from-home. But there can be dark corners in familiar places.
Lisa Kristine
#70. Life was like a river, and the river flowed in one direction and one direction only. Sometimes it moved nice and easy through familiar territory; other times it became wild and turbulent and carried you to untamed lands. You either made the most of the ride or you didn't.
Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
#71. The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to it.
David Hume
#72. All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality .
Joseph Conrad
#73. If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#74. Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.
Janice Erlbaum
#75. One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it.
Octavio Paz
#76. Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.
Henry David Thoreau
#77. If you make a Star Wars reference, everybody's familiar with that. It's a common reference that most people can relate to - Bartleby, The Scrivener, probably not so much.
Adam Reed
#78. Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry Wall
#79. Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
#80. Left, Right. Steady effort. This is familiar. Most accomplishment is like this . . . Not the result of decisive actions, or moments of truth.
No, persistence is the source of the best of what we do, of real change. Even, single-minded persistence.
Paul Chadwick
#81. The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.
Noam Chomsky
#82. Like most Michigan natives, Ferguson had a vague knowledge of a thing called barbecue, but had never actually eaten any. He was, however, intimately familiar with whiskey.
Doug Worgul
#83. Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person - you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.
Daniel Kahneman
#84. The Mexican ... is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.
Octavio Paz
#85. The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#86. The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England.
John Stuart Mill
#88. From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting ... On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.
E.B. White
#89. The familiar is by far the most beautiful.
Marty Rubin
#90. It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar.
Fear it or not, it is happening already.
Charles Eisenstein
#91. It seemed like most of the memories faded before they had time to form. And after a while, my life with my father seemed like a familiar story or a distant dream.
Kara Swisher
#92. Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.
Joe Shuster
#93. What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. As an actress for most of my life, I am profoundly familiar with poverty.
Martha Plimpton
#95. In many ways the recent history of the Ukraine can be seen as an intensified version of the history of our era. Most of the political issues are familiar to us. Most of the methods used to meet those issues are also familiar. Events in the Ukraine prefigured events through the rest of the world ...
Michael Moorcock
#96. Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
#97. Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.
Roger Angell
#98. At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.
Jeff VanderMeer
#99. I'm familiar with the Palestinian mentality, the culture, religion, and when I had information coming in on a daily basis: secrets about personal lives, politicians, what they are hiding from their society that most people don't see, I started to see the picture in a different way.
Mosab Hassan Yousef
#100. I think the Japanese love young, tannic red wines much more than most Americans do. Perhaps it is because Asians have a great fondness for tea, and tea is a very tannic beverage. Therefore a young, tannic red wine is something familiar to an Asian palate.
Robert M. Parker Jr.
