Top 100 Not Rather Quotes
#1. Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn.
Thomas Mann
#2. Is it not rather meant that it was placed far above us, in order to convince us of our utter feebleness?
John Calvin
#3. The visible aspect of modern life disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that is beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend.
Oscar Wilde
#4. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us - or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#6. Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?
J.M. Coetzee
#8. I might have felt unimportant pitted against the awesome might of the mountains. I did not. Rather, on that mountain top I found something important that I had never known before: an awareness of a vital connection between me and the Authority behind all this beauty.
Catherine Marshall
#9. There is a dramatic conflict in what is commonly called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an everchanging light?
Frantz Fanon
#10. Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man's Land.
Henry David Thoreau
#11. What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?
Cormac McCarthy
#12. What honest man would not rather be the sufferer than the defrauder?
Samuel Richardson
#13. We obey God not because we are afraid of what He will do to us if we do not. Rather, we obey Him because we are moved by all that He has done for us in Jesus Christ. He has lovingly elected us and sprinkled us with the sin-forgiving, grace-abounding blood of Jesus.
Anthony J. Carter
#14. Once such ideas began to torment him, would they ever quite leave him alone? Would they not rather increase in urgency? Would they not threaten his
very existence?
Franz Kafka
#15. But I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"
not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America ...
Lafcadio Hearn
#16. In life, you see, there is not much choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us, painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot.
Joseph Conrad
#17. What though the radiance that was once so bright, be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
William Wordsworth
#18. Who would not rather flounder in the fight than not have known the glory of the fray?
Richard Hovey
#19. Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Terry Pratchett
#20. There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.
George Eliot
#21. Suffering occurs when something is taken for what it's not , rather than for what it is.
Suzanne Segal
#22. The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. Lucy, has he not rather the air of an incipient John Bull? He used to be slender as an eel, and now I fancy in him a sort of heavy dragoon bent - a beef-eater tendency. Graham, take notice! If you grow fat I disown you.
Charlotte Bronte
#24. You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.
Pope Paul VI
#25. If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
Henry David Thoreau
#26. Who would not rather have the fame of Archimedes than that of his conqueror Marcellus?
William Rowan Hamilton
#27. The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there in peace. War will make corpses of us all.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#28. Much as the sage may affect to despise the opinion of the world, there are few who would not rather expose their lives a hundred times than be condemned to live on, in society, but not of it - a by-word of reproach to all who know their history, and a mark for scorn to point his finger at.
Charles Mackay
#29. We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter-writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?'
'Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not "rather like Jane Austen's day".
Helen Fielding
#30. Is it true that existence consists only in the action of energy? Or is it not rather that energy is an output of Existence?
Sri Aurobindo
#31. I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
#32. There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.
Aldous Huxley
#33. All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not.
Samuel Johnson
#34. By what right can we call this a system of "corrections"? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence?
Slavoj Zizek
#35. Who would not rather trust and be deceived?
Eliza Cook
#37. Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine year old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day'. (Talitha)
Helen Fielding
#38. There is no true Latter-day Saint who would not rather bury a son or a daughter than to have him or her lose his or her chastity - realizing that chastity is of more value than anything else in all the world.
Heber J. Grant
#39. Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are results of what we do with our minds: We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.
Sharon Salzberg
#40. Women cannot compete with men in physical prowess. And why in the name of all that is sane should we? Why not rather have our ambition go into sport for health, endurance, and the mere love of it?
Michael Sokolove
#41. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.
Samuel Johnson
#42. There are very few so foolish that they had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others.
Thomas Hobbes
#43. Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?
Guy De Maupassant
#44. You must always remember that your future holds promise and good fortune. Count your blessings, and never regret what was not. Rather, focus on the path God has chosen for you.
Mirella Sichirollo Patzer
#45. But, dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable
is it not rather that we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?
George Eliot
#46. Why do I not rather seek some real good - one which I could feel, not one which I could display? These things that draw the eyes of men, before which they halt, which they show to one another in wonder, outwardly glitter, but are worthless within.
Seneca.
#47. Shall he who soars, inspired by loftier views,
Life's little cares and little pains refuse?
Shall he not rather feel a double share
Of mortal woe, when doubly arm'd to bear?
George Crabbe
#48. Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be ...
William Wordsworth
#49. I believe, there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations.
Jane Austen
#50. I wonder if it hurts to live, And if they have to try, And whether, could they choose between, They would not rather die.
Emily Dickinson
#51. Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.
Alan Turing
#52. To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives? - and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared to live more worthily and profitably?
Henry David Thoreau
#53. Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal...
G.E. Moore
#54. If one could order a crime as one does a dinner, what would you choose? ... Let's review the menu. Robbery? Frogery? No, I think not. Rather too vegetarian. It must be murder - red-blooded murder - with trimmings, of course.
Agatha Christie
#55. Walking in humility isn't focusing on what we are NOT; rather, it's declaring what God is.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#56. My wife, who does not like journalizing, said it was leaving myself embowelled to posterity
a good strong figure. But I think itis rather leaving myself embalmed. It is certainly preserving myself.
James Boswell
#57. I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#58. Throughout the centuries, man has considered himself beautiful. I rather suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of pride; that he is not really beautiful and he suspects this himself; for why does he look on the face of his fellow-man with such scorn?
Comte De Lautreamont
#59. The best legacy you could leave is not some building that is names after you or a piece of jewelry but rather a world that has been impacted and touched by your presence, your joy, and your positive actions.
Jon Gordon
#60. Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
Margaret Atwood
#61. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.
Neal Stephenson
#62. Another is that the findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather,
Yuval Noah Harari
#63. The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.
Richard P. Feynman
#64. Though one may acquire much in wealth, fame, or honor, the real joy of life does not lie there but, rather, in keeping the romance of living going. Nothing gives such complete and profound happiness as the perpetually fresh wonder and mystery of exciting life.
Norman Vincent Peale
#65. [Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#66. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things.
Pope Francis
#67. As a street artist, I'm used to sharing my stuff with the public. It's a communal experience. I've learned not to be so precious, but rather to enjoy the process.
Shepard Fairey
#68. 29. Most loneliness results from insulation rather than isolation. In other words, we are lonely because we insulate ourselves, not because others isolate us.
James C. Dobson
#69. What's important is the work that you're doing, not the country that you're in. I would much rather be in a play at the Royal Court than in Los Angeles making 'Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.'
James Corden
#70. I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.
John Hodgman
#71. But shall we be happy, to say that we live in the dusk rather than in the full night? Shall we rejoice that we shall only suffer, while your offspring will be the ones to know the torments of the damned? Shall this be why we do not act?
Robin Hobb
#73. Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place.
Rick Perlstein
#74. Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.
Audre Lorde
#75. Confidentiality and transparency are not mutually exclusive, but rather two sides of the same coin.
Thomas De Maiziere
#76. One ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom.
Mohsin Hamid
#77. But to give him anything to drink was impossible, or would have been so had not the landlord bored a reed, and putting one end in his mouth poured the wine into him through the other; all which he bore with patience rather than sever the ribbons of his helmet.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#78. It's not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it's going to be useful. You have to create stuff that people really want, rather than create stuff just because you can.
Genevieve Bell
#79. He who loves the coming of the Lord is not he who affirms that it is far off, nor is it he who says it is near, but rather he who, whether it be far off or near, awaits it with sincere faith, steadfast hope, and fervent love.
Augustine Of Hippo
#80. We too often let the material things serve as indicators that we're doing well, even though something inside us tells us that were not doing our best. That we are avoiding that which is hard, but also necessary. That we are shrinking from rather than rising to the challenges of the age.
Barack Obama
#81. Let's embrace more of life, not less. Balanced people don't change the world, and I'd rather spend my time feeling worn out from meaningful activities and projects.
Chris Guillebeau
#82. It's no wonder we are so messed up when it comes to walking with God. In nearly every aspect of our existence, good performance equals good reward. Except not with him. A good thing turns bad when we perform to earn God's acceptance rather than simply receive it like a gift.
Emily P. Freeman
#83. Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way
Bertrand Russell
#84. I'd rather make a thousand mistakes trying for a better life, than to die not making any mistakes at all.
Steven Aitchison
#85. The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
Roger Scruton
#86. We must concern ourselves not with what is beyond life, or what is life, or what is the purpose of life, but rather with the understanding of this complex existence of everyday life, because that is the foundation upon which we must build.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#87. Inspiration doesn't really work like that - you're not looking out for it. Inspiration is something that tends to capture you rather than you capture it.
Joan Armatrading
#88. Paul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.
Reza Aslan
#89. A humble person is not one who thinks little of himself, hangs his head and says, "I'm nothing." Rather, he is one who depends wholly on the Lord for everything, in every circumstance.
David Wilkerson
#90. I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions.
Roxane Gay
#91. The afterlife is not so much a place but rather what happens to me, to the others left behind, after Ben's life.
Sophie Hardcastle
#92. You are afraid of hell. But that's all religion is, really. Fear of a place we'd rather not be, and where there's no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.
Patrick DeWitt
#93. The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#94. It's not that I have no shame. Rather, I'm exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere.
Lionel Shriver
#95. When introducing a character, you're usually better off sticking with broad strokes. The important thing at that point is not what color hair someone has or how tall they are, but rather, what kind of person they are.
Jason Black
#96. Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more ... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance
Wei Wu Wei
#97. I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.
Abraham Lincoln
#98. We're always pitching ideas and being told "no thank you." No offense taken, because I would so much rather be told the truth that they're not interested and be able to find the right show for that network down the line.
J.J. Abrams
#99. But the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures.
Anonymous
#100. Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it - which always amounts to the same.
Jacques Derrida
