Not To Be Quotes

#1. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

#2. You can be courageous in admitting your sin precisely because God is richly abundant in his mercy. He comes to you in mercy not because you are good but because you are a sinner, and he knows that because of this condition, you are unable to help yourself.

Paul David Tripp

#3. Just when I think I hate fashion, I hate clothes, I'm seized by this crazy thing that I have to do. I have this little studio now where I just draw. I can be in the room for three days and not even look up.

Isaac Mizrahi

#4. There's a limit that you will not be able to go past if you don't understand the importance of reading.

Eric Thomas

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

W. H. Auden

#8. I think that the United States should be the leader, not only militarily. We need to stand for freedom; we need to stand for justice in the world, because there aren't too many countries that do.

James K. Glassman

#9. 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

#10. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Donald Barthelme

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The trouble with many plans is that they are based on the way things are now. To be successful, your personal plan must focus on what you want, not what you have.

Nido R. Qubein

#14. The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music ... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.

Richard Eyre

#15. 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

#16. For God, who is in heaven, is in man. Where else can heaven be, if not in man? As we need it, it must be within us. Therefore it knows our prayer even before we have uttered it, for it is closer to our hearts than to our words.
- Opus paramirum, I:ix

Paracelsus

#17. A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

Haruki Murakami

#18. You can be converted from one belief to another, from one dogma to another, but you cannot be converted to the under standing of reality. Belief is not reality. You

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#19. Don't tell me it's going to fucking be okay! I am not okay with being that fucker's pinata!

Nenia Campbell

#20. Our Christian hope is that we are going to live with Christ in a new earth, where there is not only no more death, but where life is what it was always meant to be.

Timothy Keller

#21. I can say this: don't give up. Not on love but, more important still, not on you. Never let yourself believe that you are unlovable or flawed in any way. You deserve to be loved. You deserve kind words and an unwavering eye.

Menna Van Praag

#22. For if there was to be any transformation in the spiritual orientation of the pilgrim's soul, that change would take place not on arrival as if by magic, but in the long, hard work of The Way.

Stephen R. Lawhead

#23. He loves to be the center of attention. I hate it. He is the king of the school. I do not want to be the queen. I

Kasie West

#24. You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.

Chris Crutcher

#25. Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#26. To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.

Indira Gandhi

#27. I'm just smart enough to know what it is I don't know and try to learn as I go along and accept that you're going to make mistakes, and there are going to be things that are not going to be perfect.

Ronald D. Moore

#28. We are what God calls us to be. Even if we're not what he's calling us to be, we are. Because he called us.

Tim Hiller

#29. Humans don't leap buildings. Stuntmen with harnesses do. And won't my crashing eight stories to the ground be detrimental to the mission? The dark elves will swarm me and take me hostage instantly."
"That might be true, but you're not going to fall," he said.

Amanda Carlson

#30. As parents, we're human beings, too, but sometimes we're not as understanding as we'd like to be.

Gregory Hines

#31. Among the cognoscenti, though, it is not just about elaborate new flavors. I always consider the main test of ice cream to be the simple ice creams, especially vanilla. One should have fun when one eats, but it should also be seriously good.

Jeffrey Steingarten

#32. Many spend their time berating practitioners for not applying their method. We all need to disseminate our ideas, but most of our time should be spent applying and improving our methods, not selling them. The best way to sell a mouse trap is to display some trapped mice.

David Parnas

#33. Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.

John R.W. Stott

#34. He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#35. Not to be lost in idle admiration is the only sure means of making and preserving happiness.

Horace

#36. The Jew does not wish to be isolated. He fears being alone, without allies.

Meir Kahane

#37. The recognition of virtue is not less valuable from the lips of the man who hates it, since truth forces him to acknowledge it; and though he may be unwilling to take it into his inmost soul, he at least decks himself out in its trappings.

Michel De Montaigne

#38. You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

Karl Lagerfeld

#39. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

Virginia Woolf

#40. The worst thing that happens in life is not death. The worst thing would be to miss it ... I think the great danger in life is not showing up.

Rachel Naomi Remen

#41. I believe that whatever we have, regardless of a trade being done or not, I feel we have a shot. I've just got to believe that we're going to be all right. I've got to just play basketball.

Allen Iverson

#42. I have a responsibility to not look crazy in public. I don't want to be the person where later in life when I have kids, to say, 'Don't do this' and my kids go, 'But Mom, you did it.'

Raven-Symone

#43. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.

James Baldwin

#44. God does not deem you to be lucky or unlucky ... you're mindset does.

Robert Kiyosaki

#45. People seemed to me to fill life with shadows that should not be there.

Susan Cooper

#46. The problem with most people," Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, "is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.

Alexandra Fuller

#47. Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.

Huston Smith

#48. The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.

C.S. Lewis

#49. It is not enough to celebrate Christmas. We need to be changed and shaped by what we are celebrating. If our spiritual life is no better in spite of all our praying, fasting, and church services, then we have not yet begun to fully respond to the significance of Advent and of the Nativity.

Vassilios Papavassiliou

#50. On the cross, Jesus won the right for believers to be born again back into the god-class. Adam was created, not subordinate to God, but as a god; he lost it, and in Christ we are taken back to the god-class.

Kenneth Copeland

#51. Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.

Gloria Swanson

#52. We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Havelock Ellis

#53. I'm not a big prank guy, because I don't like them done to me. I've been on movies sets where one guys goes into his trailer, and then people move the stairs, and he comes out of his trailer, and there's no stairs. That's not funny! I don't want to be that guy!

Terry Crews

#54. Any minority's right to be different must be respected, but the right of the majority must not be questioned. Without the values at the core of Christianity and other world religions, without moral norms that have been shaped over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity.

Vladimir Putin

#55. In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.

Sam Abell

#56. I agree that dreams seem to be involved in laying down memories but I realise that dreaming gives us access to a part of our brain we do not normally have access to.

Amy Hardie

#57. If you ask any lady they want to be taller, they want to be slimmer, you know, and they want a waist. I'm not here to make people look like a sack of potatoes.

Alexander McQueen

#58. In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.

Mary Louise Pratt

#59. In this world of endless opportunities our dreams compete. If we wait to start a journey, the destination may not be anymore what we wanted to find.

Gisela Hausmann

#60. Would it not be well this Christmas to give first to the Lord, directly through obedience, sacrifice, and love, and then to give to him indirectly through gifts to friends and those in need as well as to our own? Should we do this, perhaps many of us would discover a new Christmas joy.

John Andreas Widtsoe

#61. Smears are not only to be expected but fought. Honor is to be earned, not bought.

Margaret Chase Smith

#62. If you want to control others you will not be able to meditate. About that one point, be absolutely certain.

Osho

#63. There should be a parallel between our supplications and our thanksgivings. We ought not to leap in prayer, and limp in praise.

Charles Spurgeon

#64. I feel like I have to do the best job I can to basically say, "OK, I understand - you have every right to be angry, but anger is not a plan. Here's what I want to do, and that's why I hope you will support me, because I think it will actually improve the lives of Americans."

Hillary Clinton

#65. The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.

H.G.Wells

#66. We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#67. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Don DeLillo

#68. One need not be a prophet to be aware of impending dangers. An accidental combination of experience and interest will often reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.

Friedrich Hayek

#69. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.

Meghan Daum

#70. I would say I don't like people who are really into themselves or are very materialistic. Just always talking themselves up. Not being real is the pet peeve. Be true to yourself.

Austin Stowell

#71. If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Louis L'Amour

#72. I would not want to be a politician ... Let me tell you this: If I was campaigning, and I go against my opponent and he started attacking my character, and I leap over the table and choke him unconscious, would that help my campaign?

Chuck Norris

#73. I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

Sonny Rollins

#74. No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#75. Life is to be lived as a magnificent adventure, or not at all.

Helen Keller

#76. This is not the case. There is nothing that is not the Self. The Self does not have to be realized.

Frederick Lenz

#77. The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance.
Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you
find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.

Debbi Fields

#78. I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#79. Thou shalt not steal unless thou hast a majority vote in Congress ... I'm healthy; subsidized prescription drugs won't do me much good. I'd be willing to forego my prescription drugs if Congress would force some young American to mow my lawn.

Walter E. Williams

#80. I think everyone has been annoyed at school or in their life, that's a type of bullying. So, you can take those feelings and make them bigger. But I try not to use too much from my real life, because you'll be stuck with that all day.

Kodi Smit-McPhee

#81. It is not the nature of man, as I see it, ever to be quite satisfied with what he has in life ... Contentment tends to breed laxity, but a healthy discontent keeps us alert to the changing needs of our time.

Frances Perkins

#82. The business conduct of the disciples of wise men is truthful and faithful ... He does not allow himself to be made a surety or a guarantor and does not accept the power of attorney ... He lends money and is gracious. He shall not take away business from his fellow man.

Maimonides

#83. In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I'm not.

Jandy Nelson

#84. You ever go to shop for tuna, and it says "dolphin safe", and you look at it and kind of go, "Yeah, but"-like somehow you think it's not going to be as good? Like, "I want to do the right thing-but it's probably kind of bland without the dolphin."

Louis C.K.

#85. Change is not a force to be feared, but an opportunity to be seized.

Sam Weiss

#86. I hated being a child because to be a child means that you are essentially the property of your parents, benevolently or not.

Molly Crabapple

#87. I could not be more determined and robust about this. I want more children to play cricket and to have the chance to compete. I want them playing on the correct pitches with hard balls and proper headgear.

Tessa Jowell

#88. We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we're actually writing it all the time, every day.

Arianna Huffington

#89. I brought you here to tell you this: sometimes what we are searching for does not exist. We may sacrifice for it, even bleed for it, but it was never meant to be ours.

Esther Dalseno

#90. A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.

Nicolas Chamfort

#91. I grew up in the church and had religion in my life for a long time. I'm not really a church goer, but I definitely have a hunger for a spiritual connection to the world and for my soul to be healed.

Wes Bentley

#92. To be honest, I think we should find first the possibility to make it. Research is first - if you're not interested, you never can find something. Many things happen from forgotten machines - ones that are no longer used.

Issey Miyake

#93. You do not need permission to be you. Just be your authentic, brilliant, one-soul-only self. You are a marvel. Act like it!

Toni Sorenson

#94. It appears, then, to be a condition of a genuinely scientific hypothesis, that it be not destined always to remain an hypothesis, but be certain to be either proved or disproved by..comparison with observed facts.

John Stuart Mill

#95. To be happy with myself and always make others happy. To be confident and give others confidence in themselves. To smile, to surf, to laugh and make others laugh. To read more widely. To try to be more tolerant of my weaknesses and of others, and not to be so hard on myself all the time.

Chrissie Wellington

#96. This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.

Robin Hobb

#97. Usually when we reason, our minds have a tendency to grab any information that seems to be related to the topic, in the process retrieving both relevant cues and those that seem somehow to be connected but may not actually matter

Anonymous

#98. In every single culture I encountered, there were always women who defied cultural norms to do what they believed was right for them. This phenomenon has never been related to how rich, poor, successful or not successful the woman may be.

Zainab Salbi

#99. But the ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.

William Ellery Channing

#100. O sinner, be not discouraged, but have recourse to Mary in all you necessities. Call her to your assistance, for such is the divine Will that she should help in every kind of necessity.

Saint Basil