Top 100 Once Were Quotes
#1. Most men die many times in their lives. The man we become invariably slaughters the child we once were. His knowledge of the world murders the babe's innocence.
from Time Untime by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#2. War has become our national industry, like automotives and steel and the railroads once were.
Patricia Cornwell
#3. Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#4. Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.
Mary Roach
#5. Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others.
David Plotz
#6. Women have for centuries been recognized as talented listeners, nurturers, motivators, excellent communicators. These very qualities that we once were told were unbusinesslike are precisely the qualities that business needs most to tap human potential.
Mary Cunningham Agee
#7. Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
Michael J. Fox
#8. Miles and years become suddenly invisible when you find yourself back where you started from, as if you've learned nothing and you are once again the person you once were.
Karen White
#9. I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours.
Patrick DeWitt
#10. Beware of paying attention or going back to what you once were, when God wants you to be something that you have never been. "If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know . . ." (John 7:17).
Oswald Chambers
#11. It's funny how you can become something merely by forgetting who you once were.
Chrissy Moon
#12. Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.
Oswald Chambers
#13. We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.
William Hazlitt
#15. What we do is bring them out in the open, show people what we once were, what we still can be.
Elbert Or
#16. But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#17. In this abundant earth no doubt Is little room for things worn out: Disdain them, break them, throw them by! And if before the days grew rough We once were lov'd, us'd
well enough, I think, we've far'd, my heart and I.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#18. Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation
Barack Obama
#19. That's what happens when you fall. Everything that was bright about you becomes dark. As brilliant as you once were, that's how evil you become. It's a long way to fall
Cassandra Clare
#20. Take your picture off the wall
So I won't have to see your eyes
And maybe soon I won't recall
The painful things that once were nice
Emily Ruskovich
#21. Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#22. This society of 'creatures that once were men' had one fine characteristic - no one of them endeavored to make out that he was better than the others, nor compelled the others to acknowledge his superiority.
Maxim Gorky
#23. No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.
Ray Bradbury
#24. When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were - large, brilliant, and black.
Charlotte Bronte
#25. You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow.
Larry Wall
#26. With a lot of shows, what you'll see happen is they start off really well, and they're very original, but they become sort of a version of themselves. They stand outside the show ... they become a cliche of the show they once were. That's the whole 'jumping the shark' thing.
Peter Dinklage
#27. That once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.
Patricia A. McKillip
#28. It's true that you need much time to get rid of the fat girl you once were, but you know I am sincerely grateful for my buttocks.
Kate Winslet
#29. People change,' Sara said.
'True enough,' Tsukuru said. 'People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us knew anything substantial about the other.
Haruki Murakami
#31. Our people once were warriors. But unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit. If my spirit can survive living with you for eighteen years, then I can survive anything.
Alan Duff
#32. The journey in between what you once were and who you are now becoming is where the dance of life takes place.
Barbara De Angelis
#33. When we invoke stillness within our consciousness, we have the power to recover the child we forgot that we once were.
Daniel St. Clair
#35. I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Paul Theroux
#36. When we are young we cannot know
what it is like to bigger grow
but why do grown-ups great and tall
so soon forget they once were small.
Marta Moran Bishop
#37. I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.
Quentin Blake
#38. Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.
Alice Hoffman
#39. Want a partner who can make you feel secure and loved, so you can reach your full potential. Someone who can inspire you and encourage you to try again if things don't work out. Someone who loves you for who you are, not who you might turn into, or who you once were.
Hester Browne
#40. The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.
Brian Floca
#41. While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.
Charles Dickens
#42. There should be no shame in admitting to a mistake; after all, we really are only admitting that we are now wiser than we once were.
Greg McKeown
#43. Love of God and people will pave roads where there once were none.
Shannon L. Alder
#45. I believe in steel swords, gold coins, and man's wits. ( ... ) And I believe there once were dragons. I've seen their skulls, after all.
George R R Martin
#46. ... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms
Alasdair MacIntyre
#47. [In my dream] they slide their lips over my skin, whispering whispering whispering. They tell me their names, they tell me their lives, they tell me their pain ... I can't struggle, I can't stop laughing, I can't resist these people who once were.
Carrie Ryan
#48. Some stories aren't meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles.
Caren Gussoff
#49. People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.
Peter F. Drucker
#50. Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times.
Alice Hoffman
#51. The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.
Rebecca West
#52. Miss Aubrey, come and have pity on us. We are reading novels and feel our manliness diminishing by the moment. Come restore our vanity, do, and tell us we look the dashing officers we once were.
Julie Klassen
#53. Spend some time observing babies. They don't work; they poop in their pants, and they have no goals other than to expand, grow and explore this amazing world. Be like that baby you once were, in terms of being joyful.
Wayne Dyer
#54. I once had a book on the stars but now I don't. My memory serves but not stellar, ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about.
Peter Heller
#55. Oft it may be chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were heedful for the wise to know.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#56. Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost.
Alberto Manguel
#57. And here he is again, yet things feel like they'll never be as easy between us as they once were.
Jay Asher
#58. XV. Is any man so foolish as to fear change, to which all things that once were not owe their being? And
Marcus Aurelius
#59. The child you once were lives on within you unchanged.
Bryant McGill
#60. It's all right. Things as they once were will never be again, but it's all right.
Janet Morris
#61. God cares a lot more about who we are and who we are becoming than about who we once were.
Dale G. Renlund
#62. What you once were isn't what you want to be anymore.
Jeff Tweedy
#63. It doesn't matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again.
Once you've started to leave, you will run your whole life.
Charlotte Eriksson
#64. There isn't anything noble about being superior to another person. True nobility is in being superior to the person you once were.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#65. You put too much importance on the man that you once were and not enough on the one you are becoming.
Melissa McPhail
#66. I try to create paintings that are a window for the imagination. If people look at my work and are reminded of the way things once were, or perhaps, the way they could be, then I've done my job.
Thomas Kinkade
#67. They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were,
Alice Miller
#68. When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)
Victoria Moran
#69. So be gentle with yourself; show yourself the same kindness and patience you might show a young child - the child you once were. If you won't be your own friend, who will be? If, when playing an opponent, you are also opposing yourself, you will be outnumbered.
Dan Millman
#70. It's good to look at life from the bottom up so you can see that things have risen above what they once were.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#71. No matter where you once were, no matter how dark your storm, God doesn't want you to remain there. Overcoming may not be easy, but it's possible when you ask your Father to battle for you.
Dana Arcuri
#72. Some stories are rooted in adventure, some in strife. Others are born of the heart, and the horrors and the joys locked therein are often immeasurable, and make us truly wonder what became of those children we once were.
David E. Hilton
#73. Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.
Hugh Mackay
#74. I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.
Norman Lock
#75. Many of those who once were so passionately in love with Christ now run about pursuing their own interests. They're burdened down with stress and problems, chasing after riches and the things of this world.
David Wilkerson
#76. Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
David Mitchell
#77. I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.
Philip Hoare
#78. We'll never again be the boys we once were, Tomas. But we've become so much more than we dreamed.
Raymond E. Feist
#79. The pleasures that once were heaven look silly at sixty-seven.
Noel Coward
#80. Evangelical Christians, who once were a ridiculed irrelevant sectarian movement, have, over just three decades, become a powerful voting bloc that can no longer be ignored.
Tony Campolo
#81. God grant me a quick honorable death, Isgrimnur prayed, and never let me be one of those old fools who sits by the campfire telling the young men that things will never be as good as they once were.
Tad Williams
#82. A dream you once were,
A dream of all my realities,
A dream I can no long strive for
In the wake of my manly betayals
C. Elizabeth
#83. The Moulin Rouge is, like the West Village and the Nasdaq, one of those places that people who don't like to take risks come to for the thrill of being on the spot where risks once were taken.
Michael Lewis
#84. Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs.
Will Schwalbe
#85. In adverse circumstances, every creature becomes something else, evolving or devolving. What makes us human is that we know what we once were, and, let us hope, we remember how to change back.
Brian Herbert
#86. ...we all face similar pressures to forget the simple truth of who we are. Particularly the truths that don't jive with what we see around us. As time wears us down we can forget who we once were.
Ted Dekker
#87. Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice ... Once your child becomes the "garbage" other parents are afraid of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were.
Claire Fontaine
#88. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books.
Ray Bradbury
#89. Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#91. There are peculiars all over the world," she said, "though our numbers are much diminished from what they once were.
Ransom Riggs
#93. We shall be on good terms again; though we can never be what we once were to each other.
Jane Austen
#94. Maybe you once were excited about that person God supernaturally brought into your life as a marriage partner, but now all the excitement has worn off. Don't' allow that sense of a miracle to slip away. Don't get so familiar with each other that you take one another for granted.
Joel Osteen
#95. When you hit thirty-five or forty, you know on one level that you are no longer the physical specimen you once were.
Harlan Coben
#96. To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult.
Maurice Sendak
#97. Maybe relationships could have fractals, too. And maybe the sense of loss was when you're becoming a fractal of what you once were to each other.
David Levithan
#98. I learned from her that the people who said you only live once were not readers. As often as you open a book, you come to new places and live new lives.
Joy Cowley
#99. The moment in between what you once were, and who you are now becoming, is where the dance of life really takes place
Barbara De Angelis
