Top 100 Once Wrote Quotes
#1. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.
Kingsley Amis
#2. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line?
Dan Ariely
#3. The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
Chuck Jones
#4. Newspaper columnist Dave Barry once wrote that the motto of the wedding industry is, 'Money can't buy you happiness, so you might as well give your money to us.
Denise Fields
#5. The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.
Andrea Levy
#6. To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written.
Regina Brett
#7. Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
George R R Martin
#8. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.
Nancy Mitford
#9. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.
Evan Osnos
#10. Fears are educated into us," Dr. Karl Menninger once wrote, "and they can, if we wish, be educated out.
Alan Loy McGinnis
#11. I once wrote a book on courage and what made people courageous. I found it was a strength of belief matched by a strength of willpower.
Gordon Brown
#12. One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives, Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.
Jill Lepore
#13. The MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who has devoted her career to studying and writing about the impact of digital technology on our lives, once wrote that sociable technology always disappoints, because it promises what it cannot deliver. "It promises friendship but can only deliver performance,
David Sax
#14. What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.
Thomas Lewis
#15. Someone once wrote that worrying is the hardest thing about being a parent.
Yoko Ogawa
#16. It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
John Cheever
#17. As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I'm the kind of person who - if he can't have too much of something - doesn't want any of it. In
Mary Karr
#18. Stephen King once wrote: 'Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away.. and in the end.. there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
Lucas Scott
#19. Mark Rothko once wrote, "Silence is so accurate." We
Nicholas Tanek
#20. George Washington once wrote that leading by conviction gave him "a consolation within that no earthly efforts can deprive me of." He continued: "The arrows of malevolence, however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me.
George W. Bush
#21. Dreyfus once wrote from Devil's Island that he would see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany he realized they had only been seagulls ... For me they will always be glorious birds.
Colin Higgins
#22. Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.
E. Lockhart
#23. The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.
I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, Fuck subtle.
Jim Butcher
#24. I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.
Vivian Gornick
#25. You have just dined," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." The
Michael Pollan
#26. Tartakower once wrote that after planting a Knight in the center you can go to sleep. This is not to be taken literally, of course, but it contains more than a germ of truth.
Samuel Reshevsky
#27. Goethe, the great poet-philosopher, once wrote: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent.
Humphrey Bancroft Neill
#28. Eugene Peterson once wrote that before we can love our enemies, we have to pray our hatred. In these psalms - which are more frequent than the psalms of orientation - Israel vented and boiled over at God, apparently believing he was secure enough to be able to take it.
John Ortberg
#29. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that "There is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter." Let
Marcus Luttrell
#30. The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
David Byrne
#31. Joseph Conrad once wrote that 'it is the peculiarity of Russian natures that however sharply engaged in the drama of action, they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas'.106
S.A. Smith
#32. Sometimes I need to reject the music proposed for my songs because the musicians misunderstand that the Fanny Crosby who once wrote for the people in the saloons has merely changed the lyrics. Oh my no. The church must never sing it's songs to the melodies of the world.
Fanny Crosby
#33. I once wrote on my MySpace profile that music is never authentic. It was a reaction to constantly reading the word 'authentic' in connection with bands. But what does that mean? A baby crying after being pushed out of its mother's womb, now that's what I'd call authentic.
Sophie Hunger
#34. As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us How the master's thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton's math Silently along its path.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#35. As Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who "were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.
Adam M. Grant
#36. I am a woman with wings,' I once wrote and will revise these words again. 'I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.' In a voiced community, we all flourish.
Terry Tempest Williams
#37. Mr. de Lamartine once wrote to me thusly: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program. You have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first.
Frederic Bastiat
#38. What rules the world is ideas," Kristol once wrote, "because ideas define the way reality is perceived.
Anonymous
#39. The Japanese poet Masahide once wrote,"The barn has burnt down - now I can see the moon." I now understand what that means. Life can truly begin after a fire when all is seemingly lost. All of the unnecessary has been burned away.
Kenn Bivins
#40. Nor am I nostalgic, as a French philosopher once wrote, for a lost poverty. I am nostalgic for the solidarity and sharing a modest existence can sometimes bring.
Alice Walker
#41. It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
Gore Vidal
#42. Luther once wrote, "Where God builds His Church, the devil erects a chapel next to it."15 Luther's point was that the devil is always seeking to mimic the works of God.
Robert H. Bennett
#43. Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.
Kim Gordon
#44. I'm not a believer, I call myself an atheist. It was man who invented God. I once wrote that there are 15 things I know about God, and one is that he is allergic to shellfish. There are far too many commandments and you really only need one: Do not hurt anybody.
Carl Reiner
#45. As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.
Nancy Pearcey
#46. Einstein once wrote, The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Alan Lightman
#47. As Shakespeare once wrote...To be or not to be.. And my answer to that is, yes. You're meant to be. And that your life - and every other life matters, as we're all connected as one.
Atle Jarnaes Leroy
#48. I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote that he would support the death penalty only when the infallibility of human judgment had been demonstrated.
Paul Jacob
#49. Wallace Stegner once wrote that the lessons of life amount to scar tissue.
Michael McGarrity
#50. The famous pastor in Scotland known as the prophet of Dundee44 once wrote: "For every time you look to men, look ten times to Christ." This constant looking back to Christ will keep us from judging others, and will allow us not to be discouraged even when we see problems with others in the body.
Greg Gordon
#51. Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, once wrote, Circumstances do not make the man. They merely reveal him to himself.
Brian Tracy
#52. Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
James Ellroy
#53. Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.
Steven Pinker
#54. The problems of tribal conflicts in Kenya are much older, caused by the former colonial power. A former American ambassador there once wrote about how the CIA has contributed to the divisions between Kenyans.
Yoweri Museveni
#55. A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#56. Don't add people to your subscriber list just because they once wrote you a note. Or once answered a note you wrote to them. Don't put your address book into your newsletter database. Let your readers sign up.
M.J. Rose
#57. As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: "Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life-changing big things.
Cal Newport
#58. I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)
Haruki Murakami
#59. St John of the Cross once wrote: "In the evening of our life, we shall be judged by our loving.
James Runcie
#61. C. S. Lewis once wrote that man has two clues to the meaning of the universe. One is the knowledge of a law that he did not make but is obligated to keep; the other is the knowledge that he does not and cannot keep it.
J. Budziszewski
#62. E. B. White once wrote, I can't decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#63. Emily Dickinson once wrote, 'hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,' and she was right, but she forgot to mention that despair is the thing with claws that tears out your heart. Kind of a major oversight there, Em." pg. 25
Suzanne Sullivan
#64. I once wrote a song so beautiful that I myself couldn't sing it. It's called Plastic Government Cheese Swan, and it's about how the world is plastic and full of government cheese swans.
Thom Yorke
#65. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. And as Howard Jones once wrote, Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.
Rebecca Skloot
#66. John Masterman once wrote: Sometimes in life27 you feel that there is something which you must do, and in which you must trust your own judgment and not that of any other person. Some call it conscience and some plain obstinacy. Well, you can take your choice.
Ben Macintyre
#67. Every condition exists," Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum." Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
Matthew Desmond
#68. When you're in your twenties, someone once wrote, you live to please other people. When you're in your thirties, you get tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When you're in your forties, you realize nobody was thinking about you anyway.
John Ortberg Jr.
#69. I might have remembered what my father once wrote to Henry George, I never do anything by halves, and am half hearted in no cause that I embrace.
Cecil B. DeMille
#70. It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.
Adam Gopnik
#71. The LP actress Linda Hunt once wrote, 'Dwarfism, after all, isn't like cancer or heart disease. It isn't fatal, and it isn't even an illness. It is physical, though, and inescapable. You don't get over it. It is you. But you aren't it, and that's an important distinction.
Andrew Solomon
#72. Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.
Christopher Hitchens
#73. A wise person once wrote, "Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person would die." But the only one dying is ourselves.
Debbie Ford
#74. The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry.
Edmund White
#75. I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
Richard Dawkins
#76. Warren Buffett once wrote that value investing is like an inoculation
it either takes or it doesn't
and when you explain to somebody what it is and how it works and why it works and show them the returns, either they get it or they don't.
Seth Klarman
#77. An avowed feminist activist and an outspoken bisexual, DiFranco has been candid about the necessity of women musicians identifying with the F-word. "Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist," she once wrote. "There is no box marked 'other'".
Marisa Meltzer
#78. Josh Billings once wrote, It ain't what a man knows what hurts him. It's what he knows what ain't true.
Brian Tracy
#79. Ruth once wrote, "Dear Journal, Never let a single day pass without saying an encouraging word to each child . . .'More people fail for lack of encouragement,' someone wrote, 'than for any other reason.
Billy Graham
#80. A German philosopher once wrote that he who fights monsters must take care that he doesn't become one himself.
Anthony Horowitz
#81. Style," the well-known historian Peter Gay once wrote, "is not the dress of thought but part of its essence.
Marc Trachtenberg
#82. Feynman once wrote, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Stephen Hawking
#83. Voltaire once wrote, "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." Sir Francis Bacon added, "A prudent question is one-half of wisdom." Indira Gandhi concluded that "the power to question is the basis of all human progress." Great questions are clearly the quickest path to great answers.
Gary Keller
#84. Sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?
Michio Kaku
#85. The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."
Gore Vidal
#86. Yur Karyakin once wrote: 'We should not judge a man's life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.' And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.
Svetlana Alexievich
#87. Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#88. But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#89. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
Michael Connelly
#90. As a militant troublemaker, I once wrote that it was the duty of every woman worthy of the description to upset men at least three times a day, on principle.
Julie Burchill
#91. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, "Evil is not an appearance," adding that "knowing its causes does not dispel it." Sartre
Sue Klebold
#92. Let me leave you with a positive thought. William Shakespeare once wrote: "The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite." They call this the Hidden Economy and it is not based on greed or love of money, but on unconditional, selfless, boundless and unstinting Love.
Etienne De L'Amour
#93. I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful.
Nigel Hamilton
#94. A friend of mine once wrote a silly article about all these metrosexuals like David Beckham wearing sarongs, and she described me as a 'heteropolitan.' I don't know what that means. I think it was a joke.
Kevin McCloud
#95. Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Nicole Krauss
#96. Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.
John Berendt
#97. As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container.
Alan Bradley
#98. Having been familiar with "drunk" once or twice myself, that lick just came to me - and yeah, it sounded very drunk, so I presented it to Alice [Cooper]. It felt like he wrote the lyrics in about a minute.
Johnny Depp
#99. She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind.
Aimee Bender
#100. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
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