Quotes About Decisive Moments

#1. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#2. I do not understand what makes me take a picture. Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment, the necessity to function with lynx eyes and silk gloves. Perhaps what happens when you press the shutter is an intuitive act infused with all you have learned.

Graciela Iturbide

#3. Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought which transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, linked with an irresistible charm.

Albert Camus

#4. Running makes you an athlete in all areas of life ... trained in the basics, prepared for whatever comes, ready to fill each hour and deal with the decisive moment.

George A. Sheehan

#5. I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next ten years felt like a self-centered experiment in personal abuse.

Robert Reed

#6. I didn't freak out. I immediately reached around my back, pulling the gun out of my waistband leveling it at the man's face. Well, maybe that was me freaking out. Who knows?

Natalie Carlisle

#7. It is impossible to deny a woman in a feeding mood. It is as if they look right through you, to that small, weak part that has been there since you were a baby and that doesn't know how to defy authority.

Judith Merkle Riley

#8. When I work with Women of Faith, I probably talk to anything from 15- to 20,000 women a weekend. They are dying to hear somebody tell their story out loud and not self-combust, to bring all the secrets out of the shadow into Gods light.

Sheila Walsh

#9. There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#10. You are my favourite person of all time. I want everyone to meet you.

Rainbow Rowell

#11. I had many good teachers, but only three of them were school teachers.

Michael Leunig

#12. What could he say? After the phone calls and the beating. After the desecration of his locker. The silent treatment. Pushed downstairs. What they did to Goober, to Brother Eugene. What guys like Archie and Janza did to the school. What they would do to the world when they left Trinity.

Robert Cormier

#13. 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

#14. Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.

Adolf Hitler

#15. Photographs offer more than decisive moments. They are not alone, they add and subtract and change with time. They are metaphors for our lives ... Even a static photograph can change in the blink of a day or decade.

Edmundo Desnoes

#16. This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.

Robert Delaunay

#17. I think writing should be about change.

Richard Flanagan

#18. If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour.

Edward Gibbon

#19. There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.

Neal A. Maxwell

#20. I have started to think that the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock.

Sandor Marai

#21. She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.

Leo Tolstoy

#22. There are sordid souls that eat and drink and breed and die, and imagine they have lived.

Charles W. Chesnutt

#23. History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

Roberto Bolano

#24. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. - ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Ray Kurzweil

#25. One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments ... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.

Stefan Zweig

#26. The act of creation, making anything, is an alteration. We cannot eliminate the medium or ourselves from the process, and both are limited. We create decisive moments by devoting our time and attention to specific things. This is the greatest gift we can give anyone or anything - pieces of our life.

John Paul Caponigro