Top 100 Quotes About Familiar Things
#1. None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.
Alexander McCall Smith
#3. The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson
#4. Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff - relax, stop wondering what it's all 'about' - like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this Play isn't 'about,' it simply is. Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. Don't try to understand it, let it try to understand you.
E. E. Cummings
#5. The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation.
Paul Bowles
#6. He liked familiar things, things that had been worn in by good people, people he could trust.
Jan Karon
#7. I never really noticed it any more, in the way that one often ignores familiar things, like seat cushions or loved ones.
John Boyne
#8. You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.
Mary Renault
#9. Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.
Donald Judd
#10. It often happens that when you look at familiar things through someone else's eyes you see them as you have never seen them before.
John Mole
#11. Many of us find comfort and interest in old, familiar things, while others seek inspiration or stimulation in the blatantly new or unconventional." Charity Davis-Woodard
Kevin A. Hluch
#12. There's beauty all around our paths,
If but our watchful eyes
Can trace it 'midst familiar things,
And through their lowly guise.
Felicia Hemans
#13. Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it's easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see.
Catherine Lacey
#14. We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.
Mark Twain
#15. Women survive their men. Men
men like him
don't live long when their women are gone. You'll see
he'll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he's gone.
Neil Gaiman
#16. Familiar things are a comfort to us all.
Andy Rooney
#17. Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.
Rudolf Arnheim
#18. Suddenly street and city became transformed, had the unfamiliar face that familiar things take on when our heart has taken leave of them. He looked back at the door of the house: it had become the door to a strange house that was now closed to him.
Hermann Hesse
#19. The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed.
Philip Larkin
#20. There are moments in 'Body Snatchers' that touch the sort of thing that I find scary ... like isolation and the inability to trust even familiar things. But - is that a horror movie - or a thriller? I don't really know the difference.
Christine Elise
#21. When I've tried to reinvent the wheel, I get bashed for not doing the familiar things.
Billy Corgan
#22. What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#23. It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive. (Mr. Bell)
Elizabeth Gaskell
#24. Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.
Wynn Bullock
#25. unfamiliar things least produces familiarity. Familiarity only gets closer to you when you open your doors to familiar things
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#26. Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.
Charles Handy
#27. Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#28. Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising.
Jonathan Haidt
#29. We have to give up so many things when the people we love die. So we hang on to other familiar things.
Corey Ann Haydu
#30. And that was is. Life sometimes flips on you like that. One minute you're looking at your reflection in the water, not entirely sure you like what you see, and the next minute you are upside down, submerged in a world where even familiar things look new.
Vicki Pettersson
#31. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.
Samuel Johnson
#32. New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change, Betsy decided profoundly.
Maud Hart Lovelace
#33. A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.
Louis Nizer
#34. It is the mystery of the unknown
That fascinates us; we are children still
Wayward and wistful; with one hand we cling
To the familiar things we call our own,
And with the other, resolute of will,
Grope in the dark for what the day will bring
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#35. I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.
Victoria Aveyard
#36. All things are the same, familiar in enterprise, momentary in endurance, coarse in substance. All things now are as they were in the day of those whom we have buried.
Marcus Aurelius
#37. You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.
Philip Larkin
#38. I think the movie business is in trouble. It's all movies that you've seen before. Everything's a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you.
Graydon Carter
#39. When cleaning I do it the way people go to church - not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.
Robert M. Pirsig
#40. We look for wonders and the unseen reality-the hand of God- in things extrordinary, when more often his presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday events of which life is woven.
David G. Myers
#41. She has a scent that is familiar and comforting, like all the things you wish you could take with you on your travels to make you feel less alone.
Libba Bray
#42. When we are sad ... it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.
Donna Tartt
#43. Mom says,'What are you going to do when it's time to go to college?' I choose not to think about that yet. That is years away. For now, I just watn things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known.
~pg 16; Hattie on change
Ann M. Martin
#44. Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts ... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex.
Viswanathan Anand
#45. One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While
Mortimer J. Adler
#46. The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
Jorge Luis Borges
#47. The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.
Michel De Montaigne
#48. The more we incline our hearts and minds toward God, the more heavenly light distills upon our souls. Gradually, things that before seemed hazy, dark, and remote become clear, bright and familiar with us.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#49. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager ... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.
Ntozake Shange
#50. A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
Michel Foucault
#51. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#52. A habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night ... surely a body-friendly if not familiar-lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuissance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor discusts you, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet.
Toni Morrison
#53. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]
Lauren Groff
#54. In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?
Lisa Randall
#55. I can only speak for myself and my own music, because that is what I am most familiar with, and I write about things that I am living or experiencing.
Laura Bell Bundy
#56. I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.
Charles M. Blow
#57. I did a quick injury check on my organs and bones. The routine was familiar, one I paced my way through every other morning as I went from dispassionately watching my body heal to wondering if this time, I might have pushed things too far.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#58. I don't like to get involved in things that I am not familiar with. I'm kind of a hands-on type of person.
Dolly Parton
#59. I think there's a danger of becoming too familiar with things, isn't there? That you kind of, when you're used to seeing the same things every day, you see those things come what may, and you don't see maybe the interesting things just slightly out of view behind them.
Steven Hall
#60. There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.
Michael Haneke
#61. The moment I put it on, that suit became an old, familiar, and valued friend - and I became taller and wider across the shoulders. It could not have fit better if it had been made on my body. It knew things about me I wouldn't learn for years yet, and approved of them all.
Robert A. Heinlein
#62. When you experience being present, there is no separation between you and other things. If you feel separate, you are already out of the present and returned to your familiar land of names and concepts.
Ilchi Lee
#63. As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.
Charlie Pierce
#64. Transformations require that we let go of familiar ways of doing things, without yet knowing what we will do next.
Sheldon B. Kopp
#65. At the end of this lifetime, you will leave this world. Your awareness field will stay together in a certain sense and then it will seek to return to things that are familiar. You will reincarnate.
Frederick Lenz
#66. As an actor the best thing you have is your imagination. You're not going to have all the experiences, but you draw on the things that you know. So I think you definitely use the things that you're familiar with to your advantage.
Vince Vaughn
#67. With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.
Mark Rothko
#68. Comprehensibility is the highest law of all. Unity must be there. There must be means of ensuring it. All the things familiar to us from primitive life must also be used in works of art.
Anton Webern
#69. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
Eugene Ionesco
#70. In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger.
Ari Marcopoulos
#71. We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade.
Virginia Woolf
#72. I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose-hips, the apples and thorn. I seem to be on a road, walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone.
Annie Dillard
#73. Peace, a commodity purchased with friendship and safety and anything comfortable and all things familiar; peace that was a pleasant melody playing through the moments of their day; a chord striking only the notes of security and agreement and understanding and order.
Dan Groat
#74. We know that diversity can sometimes be more uncomfortable because things are less familiar - but it gets the best results.
Megan Smith
#75. Spreading out the particle into a string is a step in the direction of making everything we're familiar with fuzzy. You enter a completely new world where things aren't at all what you're used to.
Edward Witten
#76. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:
Pebble : Beach
Raindrop : Ocean
Needle : Haystack
Zadie Smith
#77. Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.
Richard Dawkins
#78. A dementia sufferer effuses delight and notices very different things when taken out in her wheelchair. Such people can teach us to see again the little things that make a big difference. They can show us how to enjoy familiar environments with fresh new eyes.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
#79. There aren't weird things; there are only familiar and unfamiliar things!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#80. For now, I just want things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known.
Ann M. Martin
#81. That taught me a lesson I've always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard, they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them, they become soft.
Rebecca West
#82. It is good to view things as familiar or unfamiliar, rather than as difficult or easy.
Kenny Werner
#83. Weed, are you familiar with the work of Carl Linnaeus? His Systema Naturae describes a classification system for all growing things."
Weed's eyes dart everywhere, probing every corner. "Unless he visited the madhouse, I never met him," he replies.
Maryrose Wood
#84. One of the things that I try to be conscious about in crafting a song is the concept of bringing it home. I like to bring it somewhere familiar, someplace that people feel it's resolved, it's settled.
Carole King
#85. The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
Ernst Mach
#86. Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person - you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.
Daniel Kahneman
#87. I think in my life I have so many things that changed so much with work and my career, and I don't really get to plan out a lot of my days. So when I have something that's familiar - just something that's there - I don't really like to switch it up.
Sevyn Streeter
#88. The whole town was like this, a mix of old and new, familiar and not. The things that had changed seemed out of place, and the things that had remained the same made Charlie feel out of place.
Scott Cawthon
#89. 'Heartbreak House' was a lot of fun for me. I must have missed that day at school. I'd never read it or seen it. It's one of those things that a lot of people are familiar with.
Laila Robins
#90. I don't know if any of this would have happened if we had been at home ... Would we have crammed ourselves into the bathroom of a San Francisco restaurant to play her song? I doubt it. There's something about distance, being removed from what's familiar, that let's things happen.
Nina LaCour
#91. And the truth is, sometimes my sisters and I do get jealous, and sometimes we do say things to-and about-one another that are thoughtless and rude. We don't meant them, though. It's just whenever we're together, we slip into our old familiar roles.
Jillian Medoff
#92. And my chest swells with an emotion I'm not familiar with . . . happiness? Pride? I'm not sure what it is, but I suddenly feel compelled to do things that will make me feel this way all the time, which gives me pause, since that seems dangerous too.
Kelly Thompson
#94. Running through things because you are familiar with them, breeds routine and this is the seed of boredom.
James Galway
#95. Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation.
Kathryn Harrison
#96. Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.
Barbara Kruger
#97. What merit there is in my thinking is derived from two peculiarities: (1) My inability to be familiar with anything. I simply can't take things for granted. (2) My endless patience. I assume that the only way to find an answer is to hang on long enough and keep groping.
Eric Hoffer
#98. If you want things to change to different things, you must think different thoughts. And that simply requires finding unfamiliar ways of approaching familiar subjects. Ask and it is given.
Esther Hicks
#99. Been having a fight with your blankets, Septimus?" A familiar voice echoed down the chimney. "Looks like you lost," the voice continued with a chuckle. "Not wise to take on a pair of blankets, lad. One, maybe, but two blankets always gang up on you. Vicious things, blankets.
Angie Sage
#100. As an actor, I'm familiar with having bursts of energy, where you're giving things a try, and then you have down time.
Iain Glen
