Top 100 Second Hand Sayings
#1. What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead
#2. I'm really interested in fashion but at the same time I find it quite competitive. Second-hand stuff leaves you more open to whatever your own personal style is rather than feeling dictated to by shops.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor
#3. The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage - it's okay for clothes not that great for people
Karl Lagerfeld
#4. The second-hand artist blindly following his sensei or sifu accepts his pattern. As a result, his action is and , more importantly, his thinking become mechanical. His responses become automatic, according to set patterns, making him narrow and limited.
Bruce Lee
#5. I'd practically groped her under the guise of helping her get out a stain, but still, she looked like she found me about as appealing as second-hand underpants.
L. H. Cosway
#6. Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.
Mark Twain
#7. I have stood in a bar in Lambourn and been offered, in the space of five minutes, a poached salmon, a leg of a horse, a free trip to Chantilly, marriage, a large unsolicited loan, ten tips for a ten-horse race, two second-hand cars, a fight, and the copyright to a dying jockey's life story.
Jeffrey Bernard
#8. We're not dictated by the calendar, nor does the calendar sweep the obstructions from our lives when the second hand reaches midnight in the wee and fleeting hours of December. We can choose to move toward something new at any time.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#9. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else's insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of second-hand clothing, worn out and passed down.
Damien Echols
#10. Up until recently, I've always been a vintage store guy. I get a lot of my clothes second hand. I really enjoy being able to look through different styles you can find and how eclectic the vintage store vibe is.
Jack Falahee
#11. Man is evolving ... but it's difficult to see his progress with a Western perception of time. The Hindus think of time in much larger segments. They watch the hour hand of the clock while we in the West are preoccupied with the second hand.
David Lynch
#12. Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.
Chuck Palahniuk
#13. I bought almost every single thing that I furnished my house with at the Salvation Army in Hawaii. All second hand. Some of them are kind of retro, and some of them you'd never know.
Evangeline Lilly
#14. Unlike Ronan, Adam's Aglionby jumper was second-hand, but he'd taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.
Maggie Stiefvater
#15. My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books.
Alejandro Amenabar
#16. Why do 'slow down' and 'slow up' mean the same thing? Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?
George Carlin
#17. I've always been quite thrifty. I can't bear to spend hundreds of pounds on designer clothes. I shop in second-hand shops in Portobello Road and go to Sue Ryder.
Ashley Jensen
#18. I wear a lot of second hand clothes unless I have a concert and then I wear beaded and sequined second hand clothes. No stylist dresses me although I do have a woman that assists me with the buttons.
Chris Isaak
#20. If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.
Mark Haddon
#21. Time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.
Brian Eno
#23. I do a lot of vintage shopping. I love going to second-hand stores.
Victoria Justice
#24. Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Ben Hecht
#25. To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.
Virginia Woolf
#26. I was 17 years old when I built the first store ... A very simple, basic store with a basic counter - not very much equipment, all purchased second-hand. And the menu was very simple.
Fred DeLuca
#27. I think my favourite song on the album [Second Hand Rapture'] is 'Head Is Not My Home', I love the vocal melody and it's such a power hit of a track. Every time it pops on I like listening to it, I'm really drawn to it.
Lizzy Plapinger
#28. He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate ...
David Foster Wallace
#29. Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.
Herta Muller
#30. I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.
P. J. O'Rourke
#32. A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
Virginia Woolf
#33. If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
#34. The world comes second hand - fifth hand - to us and the illusion that it is fresh because it is shown as a picture of an actual place or is given as a 'true account' by some reporter who claims to have been 'there' divides man into incalculable parts without any true center.
Josephine Herbst
#35. your second-hand bicycles in the alleyways
John Altman
#36. Second hand books have a way of travelling, sure. But what travels forward can come back.
Cath Crowley
#37. For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.
Michel Faber
#38. Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
Charles Dickens
#39. Char bought a pack of clove cigarettes, claiming they tasted good, to which I ask why doesn't she just go suck on a clove so I don't have to inhale her perfumed second hand smoke?
Julie Halpern
#40. My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.
Wentworth Miller
#41. A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That's the second hand, George.
Dennis Miller
#42. Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.
Terry Eagleton
#44. Mark Twain said "all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
Sean Patrick
#45. Demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second hand books.
Graham Joyce
#47. My sister and I are both diagnosed with second-hand smoke syndromes. We have never smoked, but we grew up with second-hand smoke our entire lives.
Loni Anderson
#48. No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.
Tom Stoppard
#49. Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.
Charles Caleb Colton
#50. Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock ...
Ann Patchett
#51. What is love but a second-hand emotion?
Tina Turner
#52. I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
John Le Carre
#53. I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel
#54. True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.
William Hazlitt
#55. An old dream with a shiny new veneer. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and antiquated hysteria.
("The Chymist")
Thomas Ligotti
#56. When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.
S.A. Tawks
#57. In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.
Tana French
#58. He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
Henry David Thoreau
#59. When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E. M. Forster
#60. I'd open the door in the morning and the slightly sweet smell of second hand books would greet me. For years I wondered just what that smell was. In the end I decided it was the smell of human thought embedded in paper.
Heather Rose
#61. It is obviously no secret that I earn a lot of money. But it is also no secret that I give most of it away. I don't live a luxurious life. I drive a small second-hand Fiat. I don't have to worry about money, which is itself a privilege. But I never had any anxiety that I would lose my identity.
Henning Mankell
#62. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Galway Kinnell
#64. A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.
Anais Nin
#65. Chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.
Ray Bradbury
#66. Why is the third hand on a watch called a second hand?
Steven Wright
#67. I'm a chalkboard that's been erased over and over again until there's nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the space between seconds can be.
Sarah McCarry
#68. [ ... ]to be real
to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate.
Tom McCarthy
#69. She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the experiences of her more privileged friends.
Edith Wharton
#70. I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.
Mark Twain
#71. On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.
William Faulkner
#72. Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith ...
Dean Koontz
#73. The nimble lie
Is like the second-hand upon a clock;
We see it fly; while the hour-hand of truth
Seems to stand still, and yet it moves unseen,
And wins, at last, for the clock will not strike
Till it has reached the goal.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#74. Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.
Stephenie Meyer
#75. People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.
David Ogden Stiers
#76. A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
Samuel Butler
#77. Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: ', with love from Momma.
Vincent Starrett
#78. I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.
Alastair Reynolds
#79. If second hand smoke is killing that many people and nicotine is so addictive then why is no one addicted to second hand smoke?
Doug Stanhope
#80. You are the minute hand and I am the hour hand. The female said and continued, "You move that's why I move." "And what about the second hand?" The man queried. "That's our love for each other. We move because, and only if, it moves.
Novoneel Chakraborty
#81. I suspect that for a good deal of the time you live in a sort of glass case, not knowing real enthusiasm or genuine emotion; or feeling them perhaps at second hand, feeling them sometimes because you think you ought to, not because you really do.
Winston Graham
#82. The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
George Steiner
#83. Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.
Karl Kraus
#84. All ideas are second-hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.
Richard Branson
#85. Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#86. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and out-of-date distractions.
Thomas Ligotti
#87. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. Pass it does. Even for me.
Stephenie Meyer
#88. I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it.
Michael Crichton
#89. Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Virginia Woolf
#90. If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
Gary Hume
#92. Photography extends our perception allowing us to see and experience more - second hand.
John Paul Caponigro
#93. More and more we're negating the validity of first-hand experience of people from other countries and other cultures ... whether it's on TV, the Internet, mobile phones or whatever - the world system we live in so values second-hand information.
Nitin Sawhney
#95. By nature, an auction is kind of a wholesale beast anyway. You're buying second hand goods, even with the historical, antique or aesthetic value. You look to get the wholesale price and you hope for retail spikes periodically when you get two or three people in the audience that want the same thing.
Paul Brown
#96. I get highs, to be totally honest, in second-hand shops. My hunting instinct, I expect, really kicks in.
Bjork
#97. It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
D.H. Lawrence
#98. Do not make the writer stand behind a podium. Anything but. A podium reeks of the lecture hall. A music stand, on the other hand, is nicely minimal and lends the writer - who usually needs all the help s/he can get - a musician's second-hand cool-factor.
Lynn Coady
#99. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
Julian Barnes
#100. I was the child at school in second-hand or handmade clothes and, as I grew older, I craved material wealth, a big house and designer clothes.
Roz Savage
