Top 100 Thing One Quotes
#1. The first thing one must want, in order to gain anything, is to be himself gaining. Don't confuse sterile wishing with true wanting.
Edna Robinson
#2. As long as I can make that audience one thing, one unit, then I'm okay with it. But, sometimes, the bigger the audience, the weirder it gets.
Brian Regan
#3. From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire (Seminar 7, 319)
Jacques Lacan
#6. I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.
William, Saroyan
#7. ...the assertion that you live in a lie while I live in the truth is the most cruel thing one person can say to another...
Leo Tolstoy
#8. Madame Lefoux shrugged. I do not know about that, my lady. I mean to say, one's life is one thing; one's technology is an entirely different matter.
Gail Carriger
#9. I see women in their 30s getting plastic surgery, pulling this up and tucking that back. It's like a slippery slope - once you start you pull one thing one way and then you think, 'Oh my God, I've got to do the other side.'
Halle Berry
#10. Within these premises, the only thing one can be is an impeccable mediator. One is not the player in this cosmic match of chess, one is simply a pawn on the chessboard. What decides everything is a conscious impersonal energy that sorcerers call intent or the Spirit.
Carlos Castaneda
#11. If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
Aldous Huxley
#12. A smile is often the key thing.One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded with a smile. One is brightened by a smile. And the quality of a smile can make one die.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#13. It was likely, then that this - -this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field- - meant death. Death - -the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point.
C.S. Lewis
#14. Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#15. What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.
Terry Tempest Williams
#16. Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.
Oscar Wilde
#17. But I know that in order to get to the end of a thing, one must start at the beginning.
Michelle Zink
#18. And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep.
John Steinbeck
#20. O love, what strange and wonderful fits: one sole thing, one beauty alone, can give me life and deprive me of wits.
Gaspara Stampa
#21. I know only one thing. One doesn't abandon family. One doesn't leave them, even in the name of love.
Alyson Richman
#22. There may be a certain amount of pleasurable excitement in running up to the top of a hillock in the hope of seeing your ball near the flag, but this kind of thing one gets tired of as one grows older.
Alister MacKenzie
#23. all human beings need to keep this energy in movement. So, the first thing one must understand is that it is made up of two extremes, which walk side-by-side during the entire act: relaxation and tension.
Paulo Coelho
#24. If you were a warrior, you would know that the worst thing one can do is confront human beings directly.
Carlos Castaneda
#25. There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. The most important thing one can do for children is not accept the limitations they are so willing to impose on themselves.
Ruth Simmons
#27. There's also something of an illusion in that, you can perhaps record a TV thing one month and complete a book the next and then be in a play. Then, if they all come out at once, it looks as if you're actually juggling a million things.
Jane Asher
#28. The ability to earn a living by doing the thing one loves must be one of life's greatest gifts.
Jojo Moyes
#30. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.
Oscar Wilde
#31. Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.
Michel Faber
#32. A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.
J. P. Morgan
#33. The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
Sloane Crosley
#34. Prayers are a very personal and sacred thing. One prays when one feels like. Feel disgusted when I see people forcing others to pray, carry out certain rituals or chant the prayers loudly on loudspeakers.
Neelam Saxena Chandra
#35. His face was like a law of nature - a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
Ayn Rand
#36. In this thing one man is superior to another, that he is better able to bear adversity and prosperity.
Philemon
#37. Can we not will ourselves to achieve the impossible? Can we not use the power of our life force to change something: one small thing, one insignificant moment, one breath, one gesture? Is there nothing we can do to change what is around us?
Garth Stein
#38. Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing.
Virginia Woolf
#39. A dreadful thing one day befell me when a horse came to stand on my toe. Having no power to remove him, I found that I could not go.
An awful thing sometime later befell me when the horse was removed from my toe. Alone and with naught to secure me, I found I was forced to go.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#40. The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian.
Amy Carmichael
#41. As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.
Laura Esquivel
#42. A heart given freely is the most vulnerable and selfless thing one can offer another human being. It can be as fragile and needy as a newly born infant, or as solid and self-supporting as a granite pillar, yet it is the hands of the recipient that determines its ultimate fate.
Mark W. Boyer
#43. The first thing one learns about typography & type design is that these rules are made to be broken.
Jeffery Keedy
#44. I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person's struggle against society.
Joshua Mohr
#45. The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized - never knowing.
Jim Rohn
#46. Self-satisfaction is the ultimate thing one can achieve in life.
Manish Pradhan
#47. Look, you can't think of a person like it's one thing, one 'I' that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn't make a decision, it arrives at one.
Daryl Gregory
#48. The Lord is always there waiting to give us his love: it is an amazing thing, one which never ceases to surprise us!
Pope Francis
#49. To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again - gradually you begin to think like a writer. Ideas are not found - they are shaped.
Avi
#50. The most self-serving thing one can do is live their life selflessly. Selflessly give your experience. Selflessly give your knowledge. Selflessly give your time. Selflessly give whatever it is you have to give. And the world will rise to meet you.
Steve Harper
#51. I am tired to death! tired of every thing! I would give the universe for a disposition less difficult to please. Yet, after all, what is there to give pleasure? When one has seen one thing, one has seen every thing.
Fanny Burney
#52. The thing one resents about winter is its inactivity; the perpetual sameness of ice-armored hills and snow-blanketed woods. Great things, of course, may be going on underneath; but nature wears a mask, is icily non-committal.
Anne Bosworth Greene
#53. Was not love a terrible thing? One thought one had learned to manage it, and then it sprang free again, rattling its claws in one's liver.
Meredith Duran
#54. The first thing one notices about Jill Abramson is her short stature. The second is her intensity.
Gail Sheehy
#55. The only thing one can count on is that no one else can truly be counted on. Alice
Kate Morton
#56. It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.
Seneca The Younger
#57. A love that is twisted is a terrible thing. One thing worse than that is a life without any love at all.
Kendra Sunderson
#58. [T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. What is it about legs? Or what is it about breasts? Or the small of the back? What is it about anything? One day there will be no difference between anything. It'll all be the exact same thing. One day you'll look in the dictionary and there will be only one word and you'll just have to make do.
Jonathan Goldstein
#60. We have seen that there are two misconceptions involved in the myth that memory is a thing. One is that memory is a thing (a tangible structure rather than an abstract process) and the other is that memory is a thing (one memory rather than many memories).
Kenneth L. Higbee
#61. Sometimes the thing one wants most is the very thing that will get him killed with an axe.
Brian South
#62. My child, I bless you from my heart that you live long, attain devotion, and enjoy peace. Peace is the principal thing. One needs peace alone.
Sarada Devi
#63. The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#64. The only thing one can do one day one did not do the day before is to die.
Elizabeth Montagu
#65. You know you are truly alive, when you care for every living thing. One day soon, it will be the norm to view others not as competition, but gifts to share this gorgeous planet with, and we will not be able to imagine the loss of but one.
Tom Althouse
#66. If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything
Shunryu Suzuki
#67. Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America.
Oscar Wilde
#68. Happiness is the only thing one should ever be resigned to.
Alfred Capus
#69. Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#70. The search for one's first professional job is not unlike a magical love potion: when one wants to fall in love with the next thing one sees, one generally does.
Sloane Crosley
#71. Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don't have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don't even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising.
Robin Hobb
#72. Death is such a strange thing. One minute you're here and then just gone. You'd think there would be an anteroom, a place where you could be visited before you go.
John Banville
#73. The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.
Mary MacLane
#74. The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#75. We may live in an age when everything has to be "radical" and "revolutionary." For Luther the most radical thing one could do was to learn the basics of the faith with the simple trust of a little child.
Carl R. Trueman
#76. It was a strange thing: one never appeared to take a step forward int he heart or mind of this man. Those who wished, so to speak, to force their way into intimacy with him found the path blocked.
Alexandre Dumas
#77. Without Merlin, there would be no Gandalf, so I see them as the same thing, one a continuation of the other.
Katie McGrath
#78. You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
George R R Martin
#79. Now there was no sign of any foul weather, but when one wishes to do a thing . . . one finds no lack of reasons for the doing.
Howard Pyle
#80. For I was never able to understand, then or later on, why, if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it. For I have never waited to do as I wished. This has frequently brought me to disaster and calamity, but at least I have the satisfaction of getting my own way.
Isadora Duncan
#81. Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
Michel Foucault
#82. You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#83. Stray thought for the day: Putting boundaries on how punk should sound/look is the least punk rock thing one can do. Be yourself=Very punk.
Patrick Stump
#84. Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football.
Orhan Pamuk
#85. So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.
Andrew Delbanco
#86. One thing - one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H Gass
#88. Overly positive, horrendously cheerful people can make a depressed person even more depressed. In fact, perhaps the least helpful thing one can say to a depressed person is, "Cheer up!"
Harold H. Bloomfield
#89. There is one thing. One thing that haunts me from page one to page twenty-two. I have never spoken of it. I have never told another person
James Frey
#90. That's the thing about being hooked on a girl. You see what else is going on around you. You notice other girls. But it doesn't register the same way it used to. You only care about one thing, one goal. And sometimes, being so focused on what you want, you can't see what everyone else does.
Susane Colasanti
#91. One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#92. She was, after all, at home on D ward, more than she had ever been anywhere, and for the first time as a recognizable and defined thing - one of the nuts. She would have a banner under which to stand.
Joanne Greenberg
#93. To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life.
Rick Bass
#94. Are you really an orphan?
Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you?
No, not at present, but I suppose it's a thing one is bound to be.
Elizabeth Bowen
#95. The greatest of blessings can come from what appear to be the smallest and most insignificant of things. Don't discredit anything or anyone. One person, one tiny thing, one little shift can change your life in enormous ways.
Patience W. Smith
#96. As far as I was concerned, the best thing one could do for the poor was to not add one's self to their number.
Ken MacLeod
#97. Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it.
Thomas Moore
#98. It's a funny thing, one day you're living and the next day you're not sometimes, whether you have plans or not. Wishes and wants get trumped by the reaper every time. I don't even know if I would want a warning if it was my time. I think I'd rather be surprised.
Dan Groat
#99. I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary Oliver
#100. English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.
Paul Scott
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