H Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with H. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“How often I failed in my duty to God, because I was not leaning on the strong pillar of prayer.”
Source: The Life of St. Teresa of Avila
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
“How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.”
Source: Encounters with silence
“How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.”
“how often I longed to lovingly administer release! ... to have the courage and the right, after the soul is fled, to stop the poor wretched machine, that exists only to suffer and cause suffering.”
Source: The Garden of Eden
“How often in life are you going to find your mate and that mate happens to be your same exact age and happens to have had the same life experiences to match where you are in our life so you guys can meet perfectly and give society what it wants? It just doesn't happen that way. Some people evolve at 24, some people are 60 and are still evolving. So why are we stopping these great connections based on age, or race or colour or whatever, gender, whatever? You meet who you meet and you connect because of your life experience.”
“How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities?”
Source: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
“How often in life must one be content with what one can get!”
Source: Closing the Ring
“How often in life we complete a task that was beyond the capability of the person we were when we started it.”
“How often in our lives have we withheld the truth from someone we’re supposed to love? We justify it by telling ourselves we’re doing them some kindness, when in reality, we’re just being selfish. We don’t want them to know the truth because if they did, well, they might not love us anymore. How many of us have ever felt that no one would love us if they knew the real us? Love bears all things, the Bible tells us. The truth is, everyone who really loves you can bear the real you.”
Source: Cut
“How often in the throes of our trials do we trip over the lesson?”
Source: Daddy's Little Girl: A Father's Prayer
“How often in your life have you been criticized for having the feelings you do?. Did this make you feel invalidated?. How often do you simply stuff your feelings and agree with others, saying yes, when you really mean no.”
Source: The Ten Commandments of Self-Esteem
“How often is blindness the fear of vision rather than the lack of it?”
“How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”
Source: Emma
“How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”
“How often is insanity the excuse for sanity run amuck?”
“How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I’ve chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I’ve chosen to exercise out of a passion for change?”
Source: Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living
“How often is the battle less about the battle and more about being strengthened because of the battle?”
“How often is the division that we are experiencing a product of our having looked for division at the exclusion of everything that’s not divided?”
“How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.”
“How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.”
“How often it is a small, almost unconscious event that makes a turning point.”
“How often it is that a small action becomes great by its intention. And how often it is that a great action becomes small by its intention.”
“How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.”
Source: DUNE
“How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?”
Source: The works of the most reverend Dr. John Tillotson, late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: containing fifty four sermons and discourses on several occasions. Together with The Rule of Faith. Being all that were published by His Grace himself and now collected into one volume, to which is added an alphabetical table of the principle matter
“How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.”
“How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas?”
Source: Works: Account of His Life and Letters
“How often must you be betrayed before you see that others are taking your kindness for weakness, your silence for an inability to speak?”
Source: There and Never, Ever Back Again: Diary of a Dark Lord
“How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom”
Source: A Portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith: Drawn from His Letters and Diaries, and Introduced by John Russell
“How often on an expedition have I told myself, "That's enough!" and then a few weeks later when the effort, worry, and hardship were forgotten, I began dreaming about a new journey, planning a new climb. Pretty soon I'd be off again. And once again, it would be dangerous.
I never intended to risk my neck, but I knew that if I were ever to stop dreaming or traveling I would be old. And that would drive me to despair.”
Source: My Life at the Limit
“How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and clearness is there, maybe the result of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.”
Source: East of Eden
“How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.”
Source: Guesses at Truth
“How often one talks not to hear what the other person has got to say, but to hear what one has got to say oneself!”
Source: Collected Poems
“How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around!”
Source: The Essays
“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.”
Source: Roving Mind
“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.”
“How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries established by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility?”
“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”
Source: The Hours
“How often the highest talent lurks in obscurity.”
“How often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House.”
“How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”
Source: The Power and the Glory
“How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.”
Source: Toys in the Attic
“How often the very means of liberation we choose become the chains that bind us.”
“How often we all have heard speakers begin by calling the attention of the audience to their lack of preparation or lack of ability. If you are not prepared, the audience will probably discover it without your assistance.”
Source: The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking
“How often we expect big things from God without preparing for big things from him”
“How often we forget to dedicate ourselves to that which truly matters! We forget that we are children of God.”
Source: The Blessing of Family: Inspiring Words from Pope Francis
“How often we have had cause to regret that the histrionic art, of all the fine arts the most intense in its immediate effect, should be, of all others, the most transient in its result! - and the only memorials it can leave behind, at best, so imperfect and so unsatisfactory!”
Source: Memoirs and essays, illustrative of art, literature and social morals
“How often we have to thank the sense of beauty of some former country worker for sparing a sapling when cutting a hedge or taking a slip of some doomed tree and setting it 'quick i' the earth' to bloom for those who have come after.”
Source: A Countryman’s Summer Notebook
“How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)
“How often we see the greatest genius buried in obscurity!”