M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Most of us live in parts of the world where we don't expect to see much, and we wouldn't necessarily notice things that are crashing.”
“Most of us live in the illusion that we control our thoughts. However, in reality, the situation is quite the opposite.”
“Most of us live in the past and resist living in a new future. Why? The body is so habituated to memorizing the chemical records of our past experiences that it grows attached to these emotions. In a very real sense, we become addicted to those familiar feelings. So when we want to look to the future and dream of new vistas and bold landscapes in our not-too-distant reality, the body, whose currency is feelings, resists the sudden change in direction.”
Source: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
“Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.”
“Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less.”
“Most of us live our lives devoid of cinematic moments.”
“Most of us live our lives like toads, sitting perfectly still, under a plantain leaf. We are waiting for a fly to come our way. When it comes out darts the tongue. We nab it.
That is all. We eat it.”
Source: Death in the Woods and Other Stories
“Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own.”
“Most of us lived through the years when spam threatened to destroy e-mail. Today, democracy is being weakened by lies that come in waves and pound our senses the way a beach is assaulted by the surf. Leaders who play by the rules are having trouble staying ahead of a relentless news cycle and must devote too much effort trying to disprove stories that seem to come out of nowhere and have been invented solely to do them in.”
Source: Fascism: A Warning
“Most of us love a non-self, or something extrinsic and apart from our inner life; but a mother's love during the time she is a flesh-and-blood ciborium is not for a non-self but for one that is her very self, a perfect example of charity and love which hardly perceives a separation. Motherhood then becomes a kind of priesthood. She brings God to man by preparing the flesh in which the soul will be implanted; she brings man to God in offering the child back again to the Creator.”
“Most of us love timesavers because they give us more time to waste.”
“Most of us make an effort to do and be the best we can be, which leads to a distinction we need to make between the notion of struggle and the notion of effort.”
“Most of us make unconscious choices in the words that we use; we sleep-walk through the maze of possibilities available to us.”
Source: Awaken The Giant Within
“Most of us manage the fateful things that happen in our lives the best we can, certainly not to a Stalin-like 20-year plan.”
“Most of us may intuitively agree about right and wrong, but we also, and far more significantly, differ enormously in the ways in which we rank the virtues and the vices. ... To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God; pride - the rejection of God - must always be the worst one, which gives rise to all the others. However, cruelty - the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear - is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When it is marked as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of itself, and not because it signifies a denial of God or any other higher norm. It is a judgment made from within the world in which cruelty occurs as part of our normal private life and our daily public practices. By putting it unconditionally first, with nothing above us to excuse or to forgive acts of cruelty, one closes off any appeal to any order other than that of actuality. To hate cruelty with utmost intensity is perfectly compatible with Biblical religiosity, but to put it first does place one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion. For it is a purely human verdict upon human conduct, and so puts religion at a certain distance. The decision to put cruelty first is not, however, prompted merely by religious skepticism. It emerges, rather, from the recognition that the habits of the faithful do not differ from those of the faithless in their brutalities, and that Machiavelli had triumphed before he had ever written a line. To put cruelty first therefore is to be at odds not only with religion but with normal politics as well.”
Source: Ordinary Vices
“Most of us--maybe all of us--are broken in some way. Depending on who we are, those cracks can either let in the darkness or the light.”
Source: Ambush
“Most of us miss our best opportunities in life because they come to us disguised as work.”
“Most of us, most of our lives, are asked to live small. Most of us quit trying very young to live the bigness we know is possible.”
Source: Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans
“Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long ago, the images of which require recognition, not invention.”
Source: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
“Most of us, most of the time, are neither innately moral, nor immoral, but amoral. Our moral compass will largely depend on our personal and political circumstances as well as our perceived emotional self-interest.”
“Most of us must learn a great deal every day in order to keep ahead of what we forget.”
“Most of us must learn to love people and use things rather than loving things and using people.”
Source: The Light in the Heart
“Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.”
Source: A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis
“Most of us need to be reminded that we are good, that we are lovable, that we belong. If we knew just how powerfully our thoughts, words, and actions affected the hearts of those around us, we'd reach out and join hands again and again. Our relationships have the potential to be a sacred refuge, a place of healing and awakening. With each person we meet, we can learn to look behind the mask and see the one who longs to love and be loved.”
“Most of us never stop to consider our blessings; rather, we spend the day only thinking about our problems. But since you have to be alive to have problems, be grateful for the opportunity to have them.”
Source: 365 Prescriptions for the Soul: Daily Messages of Inspiration, Hope, and Love
“Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people.”
“Most of us only put in as much effort as a situation requires from us. If we can 'get away' with being less considerate or less reciprocal, and various other forms of 'getting without giving,' many of us will, not because we're evil, but simply because we can. If people demanded or expected more of us we would do more, but when they don't, we don't make the effort. This dynamic is true in practically every relationship we have. When our self-esteem is low and we expect very little of others, we are likely to get very little from them as well.”
Source: Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries
“Most of us outgrow the religion of our childhood just like we outgrow children’s clothing. Both experiences are traumatic. Both experiences are necessary.”
“Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to "save" our way to capital ownership.”
“most of us persist in regarding leadership as synonymous with - indeed solely derived from - high position. Perhaps the notion of grass-roots leadership strikes us as too much of an oxymoron; confronted with apparent paradox, our imaginations fail. ... I believe that in the future, our ideas about the nature of leadership will undergo a radical transformation. As the instrumental use of knowledge continues to redefine the nature and purpose of organizations, we will begin to look at those on the front lines for leadership.”
“Most of us prefer to be as quiet as possible about giving, because every time it's publicized that we do something, if it's something of the nature of giving, we'll be doubly besieged, and you really get sick of being always criticized no matter what you do.”
“Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but t is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.”
Source: Trust
“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.”
“Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.”
Source: Psychology: The Briefer Course
“Most of us readily take things for granted that at an earlier time remained to be discovered”
“Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature”
“Most of us recognize how important it is to listen respectfully when our loved ones are talking; but we often forget that it is equally important to talk respectfully when they are listening.”
“Most of us regard good luck as our right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right.”
Source: The Business of Life
“Most of us remain strangers to ourselves, hiding who we are, and ask other strangers, hiding who they are, to love us.”
“Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.”
“Most of us remember fondly our grandmothers' and mothers' kitchens but it can hardly be true that all of them enjoyed cooking. For most of history, and even today, cooking has not been a choice for women and, in the most extreme of cases, it has been the reason for their deaths. The luxury to be able to choose to cook is a class privilege. What to make of it, then?!”
Source: Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia
“Most of us respond with panic when we get what we want. The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. We let success get to our head and start acting in over-confident ways. This is the beginning of self-destruction”
“Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods.”
“Most of us save our best behavior for those whom we barely know and show our worst side to those we know the best.”
Source: Nine Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage: Because a Great Relationship Doesn't Happen by Accident
“Most of us see Justice O'Connor as something of an icon, although we do not agree with all of her decisions.”
“Most of us seldom take the trouble to think. It is a troublesome and fatiguing process and often leads to uncomfortable conclusions. But crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.”
Source: Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: Advisory Board: M. Chalapathi Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, and B. R. Nanda; General Editor: S. Gopal
“Most of us sleepwalk through our lives. We take all its glories, its wine, food, love, and friendship, its sunsets and its stars, its poetry and fireplaces and laughter, for granted. We forget that experience is not, or should not be, a casual encounter, but rather an embrace. Consequently, for too many of us, when we come to the end, we wonder where the years have gone. And we suspect we have not lived.”
“Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples’ worlds — working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment — and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn’t quite ring true. And so you make your place in the world by making part of it — by contributing some new part to the set. And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.”
Source: Art and Fear
“Most of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead, the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks, separations, and crises in life. [...] By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.”
Source: The Laws of Human Nature
“Most of us spend our lives convinced that there's something missing: "If only I had a bigger barbecue, more money, a bigger car, a different wife, a different.... If only I could upgrade somehow, then I would be okay."”