W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“We seem to have lost the gift of patience, of waiting for time to unfold its story.”
Source: Gardening in the Desert: A Guide to Plant Selection and Care
“We seem to have lost the wisdom of the indigenous people, which dictated that in any major decision, the first consideration was 'How will this decision we're making today affect our people in the future? These days, decisions are made based on the bottom line.”
“We seem to have lost. We have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future.”
“We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”
“We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.”
“We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.”
“We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.”
“We seem to invest so much time and belief that those things are stable in some way - something to build towards, or something to use to better understand where we come from. So often those expectations are just so out of line with how the universe works. I don't see it as a productive way of seeing the world, so, when I deal with that stuff formally - or when I try to allow it to inspire me - I'm open to it twisting itself up.”
“We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.”
“We seem to know when to 'tap the heart.' Others have hit the intellect. We can hit them in all emotional way. Those who appeal to the intellect only appeal to a very limited group. The real thing behind this is: we are in the motion picture business, only we are drawing them instead of photographing them.”
“We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.”
“We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)”
“We seem to live in a world where you have to walk around grinning like a loon. I can’t understand all the fuss about Mona Lisa painting, everyone wondering why she’s not smiling, if she’s depressed or heartbroken. No, she was just normal!
Emotions are always extreme these days: you either have to be crying with laughter or crying in pain. No wonder water levels are rising. It’s not global warming, it’s all the tears from crying.”
“We seem to live in an age of accelerating polarities where the good become better, the bad worse, the smart smarter, the dumb dumber, the kind kinder, the mean meaner, the rich richer, the poor poorer, the happy happier, and the unhappy ever more so.”
“We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome .. but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it.”
“We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.”
“We seem to want mass production, but we must remember that men are individuals not to be satisfactorily dealt with in masses, and the making of men is more important than the production of things.”
“We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.”
Source: Hang-ups: Essays on Painting (mostly)
“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”
Source: The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures
“We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze.”
“We seemed to be drifting as a society - losing touch with the basic concepts of right and wrong.”
“We seemed to be trapped in an episode of One Life To Waste. It's all very dull.”
Source: City of Ashes
“We seemed to have arrived at a reality only to abandon it or exchange it for something that claimed to be another reality.”
Source: Peeling the Onion
“We seemed to have emerged upon a snowy curve of mountainside below a glacier--- I believe we were in Faerie, for there were two little stone houses tucked in amongst the jagged icicles at the glacier's edge, with smoke curling from their chimneys. One had an apple tree in its yard, the apples coated in a rind of ice. The icicles themselves were like a forest of glittering trees, through which the fox faerie was darting, deeper into the glacier.
"Hurry up!" the faerie called.
I hurried, against my better judgment I might add, but then that is almost always the case when interacting with the Folk; stumbling into an impossible forest of icicles is not the most ill-advised thing I have done in my career. The forest made little plinking sounds and reflected our darting shapes strangely. In the distance, there was music.”
Source: Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands
“We segregate men from women, and no matter how many times we insist that men and women are equal, men and women should be treated the same, when it comes to the moment of excretion, even the most modern society - especially the most modern society - segregates two restrooms with little icons outside the doors, one wearing a dress, one wearing pants.”
“We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.”
“We seldom break our leg so long as life continues a toilsome upward climb. The danger comes when we begin to take things easily and choose the convenient paths.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche
“We seldom call anybody lazy, but such as we reckon inferior to us, and of whom we expect some service.”
“We seldom enjoy leisure we haven't earned.”
“We seldom find any person of good sense, except those who share our opinions.”
“We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.”
“We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention.”
“We seldom give each other advice-I think that's the success of 25 years of marriage.”
“We seldom have originals these days, just clever copyists.”
“We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.”
Source: TransAtlantic
“We seldom know what we truly deserve, lost between underestimating and overestimating ourselves.”
“We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.”
“We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.”
“We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.”
Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With Murphy's Essay
“We seldom look up to the person; we usually look up to their persona.”
“We seldom make logical mistakes, but often have mistaken logics.”
“We seldom praise anyone in good earnest, except such as admire us.”
“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”
Source: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
Source: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much: a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows and, but which all the world does not practice”
“We seldom repent talking little, but very often talking too much.”
“We seldom require more to the happiness of the present hour than to surpass him that stands next before us.”
Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq
“We seldom speak of the virtue which we have, but much oftener of that which we lack.”
“We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.”
“We seldom stop to think how many people's lives are entwined with our own. It is a form of selfishness to imagine that every individual can operate on his own or can pull out of the general stream and not be missed.”