Basic Things Quotes

All I can do is just go in there and tighten up my game, tighten up my handles. Just all the little basic things that you wouldn't even think about, the fundamental parts of the game. ~ Derrick Rose

The basic thing is, people want to get paid, so they'll say the things that get them paid, in entertainment or politics. ~ Roseanne Barr

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things. ~ Harrison Birtwistle

The 'rob from the rich, give to the poor' is more of a general overview than a specific thing we have to do every time. It really means making sure those who have too much do some sharing with those who have too little, and it isn't always just about valuables or money or even basic things like food. It is also about sharing power and opportunities. ~ Garth Nix

Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them? ~ Jamie Zawinski

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn. ~ Steve Martin

If loyalty is, and always has been, perceived as obsolete, why do we continue to praise it? Because loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty there can be no family. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society. ~ Eric Felten

I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I'd always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I'd ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer. ~ Aspen Matis

Sometimes we forget the most basic things, since it has been too long since we learned them. I realized I had done the same with my own lesson plan. You do not teach students to throw until you have taught them to fall. And I must not teach you to fight if you do not understand how to lose. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly ~ Sebastian Junger

A good father does these basic things: provides for his family, protects his family, and gives spiritual and moral guidance. ~ David Blankenhorn

We just can't love without God. God wants for us want we want for ourselves. These basic things are not that hard to grasp. We just have to have faith, and faith is a gift. We just need to accept it. ~ Rich Mullins

There are etiquette things that actors, new actors, need to know about. Because it only takes one mess-up on a set to get fired. Not being where you're supposed to be or saying something to the wrong person that you're not supposed to say, and those are like basic things that the actors need to know. ~ Loretta Devine

When it comes to educating all of us about the most basic things in life, it seems to me we need more kindergartens and fewer graduate schools. ~ Andy Rooney

Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a an was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were to uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutly necessary to make a civilized society. ~ John Lame Deer

They were afraid of your authentic love, because authentic love is beyond their control.You are possessed by it. You are not the possessor, you are the possessed. And every society wants you to be in control. The society is afraid of your wild nature, it is afraid of your naturalness, so from the very beginning it starts cutting your wings. And the most basic thing which is dangerous in you is the possibility of love, because if you are possessed by love you can go even against the whole world. ~ Osho

And after a while, you just pare things down more and more and more, until you get to certain basic things which just - basic ideas which just seem to work for you over and over again. ~ Robert Barry

Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the type-writer, trying to get back to the book he'd come to New York to write. It was supposed to be about America, and freedom, and the kinship of time to pain, but in order to write about these things, he'd needed experience. Well, be careful what you wish for. For now all he seemed capable of producing was a string of sentences starting, Here was William. Here was William's courage, for example. And here was William's sadness, smallness of stature, size of hands. Here was his laugh in a dark movie theater, his unpunk love of the films of Woody Allen, not for any of the obvious ways they flattered his sensibility, but for something he called their tragic sense, which he compared to Chekhov's (whom Mercer knew he had not read). Here was the way he never asked Mercer about his work; the way he never talked about his own and yet seemed to carry it with him just beneath the skin; the way his skin looked in the sodium light from outside with the light off, with clothes off, in silver rain; the way he embodied qualities Mercer wanted to have, but without ruining them by wanting to have them; the way his genius overflowed its vessel, running off into the drain; the unfinished self-portrait; the hint of some trauma in his past, like the war a shell-shocked town never talks about; his terrible taste in friends; his complete lack of discipline; the inborn incapacity for certain basic things that made you want to mother him, fuc ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I began to suspect that perhaps the problem lies not in God's goodness but in how we measure it. Laxmi and Kanakaraju and the women and children at the AIDS ministry, they prayed for basic things - food, shelter, health, peace - and they did not always receive. Yet I saw in their eyes the kind of joy and spiritual connectedness that most Christians I know long for. ~ Rachel Held Evans

On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away. ~ Edwidge Danticat

We use the Air Force analogy: there were expensive things they had to do to get a cockpit suitable for a lot of pilots, like wraparound windshields, but their initial solutions, when they realized average didn't work, were adjustable seats. How in the world did they not already have adjustable seats in their planes? We're looking for adjustable seats for education, for basic things that we can do. ~ L. Todd Rose

Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status. ~ Sebastian Junger

If I can get a day to myself, I won't answer the phone, I'll read or go for a walk. Simple, basic things. People think there's always time to do that but there isn't. Life is short. ~ Viggo Mortensen

You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that's happening. It's probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures. ~ Marjane Satrapi

I want to do the basic things, like putting my daughter to bed. It's the sweetest thing. ~ Tom Douglas

But one thing you have to understand clearly is that it is the man who longs for domination, and it is the woman who dominates. This is what I call coexistence: live and let live. More than that is all imagination. If you really had known what love is ... the basic thing is not to create a relationship. Stand aloof as the pillars of a temple stand aloof, but support the same roof. Don't destroy the individuality of the other, enhance it if you can; otherwise, at least leave it as it is, uninterfered with. ~ Rajneesh

If you'll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat has been told long ago to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channeled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope. ~ Philip K. Dick

Everything is being run by computers. Everything is reliant on these computers working. We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail. ~ Mikko Hypponen

God, you don't just barge in on my father, and definitely not my mother.
No way. You check with their personal secretaries first. Check out their moods. Then you make an appointment to slip in. There are basic things you learn when your parents run a planet. ~ Mike Shepherd

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does? ~ Phyllis Rose

There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on. ~ Michael Pollan

In keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. ~ Sebastian Junger

If you are doing all five of the basic things, do you know what the next principle of God's will is? Do whatever you want! If those five elements of God's will are operating in your life, who is running your wants? God is! ~ Anonymous

I write my lyrics the day I sing the song, so even when I have the basic things, I'm thinking what can I change, what can I add, how many harmonies can I do. ~ Kirk Windstein

The best way to look at any business is from the standpoint of the clients. So there are these certain basic things that aren't going to change. Companies are going to have needs for equity, debt, advice, FX, and derivatives. Individuals are going to have needs for auto loans, mortgages, something that looks like a deposit account, and the ability to send money to people. Those things aren't going to change. ~ Jamie Dimon

I'm sort of annoyed that some very basic things about poetic forms were not conveyed to me in the various poetry courses I took over the years. ~ Juliana Spahr

Every human being, he believed, must do one of three basic things during his lifetime: leave something living, create something lovely, or make something better. ~ Renee Manfredi

And when we draw lines in the sand with regard to certain basic things that are vital to our interest and to the interest of democracy and our friends around the world, we have to be willing to back that up. ~ Fred Thompson

To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit.
To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves.
When we listen to the better angels of our nature, we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things
such as goodness, decency, love, kindness.
Greatness comes in simple trappings. ~ Richard M. Nixon

This is crossing the Rubicon, after which there will be no more sovereign states in Europe with fully-fledged governments and parliaments which represent legitimate interests of their citizens, but only one State will remain. Basic things will be decided by a remote 'federal government' in Brussels and, for example, Czech citizens will be only a tiny particle whose voice and influence will be almost zero ... We are against a European superstate. ~ Vaclav Klaus

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else ... ~ Lucy Grealy

I see a couple of things missing. Any society, any community, even in the family, when the elders don't do their jobs, the youth suffer. We have no done our job. I'm saying anybody 55 and up. We didn't teach people the basic things. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

At their core, Americans all want the same basic things: a quality education for their children, a good job so they can provide for their families, healthcare and affordable prescription drugs, security during retirement, a strongly equipped military and national security. ~ Ruben Hinojosa

We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes? ~ Andrew Sullivan

The cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that? ~ Homaro Cantu

Love is really my nemesis. I never really allowed myself to indulge in such basic things because I was so motivated and thought that if I did I wouldn't succeed. ~ Marina And The Diamonds

One of the basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty. ~ Edward Witten

It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

My three had these things in common. They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and precious. ~ John Steinbeck

I know basic things about belly dancing, but not the technicalities; I want to learn it. I want to learn belly dancing. ~ Malaika Arora Khan

I've seen so many people - loved ones and colleagues - who jump from one diet to the next, one exercise regimen to the next . I was trying to figure out what were some of the basic things that each of us can build into a lifestyle for good, instead of bouncing from one thing to the next. ~ Tom Rath

Children always want the same things because they all need the same basic things. ~ Cecelia Ahern

The basic thing a man should know is how to change a tyre and how to drive a tractor. Whatever that bearded dude is doing on the Dos Equis beer commercials sets the bar. That's your guy. Every man should be aiming to be like him. The beard is just the tip of the iceberg. ~ Timothy Olyphant

I know, interference is one of the very few things that is apparently against the rules. I do not intend to interfere, I intend to learn his systems so I can stop having to constantly manage so much of the circus. ~ Erin Morgenstern

All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place, and the truth was in another. ~ John Le Carre

If listening was truly a lifesaving measure, then night shift was a prime time for saving lives. The cover of darkness provided safe cover for the truth to emerge. Confessions, words that people didn't even know resided in them, flew like startled bats into the night. People confessed to stealing things, to hurting people, to loving some and hating others. ~ Karla Theilen

Little things like time and generations don't matter very much with good friends who are fond of each other's company. ~ Ari Berk

I don't like this." Cormac punched the stone of the wall as he paced the room. He'd been periodically punching things all day and I'd been graciously not commenting on it. ~ Donna Augustine

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

She had been invited to dinners and luncheons and dances, but their doings, she told Dirk, had bored her.

"They're nice," she said, "but they don't have much fun. They're all trying to be something they're not. And that's such hard work. The women were always explaining that they lived in Chicago because their husband's business was here. They all do things pretty well  -  dance or paint or ride or write or sing  -  but not well enough. They're professional amateurs, trying to express something they don't feel; or that they don't feel strongly enough to make it worth while expressing. ~ Edna Ferber

It takes a lot of strength to hold onto and care for the things we love, so why is it that god seems to have made humans unable to conjure up that degree of power and love? ~ Ai Yazawa

It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already. ~ Jonathan Edwards

You feel your own life - your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to - and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: "God, it feels great to be alive!" That's delight. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean. ~ Nick Cave

Yet the basic fact remains: we live in a world marked by violence, and if we want to protect others, we sometimes have to be willing to fight. ~ Eric Greitens

Whenever things were going well, I started to feel vain. ~ Heather O'Neill

Someone told me once that Lucinda Williams takes six years between albums, and that's what stuck to me; it's like, you really are a factory. You don't do things to make them, on your own time. ~ Beth Ditto

Men and women thought and did noble and mean things that would have been impossible to them before or after. A man cannot drink old Bourbon long and remain in his normal condition. We did not drink Bourbon, but blood. ~ Rebecca Harding Davis

I begin to want things I've never wanted before: braids, a dressing-gown, a purse of my own. Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I've done these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly. Partly this is a relief. ~ Margaret Atwood

I think that is what you want to do as a cinemagoer - to experience something fully. Some things don't let you experience them fully. It may be your own preordained prejudice where you can't experience them fully. But when you come out of the cinema having felt, thought, and experienced your way through two hours, that is a really cool thing. ~ Colin Farrell

It's so crazy now with the Internet and being able to play shows to people who are actually interested in you. I still feel so lucky when that happens. Things just happen so fast. ~ Mac DeMarco

The first things people always ask are,
why?
And how?

But not with me.

I don't want to do anything.
I don't want to be anything.
I want to disappear elegantly.
I want people to look for my goodbye note
and find nothing but smoke. ~ Lora Mathis

•The key to fighting is never to fight unless the cause is so great that you couldn't bear not to defend it and the losses you are going to suffer are things that you could afford to lose. If you do fight, the thing to remember is that it is going to hurt because that is what happens in a fight and you might as well reconcile yourself to it in the beginning and then it will not matter when it happens ~ Jennifer Crusie

I don't want there to be things you "love about me", I want you to love "all of me". ~ Mathias Malzieu

I don't think anybody has ever been able to live up to what they promised. I don't know a government that has ever been successful at that because once they get into power, things change and the world is controlled also by business now. ~ Hugh Masekela

One of my favorite things is when people will ask for a song that I hadn't planned to play. It is really fun to see if you can remember something, and you don't always. I mean, sometimes it's just crash and burn. ~ Lyle Lovett

To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing. ~ Oscar Wilde

I love producing, I love bringing things together. ~ Kevin Spacey

One of the most loving things you can ever do for your spouse is to pray for them. "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7). ~ Alex Kendrick

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world. ~ Mohsin Hamid

One of the things I enjoy most during the World Cup is watching a team improve, mature, and gel during the course of the tournament. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be. ~ Julian Baggini

[M]rs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It's all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other's understanding: but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little things just to see how they are growing. Half the verbal sprigs we hand each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature: left longer in the ground they might have come to something, but once they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the fault, no doubt, of the times we live in. Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feels, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation. ~ Jan Struther

Ever since I was a kid, I've always thought it very important to be happy inside. There's a lot of bad things happening in the world, but it's important to try to stay happy and appreciate what you've got, and don't look externally for the happiness. ~ Ana Ivanovic

No matter what choice you make, it doesn't define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there's ever a choice you've made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice. ~ Jonathan Maberry

A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas, so that by noticing it, you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon; [that is,] those things that were presented unto your minds by the Spirit of God, will come to pass; and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation, until you become perfect in Christ Jesus. ~ Sam Smith

When I think of the flag ... I see alternate strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood to vindicate those rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Wherever we direct our attention, we spend creative energy. We can save creative energy if we divide attention, if we do not become identified with things, people, and ideas. When we become identified with things, people, and ideas, we then forget our Self and lose creative energy in the most pitiful way. It is essential to know that we need to save creative energy in order to awaken the consciousness, and that the creative energy is the living potential, it is the vehicle of the consciousness, it is the instrument in order to awaken the consciousness. ~ Samael Aun Weor

We live on a planet that is amazing, beautiful, and full of wonder but not protected from powerful destructive forces of nature. We are capable of doing wonderful and selfless things but also self-absorbed and harmful things. This is the world we live in. ~ Adam Hamilton