What Counts Quotes

All technologies are neutral. What counts is who uses them and what they use them for. Any material, any tool in the hands of an artist, can result in a work of art. ~ Ken Robinson

The real winners are not those at the top but those who have come the farthest over the toughest roads. Your victory may never make the headlines. But you will know about it, and that's what counts. ~ Ernest A. Fitzgerald

Showing up is what counts. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What counts is not the enormity of the task, but the size of the courage. ~ Matthieu Ricard

When you are racing in an able-bodied competition, you're all equal and you go out there and try your best, and that's what counts. ~ Natalie Du Toit

Okay, so if that's not real, what is? What counts, to you?" He thought for a second, then said, "I don't know. Just because someone's pretty doesn't mean she's decent. Or vice versa. I'm not into appearances. I like flaws, I think they make things interesting." I wasn't sure what answer I'd expected. But this wasn't it. For a second, I just sat there, letting it sink in. "You know," I said finally, "saying stuff like that would make girls even crazier for you. Now you're cuteand somewhat more attainable. If you were appealing before, now you're off the charts. ~ Sarah Dessen

What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing. ~ Pablo Picasso

There are various virtues of what counts as a best explanation, and I imagine familiarity is one of them. ~ William Lane Craig

My most treasured possessions are not things; they are only things, my friends, family and animals are what counts. ~ John The Apostle

You can't be a doctor. Only boys can be doctors. Leroy's got to be the doctor."
"You're full of shit, Spiegelglass, Leroy's dumber than I am. I got to be doctor because I'm the smart one and being a girl don't matter."
"You'll see. You think you can do what boys do but you're going to be a nurse, no two ways about it. It doesn't matter about brains, brains don't count. What counts is whether you're a boy or a girl."
I hauled off and belted her one. ~ Rita Mae Brown

What counts is a way to get along with people that will bring us personal satisfaction and, at the same time, not trample upon the egos of those we deal with. ~ Les Giblin

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Getting rid of Bin Laden is good for the cause of peace worldwide but what counts is to overcome the discourse and the methods - the violent methods - that were created and encouraged by Bin Laden and others in the world. ~ Ismail Haniyeh

It's easy to get people's attention, what counts is getting their interest. ~ A. Philip Randolph

It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others. ~ Stefan Petrucha

What counts in the ring is what you can do after you're exhausted. The same is true of life. ~ Muhammad Ali

What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple. ~ Paulo Coelho

Once you're out here in the world, nobody cares where you used to live. Who you are, that's what counts. ~ Jennifer R. Hubbard

A cat is a responsibility after all. And feeding and keeping and caring about a stupid fat cat isn't much, isn't much in the entirety of what counts for being a person and the huge range of what people do,but it is something. It is something and it's something that's warm and that I still have. ~ Steven Hall

What counts is not the years in your life but the life in your years. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson II

To exist is to defy all that threatens you. To be a rebel is not to accumulate a library of subversive books or to dream of fantastic conspiracies or of taking to the hills. It is to make yourself your own law. To find in yourself what counts. To make sure that you're never "cured" of your youth. To prefer to put everyone up against the wall rather than to remain supine. To pillage whatever can be converted to your law, without concern for appearance. ~ Dominique Venner

Any damn fool can build homes. What counts is how many you can sell for how little. ~ William Levitt

Three things:
1- Stop letting pride win. Don't let it destroy and unravel friendships and loves. We blinked, and it's the holidays again. How many more laps around the sun are left? Life is slippery and fleeting, and distance so cold. Stay humble and warm. Remember what counts.
2- Be unapologetically in love with everything. People and the cosmos. Poetry and oceans. The growth everywhere from roses to your heart to the messes that brought you to this level. The ground beneath you. The feeling. Any feeling. The fact that you can feel at all- forever a privilege.
3- Stay tender. Always tender. ~ Victoria Erickson

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts. ~ Aristotle Onassis

What are you doing extra? That's what counts. That's when you're working hard - when you're going above and over what's expected of you" (102). - Tony Gonzalez, "The Giant Within ~ Denzel Washington

For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences. ~ William Barrett

Life goes on without regard to our whims. What we make of life is what counts, how we address the challenges in our lives determines our respective levels of personal accomplishment and happiness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies. ~ E. O. Wilson

It has become fashionable to speak of the Enlightenment as an idiosyncratic construction by European males in a bygone era, one way of thinking among many different constructions generated across time by a legion of other minds in other cultures, each of which deserves careful and respectful attention. To which the only decent response is yes, of course - to a point. Creative thought is forever precious, and all knowledge has value. But what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment. If we ask whose ideas were the seeds of the dominant ethic and shared hopes of contemporary humanity, whose resulted in the most material advancement in history, whose were the first of their kind and today enjoy the most emulation, then in that sense the Enlightenment, despite the erosion of its original vision and despite the shakiness of some of its premises, has been the principal inspiration not just of Western high culture but, increasingly, of the entire world. ~ Edward O. Wilson

I've always tried to tell myself that the work itself is the thing, that win, lose, or draw, the work is really what counts. ~ Julius Erving

Painting is just a tool; it is nothing in itself. What counts is how you do it. ~ Michele Cassou

What counts is not the data, but the mind that deals with
them. The data that Galileo, Newton, Ricardo, Menger, and
Freud made use of for their great discoveries lay at the disposal
of every one of their contemporaries and of untold previous
generations. Galileo was certainly not the first to observe the
swinging motion of the chandelier in the cathedral at Pisa. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Original discoveries, to remind you, are what counts the most. Let me put that more strongly: they are all that counts. They are the silver and gold of science. ~ Edward O. Wilson

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news. ~ Michael Ignatieff

In the theater of confusion, knowing the location of the exits is what counts. ~ Mason Cooley

Believe me that in every big thing or achievement there are always obstacles-big or small- and the reaction one shows to such obstacles is what counts, not the obstacle itself. ~ Bruce Lee

The capability of human life is beyond our imagination. What counts is the human capacity to investigate and transform our own mind and the world around us in a powerful and positive direction. ~ Gelek Rimpoche

What counts in Hollywood is box office. It doesn't really matter what people think of you as an actor because, as long as you have been in a movie that has made money, you will always get another job. ~ Diane Kruger

My room is much better than Axel's and that's what counts, right?" "That's right," Dad said. "Hey!" Axel said. ~ Aileen Erin

You're out there, Lespere. It's all over. It's just as if it had never happened, isn't it?"
"No."
"When anything's over, it's just like it never happened. Where's your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?"
"Yes, it's better!"
"How?"
"Because I got my thoughts, I remember!" cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.
And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And thus knowledge began to pull Hollis apart in slow, quivering precision.
"What good does it do you?" he cried to Lespere. "Now? When a thing's over it's not good any more. You're no better off than me."
"I'm resting easy," said Lespere. "I've had my turn. I'm not getting mean at the end, like you. ~ Ray Bradbury

As a young girl, I was much more preoccupied by my flaws. Everyone teased me because of my long, skinny neck. To hide my so-called deformity, I was wearing a turtleneck when I was 3! Yet my neck is probably my best asset. At the end of the day, what counts is the entire package. ~ Iman Abdulmajid

Men are of no importance. What counts is who commands. ~ Charles De Gaulle

We do not strive for spectacular actions. What counts is the gift of yourself, the degree of love you put into each of your deeds. ~ Mother Teresa

But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That's what counts. ~ James McBride

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life. ~ Julian Barnes

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth - that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. ~ Michel Foucault

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead. ~ Nelson Mandela

I don't care what you play, where you're from, who you produce. It depends on what you're doing when you're with me. That's what counts. I don't pre-judge anything or anybody. ~ Ziggy Marley

Books are like people. They can be beautiful on the outside and it's wonderful when they are, but what counts is the inside. And the inside of a book can be communicated in a dozen different ways, and cheaply enough that everyone can have access. And everyone should. ~ M.C.A. Hogarth

Coming up with the answers quickly and accurately is what counts the most. ~ Toru Kumon

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. ~ Eric Hoffer

Perfection is what you are striving for, but perfection is an impossibility. However, striving for perfection is not an impossibility. Do the best you can under the conditions that exist. That is what counts. ~ John Wooden

Because what matters, what counts, isn't how well you are loved, but how able you are to give love. ~ Richard House

Being honest is what counts. To make the ordinary extraordinary is so much better than starting with the extraordinary. ~ Ricky Gervais

What counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. ~ Albert Camus

The spirit of a nation is what counts-the look in its eyes. ~ Jean Giraudoux

Our religion does not discriminate according to color, sex or anything else. What counts is piety and faith. ~ King Hussein I

It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations" that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind. ~ Georges Bataille

When a thing is told to you and you can't remember it happening it doesn't count somehow. It is as though it had nothing to do with you. Remembering, that's what counts. ~ Brian Moore

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it's what the learner learns. ~ Alfie Kohn

What really matters is that you do what you think is right, what you believe in, and you surround yourself with the people you care about in this world. That's what counts in this life. ~ Brian Dennehy

We live in a world where action is what counts. ~ Melinda McGraw

What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it. ~ Frantz Fanon

Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming. ~ E. O. Wilson

Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is the enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current ... ~ Miguel Serrano

Deficit reduction is the demand of the financial institutions and the superrich, and in a rapidly declining democracy, that's what counts. ~ Noam Chomsky

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation. ~ Gustav Mahler

What counts as genuine consciousness, I will argue, is conscious access-the simple fact that usually, whenever we are awake, whatever we decide to focus on may become conscious. Neither vigilance nor attention alone is sufficient. When we are fully awake and attentive, sometimes we can see an object and describe our perception to others, but sometimes we cannot-perhaps the object was too faint, or it was flashed too briefly to be visible. In the first case, we are said to enjoy conscious access, and in the second we are not (and yet as we shall see, our brain may be processing the information unconsciously). ~ Stanislas Dehaene

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go. ~ Cesare Pavese

It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone. ~ Bryce Courtenay

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. ~ Thucydides

What counts is the cultural level ~ Ezra Pound

Gender provides a revealing entrance into the world's religious traditions. How gender is viewed reflects itself not simply in the moral practices of those traditions, but in their metaphysics. Gender shapes their worldview and ethos. In Taoism, for example, ultimate reality is feminine, and what is seen as truly powerful is what adapts and adjusts. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam privilege the masculine. For these religions, what counts for ultimately is the power to control and command. Religions are gendered entities, although often presenting themselves as something simply natural or God-ordained, and therefore objective and universal. Viewing the various religions through the lens of gender, opens up a hidden landscape. It reveals what is usually veiled, puts voices into officially sanctioned silences, and makes more complex what we see and hear and learn from the past. It enriches our grasp upon the heritage of the sacred. ~ John C. Raines

A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything
needed for the extravagant journey that is his life. What counts
for a warrior is being alive. Life in itself is sufficient,
self-explanatory and complete.
Therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the
experience of experiences is being alive. ~ Carlos Castaneda

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There is another important point: encountering the poor. If we step outside ourselves we find poverty. Today-it sickens the heart to say so-the discovery of a tramp who has died of the cold is not news. Today what counts as news is, maybe, a scandal. A scandal: ah, that is news! Today, the thought that a great many children do not have food to eat is not news. This is serious, this is serious! We cannot put up with this! Yet that is how things are. We cannot become starched Christians, those over-educated Christians who speak of theological matters as they calmly sip their tea. ~ Pope Francis

Regardless of all what you have done or the treasures you have acquired on earth, what counts before God is what you have invested in the Kingdom of God ~ Sunday Adelaja

In the end, it doesn't matter what words are said or unsaid ... Life's mistakes are made whether you can see them or not. What counts is how we learn to live with them. ~ Gail Tsukiyama

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight- it's the size of the fight in the dog. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

It is not the years that count; what counts is what you did in those years. ~ Debasish Mridha

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your engagement in the social media environment what counts are: Comments and Sentiment. ~ David Amerland

What counts is the question, of what is a body capable? And thereby he sets out one of the most fundamental questions in his whole philosophy (before him there had been Hobbes and others) by saying that the only question is that we don't even know [savons] what a body is capable of, we prattle on about the soul and the mind and we don't know what a body can do. ~ Gilles Deleuze

She says you should never wake dreaming people suddenly,' Rahel said. 'She says they could easily have a Heart Attack.'

Between them they decided it would be best to disturb her discreetly rather than wake her suddenly. So they opened drawers, they cleared their throats, they whispered loudly, they hummed a little tune. They moved shoes. And found a cupboard door that creaked.

Ammu, resting under the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with her love for them....

...'If you're happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count' Estha asked,
'Does what count?'
'The happiness--does it count?'
She knew exactly what he meant...
...Because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple, unswerving wisdom of children. ~ Arundhati Roy

As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes,or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, or who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance. ~ Laura Mulvey

What counts in any man is the consistency and integrity of his behavior, and his courage in taking a stand, not his conformity to official dogma. ~ Joost A.M. Meerloo

Ll K Hamilton
Some days the lion eats you, but some times you shove your arm down it's throat and pull it's visera out through it's mouth and kill it. Of course, sometimes it bites your arm off, and then eats you, but you tried, that's what counts. Some days it's not about winning, but about fighting. If you don't try, the lion will most definetely eat you. But sometimes when you put your all into something, and don't give up even when the odds are so against you, you surprise the lion and yourself, and you win. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Know what matters most to you and be unwilling to compromise those priorities at almost any price. ~ Frank Sonnenberg

Any man can shoot a gun, and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately, but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you. ~ Louis L'Amour

I always like to win. But I'm the big sister. I want to make sure she has everything, even if I don't have anything. It's hard. I love her too much. That's what counts. ~ Venus Williams

Your Barney?" Cole's eyebrows shot up.
"Yours?"

"He's mine all right!" Claire replied.

"Everyone in this family belongs to everyone else – belongs with everyone else, rather. I've looked after him for a year now – ironed his shirts, made his school lunches, told him stories. I made that dressing gown he's wearing, whereas no one knew you were alive this time last week. But what matters most is that he wants to be ours and he doesn't want to be yours. That's what counts. ~ Margaret Mahy

I've started doing my Kathak, and I rehearse every day. Also, I'm eating right and keeping in shape. I'm a non-smoker and non-drinker and essentially a happy person. That's what counts the most. Your well-being is reflected in your personality. ~ Madhuri Dixit

I record the events of my life, filling up one notebook after another. Maybe I'm not getting the details exactly right, but it doesn't matter. The strict facts hold no currency here. What counts is the saliva I just spat on this very sheet of paper. The thick gob slowly dissolves a small circle in the text and turns the words translucent. The ink starts to bleed. The fibers loosen. If you run your fingers along this paragraph, you'll find the site where I stabbed my thumb straight through the page. There is an entire world in that hole. ~ Jeff Jackson

Where you begin doesn't matter. Your willingness to start is what counts. ~ Rhonda Britten

It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts. ~ Orhan Pamuk

All the luminous and loving episodes of any relationship you have had in your life continue to exist in the present at all times, no matter how old they are and regardless of any unpleasant experience you may have had in those same relationships. As you acknowledge the luminous episodes, they return to life. If you can retrieve their memory at any time, those moments will always be with you. The fact of whether you are physically in those relationships or not is completely irrelevant. What counts is your capacity to treasure any luminous relationship, no matter how long it lasts, or whether it is past or present. Authentic relationships are not bound by time. You are not the victim of time. By selecting and holding the memories you value in time you lay the foundations for your future memories. ~ Franco Santoro

Everything that happens before Death is what counts. ~ Ray Bradbury

Bit by bit, putting it together ...
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art.
Every moment makes a contribution,
Every little detail plays a part.
Having just the vision's no solution,
Everything depends on execution,
Putting it together, that's what counts. ~ Stephen Sondheim