Worthwhile Things Quotes

Well, I think it's extraordinarily fun to write, and I look forward to it every day, but that doesn't mean I think it's easy. There's a difference between the two. It's fun in the way all worthwhile things are fun – there's difficulty attached to it. I think that a writer has to accept a certain amount of frustration. It's inherent in the task, and you have to simply persevere. It's part of the definition of the work. ~ David Guterson

For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. ~ Mark Bauerlein

And it certainly wasn't a choice without risk. But then very few worthwhile things in life are. The greater the risk, the greater the reward. ~ Heather Hackett

Situations in life often permit no delay; and when we cannot determine the course which is certainly best, we must follow the one which is probably the best. This frame of mind freed me also from the repentance and remorse commonly felt by those vacillating individuals who are always seeking as worthwhile things which they later judge to be bad. ~ Rene Descartes

Live an active life among people who are doing worthwhile things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them. The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life. ~ Dale Carnegie

Great things can happen when you don't care who gets the credit. ~ Mark Twain

If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. ~ Brian Tracy

Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Sometimes the most worthwhile things are right in front of our eyes. We just make them hard because we think that gives them more value. ~ Karen Rose

The person who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. ~ Pablo Casals

All human beings seek the happy life, but many confuse the means - for example, wealth and status - with that life itself. This misguided focus on the means to a good life makes people get further from the happy life. The really worthwhile things are the virtuous activities that make up the happy life, not the external means that may seem to produce it. ~ Epictetus

There are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world of ours: children and art. ~ Stephen Sondheim "Sunday In The Park With George"

Worthwhile things never come easily ~ Mirna El Mahdy

I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there's no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics. ~ Edmund Hillary

The most fruitful and worthwhile thing I have ever done has been to teach. ~ Harvey Dunn

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
~ Robert W. Service

our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them. ~ Neil Postman

While the things that motivate us differ greatly from one person to the next, the outcomes do not. ~ Tom Rath

[S]omething inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible. ~ C.S. Lewis

Magic,' said Odd, and he smiled, and thought, if magic means letting things do what they wanted to do, or be what they wanted to be ... ~ Neil Gaiman

I admire leaders in science, people who really figure things out like Richard Fineman or people who work on vaccines, tons of people working on [the] HIV vaccine. There's leaders in business, people like Warren Buffett, who've got a certain approach they take that are pretty amazing. There [are] product innovators like Steve Jobs was, where he gets behind a concept and does a fantastic job. ~ Bill Gates

When we were working on 'Julie & Julia,' I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven't made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren't a grown-up. ~ Nora Ephron

I am the voice of the voiceless; Through me the dumb shall speak. Till the deaf world's ears be made to hear. The wrongs of the wordless weak. And I am my brothers keeper, And I will fight his fights; And speak the words for beast and bird. Till the world shall set things right. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Rincewind trudged back up the beach. "The trouble is," he said, "is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so. ~ Terry Pratchett

GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it has the same effect. All the best things we have, when abused, will cause bad things to happen. The need for sacrifice, to obey, to make a gift of your life is in all of us and it's a deep thing. In the Islamic world today, people are trying to rejoin themselves to an antiquated and ancient faith and the result is massive violence when they encounter people who have not done that. We'd say that sense of sacrifice is good but only if you're sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another's life you've overstepped the mark. ~ Roger Scruton

Happiness isn't what happens when you whistle along, pretending bad things don't exist ... Happiness is earned, like everything else. It's achieved. ~ Marisa De Los Santos

I'm not someone who is scared of doing things out of the box. ~ Kirsten Dunst

If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you. ~ Peter Thiel

The thing is, the studio then forget that you're an actor and that you can do other things, and so since they pay you for that, they don't want you to do anything else. ~ Charles S. Dutton

Why do we focus on certain things at the expense of others? We will risk our lives to save a person from drowning, yet not make a donation that could save dozens of children from starvation. We install solar panels when their impact on CO2 emissions is minimal - and indeed may have a net negative effect if manufacturing and installation are taken into account - rather than contributing to more efficient infrastructure projects. ~ Graeme Simsion

Mrs. Casey, do you love Christmas?
Well you know, she answered reflectively, Christmas can be a sad time for people too. It's a remembering time for us older ones. We remember the people who are gone.
Oh, I never thought of that, I told her in surprise.
Well that's youth for you, she said; you don't start to look back over your shoulder until there is something to look back at, and around Christmas I tend to think of the Christmases past and the people gone with them. ~ Alice Taylor

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going. ~ Molly Haskell

If you want an active schedule, you have to husband your time so you can act on the things that are important. ~ Robert Pozen

If someone is brought in for an interview, for example, and is asked about their views on things, but has posted things that are completely contrary to the interview, frankly I have much more faith in what they posted than what they say during the course of an interview. ~ Adam Schiff

This is a jury of your peers. They watch the same TV movies. They belong to Oprah's Book Club. You can take any monster, slap a bad dad into his past, and all of a sudden he's just another lost soul, lashing out. And you were the poor lady that got in the way. They'll argue you lacked compassion. You were the one who took things too far. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I think there's so much feeling among young girls where they feel like they have to be this perfect thing - and they don't. Perfect people don't exist. Sometimes people need to be told it. ~ Niall Horan

We make art. We do not feel the need to cut things apart to see what they're made of. ~ Holly Black

...this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire.

So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs...

So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide:

Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one.
Give me comfort, give me edge.
Give me novelty, give me familiarity.
Give me predictability, give me surprise.
And we ~ Esther Perel

What is life if it's not in pursuit of the things we love? ~ Krista Ritchie

You see, I could no longer be trusted around beautiful things and my weakness was apparent ~ Liza Ward

As long as something teaches you some things, do not be afraid of it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff. ~ Pete Hamill

I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Rude is arrogance. Rude is feeling like you're above people. Getting to the point of things ain't rude, sugar. ~ Belle Aurora

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all. ~ Rachel Cusk

It's been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet
it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. I think about how to do it, you know. How to kill them. All kinds of elaborate things, like trapping them in pits and burying them alive, or covering them with concrete. ~ Rachel Caine

One of the things that struck me as unique about Hollywood is that I never had bad meetings. There were all enthusiastic, but meaninglessly enthusiastic. ~ Mark Leyner

I'd have found it amusing enough, I dare say, if I hadn't been irritated by the thought that these irresponsible Christian zealots were only making things harder for the Army and Company, who had important work to do. It was all so foolish and unnecessary - the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for? In ~ George MacDonald Fraser

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate. ~ Mos Def

You do not see what I see
How can you when all you do is use your eyes
But I look deeper and further than the deepest ocean
I notice the frown lines and the smile lines ~ Soulla Christodoulou

The right thing to do usually comes straight from your gut. When you work fast, you tend to work more from the gut, because your mind simply doesn't have as much time to justify an easier way to do things. ~ Larry Winget

I'm not registered to any party. I don't really play in the political world. I'm really more interested in getting things done. ~ Gary Sinise

Janie starched and ironed her face and came set in the funeral behind her veil. It was like a wall of stone and steel. The funeral was going on outside. All things concerning death and burial were said and done. Finish. End. Never-more. Darkness. Deep hole. Dissolution. Eternity. Weeping and wailing outside. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I don't want to be rude," he said, "but I need to know about Cyra."
Ara folded her hands over her stomach. "What about Miss Noavek?"
"Is she…?" He couldn't quite say the word.
"She is alive."
He closed his eyes, just for a tick letting himself think about her again. She was lively in his memories, fighting in the training room like war was a dance, searching windows into black space like they were paintings. She made ugly things beautiful, somehow, and he would never understand it. But she was alive. ~ Veronica Roth