Quotes by theme

nothing

Quotes including the word “nothing”.

154 results
Great the Alexander

There is nothing impossible to him who will try.

Maya Angelou

You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.

Thomas Aquinas

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

Aristophanes

Why, I'd like nothing better than to achieve some bold adventure, worthy of our trip.

Marcus Aurelius

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.

Jane Austen

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

Bach

There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

Bach

The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.

Francis Bacon

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

Matsuo Basho

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.

Bataille

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”

Beckett

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Beckett

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

Henri Bergson

Time is an invention and nothing else.

Borges

“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

Andre Breton

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

Andre Breton

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

Amílcar Cabral

“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories...

Calderon

In this treacherous world Nothing is the truth nor a lie. Everything depends on the color Of the crystal through which one sees it”

Chateaubriand

There is nothing beautiful or sweet or great in life that is not mysterious.

Joseph Conrad

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

cummings

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Marie Curie

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Salvador Dali

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Delacroix

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

Demosthenes

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what every man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Dickens

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

Emily Dickinson

Saying nothing; sometimes says the most.

Diogenes

It is the privilege of the Gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Will Durant

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Will Durant

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Umberto Eco

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”

Eminescu

A man can have everything having nothing and nothing having everything.

Exupery

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Faulkner

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

Flaubert

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Flaubert

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Fontaine

Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred.

Robert Frost

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Plinius Gaius

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Galeano

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.

Galileo Galilei

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

Galileo Galilei

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Carlos Gardel

Twenty years is nothing.

Gauguin

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Goethe

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

Goethe

Nothing is worth more than this day.

van Gogh,Vincent

“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Nikolai Gogol

...nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book... ...

Nadine Gordimer

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

Patrick Hearn

No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before.

Martin Heidegger

“Why are there beings at all, instead of nothing?”

Hemingway

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Hemingway

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Heraclitus

Everything flows and nothing stays still.

Hesiod

A man wins nothing better than a good wife, and then again nothing deadlier than a bad one.

Hippocrates

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words. Walking is the best medicine.

Homer

While sane, nothing shall I compare with a friend.

Horace

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work. ---- Whatever advice you give, be short.

Ted Hughes

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

Na Hye-sok

the experience taught me: nothing is impossible.

Juan Jimenez

To live is nothing more than to come here to die, to be what we were before being born, but with apprenticeship, experience, knowledge of cause, and perhaps with will.

Frida Kahlo

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

Immanuel Kant

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Kazantzakis

I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.

Kazantzakis

I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

John Keats

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

John Keats

I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.

Omar Khayyam

Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since "the rest of your life" won’t last forever

Kierkegaard

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”

L. Martin King,

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Arthur Koestler

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Kropotkin

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.

Per Lagerkvist

No, the man said, looking past him with his empty gaze, the realm of the dead isn't anything. But to those who have been there, nothing else is anything either.

Laozi

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Vinci da Leonardo

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”

Rosa Luxemburg

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

Antonio Machado

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road-- Only wakes upon the sea.

Andre Malraux

To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.

Karl Marx

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Somerset Maugham

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.

Cecilia Meireles

The song is everything. The rhythmic wing has eternal blood, And I know that one day I shall be dumb: — Nothing more.

Herman Melville

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

John Milton

Nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on what is just and right.

Yukio Mishima

What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world.

Moliere

I become quite melancholy and deeply grieved to see men behave to each other as they do. Everywhere I find nothing but base flattery, injustice , self-interest, deceit and roguery. I cannot bear it any longer; I'm furious; and my intention is to break with all mankind.”

Moliere

“The more we love someone, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that true love shows itself.

Montaigne

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”

Nabokov

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Napoleon

If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.

Napoleon

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide

George Orwell

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

Pascal

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Pascal

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Pascal

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Valery Paul

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Pessoa

Myth is the nothing that is everything.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Sylvia Plath

If you expect nothing from anybody, you are never disappointed.

Elder the Pliny

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Alexander Pope,

And die of nothing but from rage to live.

Proudhon

I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.

Proudhon

When deeds speak, words are nothing.

Marcel Proust

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

Raymond Queneau

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.

Racine

I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want.

Racine

There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it with reluctance.

Wilhelm Reich

I came to consider the instinct as nothing more than the "motor aspect of pleasure.

Remarque

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

Rilke

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible

Rilke

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

Robespierre

lf the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.

Henri Rousseau

Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.

Carl Sandburg

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Sartre

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Schiller

Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing.

Schopenhauer

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

Schweitzer

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory

Robert Scott

The attitude of the men is equally worthy of admiration...there is a rush to be first when work is to be done, and the same desire to sacrifice selfish consideration to the success of the expedition...Fortune would be in a hard mood indeed if it allowed such a combination of knowledge, experience, ability, and enthusiasm to achieve nothing.

Bernard Shaw

God is the hope, we all have inside us and keep us alive. God is the soul, or otherwise the energy we have inside us and help us to deal with everything in life. God is the birth, a new life from nothing, from no existence to existence.

Ahmed Shawqiν

It is not in vain that people frequent this planet, Nor is it for nothing they depart hence.

Mary Shelley

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

Socrates

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing

Sophocles

Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing.

Spinoza

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

Ramos Sucre

A man marries when he has nothing else to think about.

Talleyrand

Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.

Thales

Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it.

Henry Thoreau

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Thucydides

We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing.

Toulouse

Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.

Mark Twain

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Unamuno

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

Unamuno

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.

Unamuno

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

Paul Valery

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

Paul Valery

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising.

Washington

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Durant Will

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment.

Durant Will

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Durant Will

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Tennessee Williams

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

L. Wittgenstein

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

L. Wittgenstein

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

L. Wittgenstein

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

Yourcenar

Nothing is slower than the actual birth of human.

Emile Zola

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.