Being That One In A Million Quotes & Sayings

Practice being fully present with something. Perhaps you may find something of God there. Go outside and look at the stars. Not for just a few seconds - lay a blanket in the yard, lie on your back and really look at the stars. Try to let your heart feel the incomprehensible size and grandeur of the universe. Take the time to really attend to a meal, a good book, a piece of music, or a sunrise. The point is to be fully present, to not be swept up into the distraction of a thousand voices, but to learn how to simply and fully attend to one. Then, when one enters back into the noisy world that we live in, even the million colors together are more vibrant because you have learned to better see color in its essence. To truly see is to find hope. — Michael Gungor

Rory: "People are being serious."
Jazza: "There's a serial killer out there. Of course people are being serious."
Rory: "Yeah, but what are the chances?"
Jazza: "I bet all of the victims thought that."
Rory: "But still, what are the chances?"
Jazza: "Well, I imagine they are several million to one."
Jerome: "Not that high. You're only dealing with a small part of London. And while there might be a million or more people in that area, the Ripper is probably focusing on women, because all of the original victims were women. So halve that
"
Jazza: "You really need another hobby. — Maureen Johnson

He has one in a million chance of being with her, yet he dreams about that single chance every night. — Anonymous

If I could do it all over again, I'd probably still leave. Except, this time, I would hold you closer, tighter, longer. I would kiss you a thousand more times, tell you I love you ten thousand more times, have sex with you one million more times. I didn't get it right the first time when you were mine. If I could it all over again, I would value your trust, stand by your actions, and never take score...even though I'm totally winning. So if you can just find it in your heart to shut the hell up and love me, I swear with every fiber of my being that I will spend every possible minute loving you." A smile that flirts with cruelty lifts on his mouth. "Your move. I'm wearing to many clothes. — Elisa Marie Hopkins

An astronomer once explained to me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is vast, too vast to be understood without metaphor, so he gave me one. He said if you picture the Milky Way as being the size of mainland Europe, our solar system - that's Mars, Venus, Saturn, us here on Earth (you remember from school) - in a Milky Way the size of Europe our solar system would fit inside a single teacup somewhere in Belgium. He paused for my amazement, which I duly offered. But really what can you say? "Ooh, a teacup." "Blimey, Belgium." "Cor, it makes you think, doesn't it?" Then he added, clearly sensing I was at a bit of a loss for words, having just been reduced to a dot on a speck in a teacup in a continent: "Russell, there are 400 million KNOWN galaxies in our universe. — Russell Brand

She was talking too loud now, shouting almost, and a long silence followed. Why was she being like this? He was only trying to help. In what way did he benefit from this friendship? He should get up and walk away, that's what he should do. They turned to look at each other at the same time.
"Sorry," he said.
"No, I'm sorry."
"What are you sorry for?"
"Rattling on like a ... .mad cow. I'm sorry, I'm tired, bad day, and I'm sorry for being ... so boring."
"You're not that boring."
"I am, Dex. God, I swear, I bore myself."
"Well you don't bore me." He took her hand in his. "You couldd never bore me. You're one in a million, Em."
"I'm not even one in three."
He kicked her foot with his. "Em?"
"What?"
"Just take it, will you? Just shut up and take it. — David Nicholls

He thought how wonderful it would be if he could take off his shoes and walk barefooted in the grass the way he used to do in the park when he was a boy. What a fine picture that would be - the President walking barefooted on the White House lawn - and he knew if he did it the picture would be reproduced in one hundred million homes across the nation and the world and it would win him votes. The people liked to think of the President being a bit impulsive when it came to matters of the heart, a bit comic in domestic affairs, a bit inferior to each of them in some way.... — James Edwin Gunn

Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow the world. — Salman Rushdie

For decades afterwards, I punished myself with images of Sofia standing
naked in the snow, shivering, clutching a chunk of cement that a guard had told her was soap, in the worst winter Poland has ever known. But as I stared at the empty train tracks and thought of the stationmaster making the schoolyard slash across his throat, I had no idea what he was talking about. I could not have conjured up the kind of man who would be willing to design an oven that would be economically fueled by the fat of the men, women and children it was burning. I would not have believed that these same engineers would find other men willing to carry out their monstrous plans. I, too, would have dismissed it as propaganda, that one kind of human being could industriously collect and kill six million of another kind of human being. Somewhere along the line, there would have to be someone who said no.
Forgive me, Sofia. Forgive me, Isaiah. I did not know. — Helen Maryles Shankman

One of the things I like about being a celebrity is that you can get away with murder. Not just metaphorically, literally. Remember that annoying blond dog reporter at E News used to talk smack about me? I paid two mobsters five million dollars each to throw her off the Stratosphere tower in Las Vegas. — Zach Braff

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise, — Anonymous

Over the years of being stuck in this shit hole called life, I had debated religion and church, souls and freewill, heaven and hell.
I had come to a few conclusions. Mankind was too self-serving to understand what He had wanted from them. It wasn't a million dollar church, it wasn't perfection, it wasn't about how many times you prayed or apologized or that one day a month where you fed the homeless. And you weren't banished to hell for that one time you told someone to fuck off. You didn't end up in hell for that time you were a bitch to your fellow man.
It took a lot to end up there, and man worked at it with crazed enthusiasm. They worked harder at chiseling their way into hell, than any other action. — L.A. Kennedy

They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free - and not so that they could cast loose from Earth's terrible situation, not at all - rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

I think that an anthill is better than a nest ... that in the anthill among a hundred thousand or a million you are freer than in a nest, where all sit around and look at one another, waiting until scientists finally discover ways to make us mind readers ... the psychology of the nest is loathsome to me, and I always sympathize with one who flees his nest, even if he flees into an anthill, where it may be crowded but one can find solitude - that most natural, most worthy state of man, that precious and intense state of being conscious of the world and of oneself. — Nina Berberova

I can't lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn't love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn't want you and you will find a million.
Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn't showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive.
Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary. — Krystal Sutherland

It was fantastic to dive from the side of the boat into the dark waters, for as you hit them they burst into a firework display of greeny-gold phosphorescence so that you felt as though you were diving into a fire. Swimming under water, people left trails of phosphorescence behind them like a million tiny stars and when finally Leonora, who was the last one to come aboard, hauled herself up, her whole body for a brief moment looked as though it was encased in gold.
"My God, she's lovely," said Larry admiringly, "but I'm sure she's a lesbian. She resists all my advances."
"She's certainly very lovely," said Sven, "so beautiful, in fact, that it almost makes me wish I weren't a homosexual. However, there are advantages to being homosexual."
"I think to be bisexual is best," said Larry, "then you've got the best of both worlds, as it were. — Gerald Durrell

you're worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns' paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has passed. — Clay A. Johnson

By Blake's model, as I understand it, it's as though the Fifth Symphony existed already in that higher sphere, before Beethoven sat down and played dah-dah-dah-DUM. The catch was this: The work existed only as potential - without a body, so to speak. It wasn't music yet. You couldn't play it. You couldn't hear it. It needed someone. It needed a corporeal being, a human, an artist (or more precisely a genius, in the Latin sense of "soul" or "animating spirit") to bring it into being on this material plane. So the Muse whispered in Beethoven's ear. Maybe she hummed a few bars into a million other ears. But no one else heard her. Only Beethoven got it. He brought it forth. He made the Fifth Symphony a "creation of time," which "eternity" could be "in love with. — Steven Pressfield

In fact, when some wedding guest inevitably complains about the seating arrangements, you might point out how long it would have taken you to consider every possibility: assuming you spent one second considering each one, it would come to more than half a million years. The unhappy guest will assume, of course, that you are being histrionic. — Leonard Mlodinow

Everyone tells us to be one in a million ... What they don't tell us is that being one in a million also means being one against a million. — Saahil Prem

The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers. — John Taylor Gatto

I know you want to think Dad's fine with me being gay, but he's not."
"But if you don't tell me when people say things like that to you, or do things that hurt you, then how can I help you?" Simon could feel Isabelle's agitation vibrating through her body. "How can I-"
"Iz," Alec said tiredly. "It's not like it's one big bad things. It's a lot of little invisible things. When Magnus and I were traveling, and I'd call from the road, Dad never asked how he was. When I get up to talk in Clave meetings, no one listens, and I don't know if it's because I'm young or if it's something else. I saw Mom talking to a friend about her grandchildren and the second I walked into the room they shut up. Irina Cartwright told me it was a pity no one would ever inherit my blue eyes now ... It's not like a stab wound you can protect me from. It's a million little paper cuts every day."
( City of Lost Souls- Cassandra Clare) — Cassandra Clare

I couldn't help wondering where porpoises had learned this game of running on the bows of ships. Porpoises have been swimming in the oceans for seven to ten million years, but they've had human ships to play with for only the last few thousand. Yet nearly all porpoises, in every ocean, catch rides for fun from passing ships; and they were doing it on the bows of Greek triremes and prehistoric Tahitian canoes, as soon as those seacraft appeared. What did they do for fun before ships were invented?
Ken Norris made a field observation one day that suggests the answer. He saw a humpback whale hurrying along the coast of the island of Hawaii, unavoidably making a wave in front of itself; playing in that bow wave was a flock of bottlenose porpoises. The whale didn't seem to be enjoying it much: Ken said it looked like a horse being bothered by flies around its head; however, there was nothing much the whale could do about it, and the porpoises were having a fun time. — Karen Pryor

Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse. — Saul Bellow

More than nine million people a year come to the Smokies, many of them to picnic. So bears have learned to associate people with food. Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn't mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try to stroke it or feed it a cupcake or something. There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler's fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby's hand. — Bill Bryson

So, Kurt Cobain kills himself at 27 and becomes a legend. People like that are one in a million. I'm just a normal human being. I agonize and suffer, but I also laugh all the time. People all die someday and disappear as if they never existed, but that's natural. I though I wasn't afraid of dying. No, NOBODY is actually afraid of dying itself. The pain of suffering lasts for an instant. What truly agonizes me... Is the thought of your crying face from far far across the entire galaxy. You were always prettiest when you smiled. — Inio Asano

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite - on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel - keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one ... that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger - indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it - than it is a monumental distraction from hunger. — Caroline Knapp

5.5 Never sacrifice the safety and comfort of your group just to meet your budget. Do your homework and research your chosen carrier thoroughly. Obtain a certificate of insurance listing your organization as additional insured and displaying a minimum of five million dollars in liability. Understand and factor in that one driver can drive ten hours or six hundred miles, whichever comes first. That driver must then have eight hours of sleep before being available again to drive! Don't push the limit too hard! — Craig Speck

Here are two facts that should not both be true:
- There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet.
- Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population
2 billion men and women
malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. — Michael Dorris

How you got your college education mattered most." And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors "who cared about them as a person," or having had "a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams," or having had "an internship where they applied what they were learning." Those workers, he found, "were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being." There's a message in that bottle. — Thomas L. Friedman

There are some days when history is made. Yesterday was one - and I was honoured to be in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in. During his soaring inaugural address, the new president gazed over a teeming National Mall that was crowded with more than a million people. — Des Browne

I think the truth is that we are in love with the fantasy of being that one person who could inspire, arouse, or affect someone who is so untouchable to the rest of the world. It makes us feel special; like we're the diamond in the rough, the one in a million, the one that everyone else couldn't be, and do what everyone else couldn't do. Imagine being that significant to someone? To never have to doubt that he loves you, or needs you, or more importantly, wants you more than any other. — Christine Zolendz

I may ... pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets-that's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue-that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame ... [I] may partake of trendy diversions-that's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote ... represented a serious impact on our time-that's fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing-less than nothing, a positive impediment-measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty.8 — Richard D. Phillips

Got a job for you, Seven."
"Yeah?"
"I need you to find someone."
"Who?"
"A woman," I say. "About five and a half feet tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes."
"That describes half the women in New York."
"Yeah, well, the one I'm looking for is twenty-one or so," I say. "She's good-looking, kind of curvy for being so petite... got a red 'S' tattooed on her wrist..."
He stares at me, like he expects more information. "What else?"
I shrug, glancing at the high heels, flipping them over to look at the red soles. "She wears a size thirty-nine shoe."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Shouldn't be too hard," he says, blinking a few times as he looks at the ground. "Only a couple million people in the city."
"That's the spirit," I say, slapping him on the back. — J.M. Darhower

On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days ... Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate. — Henry David Thoreau

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder. — Donald Miller

The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

My grandfather used to say that everyone alive has already beaten the craziest odds, just being born. Like one in a trillion. Your parents could have had a million different kids, but they had you. And before that could happen, your parents had to be born themselves, and their parents had to be born. — Rebecca Stead

There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks? Whales are mammals, and mammals do not lay a million eggs. We were forced to give up commercial hunting and to raise domestic mammals for meat, preserving the wild ones as best we could. It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done. — Mark Kurlansky

Journalists were among those who thought that way. Clarke Beach, for example, in a September 6 article for the local newspaper, the Star-Bulletin, wrote, "A Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world, with one chance in a million of being successful. — Donald Stratton

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books ... — Mohsin Hamid

Someone asked me very recently why I have 8 million views on TED - "your work resonates, what are you doing?" What I think my contribution is, what I do well, is I name experiences that are very universal that no one really talks about. That's the researcher in me; that's really part of being a grounded theory researcher - putting names to concepts and experiences that people have. That's the researcher part. — Brene Brown

I am not bound by material things. It's being successful that drives me forward. I love success. I don't wake up in the morning thinking 'Great - I've got one million pounds in the bank'. I wake up happy because I am a successful part of a successful team. It's that success that brings all the media coverage, the first-night parties, the endorsements. I will never lose sight of that. It has come very quickly - sooner than even I expected. But it's great to know that if I continue in the same vein, then I can do exactly what I want with the rest of my life. I will be financially secure. — Kevin Pietersen

That's no doubt why Google took the lead in an astonishingly large $542 million investment round in Magic Leap last October. Whatever it is cooking up has a good chance of being one of the next big things in computing, and Google would be crazy to risk missing out. The investment looked especially prescient in January, when Microsoft revealed plans to release a sleek-looking headset this year. HoloLens, which lets you interact with holograms, sounds as if it's very similar to what Magic Leap is working on. — Anonymous

Love is the weapon which Omnipotence reserved to conquer rebel man when all the rest had failed. Reason he parries; fear he answers blow for blow; future interest he meets with present pleasure; but love, that sun against whose melting beams the winter cannot stand
that soft subliming slumber which wrestles down the giant, there is not one human being in a million, nor a thousand men in all earth's huge quintillion, whose clay heart is hardened against love. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question. — William Morris

Sorry' he said. 'No, I'm sorry.' 'What are you sorry for?' 'Rattling on like a mad old cow. I'm sorry, I'm tired, bad day, and I'm sorry for being so ... boring.' 'You're not that boring.' 'I am, Dex. God, I swear I bore myself.' 'Well, you don't bore me.' He took her hand in his. 'You could never bore me. You're one in a million, Em. — David Nicholls

In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank records, or toll pass records, or public transit records, or phone call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. — Cory Doctorow