Completed Quotes & Sayings

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered. — Ann Druyan

Lot of work can be completed by 7 A.M.; people who wake up at 10 and 11 don't know what they are missing. — Ravi Teja

We completed and released 'No Code' in 1996. We began some off and on touring for that release. — Jack Irons

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance. — Tennessee Williams

After I completed the project for BCG, I was offered the position of Director of Marketing for Ozon.ru. — Maelle Gavet

The postwar WWII GI Bill of Rights-and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans-signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world. — Peter Drucker

Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up. — Greg Iles

Achala, worrying and scheming about your next life, before you have even completed this one, is not a good practice. Rinpoche — Daniel Prokop

For a team to succeed, responsibility must go down deep into the organization, down to the roots. Getting that to happen requires a leader who will delegate responsibility and authority to the team. Stephen Covey remarked, "People and organizations don't grow much without delegation and completed staff work, because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses." Good leaders seldom restrict their teams; they release them. — John C. Maxwell

Six years ago, I completed the premier episode of Hawaii Five-O, and Jack Lord and I immediately realized that we had a good series, that this was a success such as we'd never hoped for! — James MacArthur

Life is a gift that must be given back and joy should arise from its possession. It's too damn short and that's a fact. Hard to accept this earthly procession to final darkness is a journey done, circle completed, work of art sublime, a sweet melodic rhyme. A battle won. — Dean Koontz

Watching the completed version of The Two Towers for example, I was very conscious of scenes - sometimes whole sequences - that I had seen being filmed or edited but which hadn't made it into the final cut. — Brian Sibley

Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny
he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally
you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The whole intends to do something through you. — Osho

We got an international coalition [against Iran], and we imposed that. It was slow, patient diplomacy, nothing at all particularly headline-worthy. But then you got to the point where the negotiations - which I started and Secretary [John] Kerry completed - I think made the world safer. — Hillary Clinton

May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Is it too much?"
"No. It's like you completed the circuit," I say, gripping his other hand. "I feel kind of drunk, though."
"Drunk on power?" he asks.
I giggle. "Shit, Snow. Stop talking. This is embarrassing. — Rainbow Rowell

All around the garage and house were pieces of me, but they couln't put them together. They didn't see the completed puzzle standing in front of them. — Alexandra Bracken

The little that is completed, vanishes from the sight of one who looks forward to what is still to do. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel. — Karen Russell

It often happens that men pull in a certain political, social, or familiar harness simply because they never have time to ask themselves whether the position they stand in and the work they accomplish are right; whether their occupations really suit their inner desires and capacities, and give them the satisfaction which everyone has the right to expect from his work. Active men are especially liable to find themselves in such a position. Every day brings with it a fresh batch of work, and a man throws himself into his bed late at night without having completed what he had expected to do; then in the morning he hurries to the unfinished task of the previous day. Life goes, and there is no time left to think, no time to consider the direction that one's life is taking. So it was with me. — Pyotr Kropotkin

He was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed
their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to
apply what they had learned there - lock, stock, and barrel - within
Egyptian academia. For people like them, "progress" and "the West"
were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive
and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the
great Western values - democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and
equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation's
heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered
shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was
our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved. — Alaa Al Aswany

It is a sweet thing that we serve a dissatisfied God who has destinations in mind for us that we would never choose for ourselves. It really is a good thing that he will not be satisfied until he has gotten us exactly where he created us and re-created us to be. Most of us would have been satisfied to stay at home, and many of us would have quit the journey long before it was completed. But our heavenly Father won't give up until each one of his children has completed the journey. — Paul David Tripp

Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics. — Sheldon L. Glashow

The two parts cannot be done simultaneously. A border fence must be started first - and completed first. Only after all the ACLU lawsuits and INS rulings have run their course, and the border is still secure, do we move to Step Two. I happen to think we don't do the amnesty part ever, but it's tendentious even to discuss what to do with illegal aliens already here until we can prevent more from coming. We'll talk about legalization as soon as it's as hard to get into the United States as it used to be to get out of East Germany. To review: Step One: Secure the border. Step Two: Discuss what to do with illegals already here. — Ann Coulter

I learned what education really is: the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the process a infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school. — Lucy Larcom

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?
You are familiar yet an aberration. — Wallace Stevens

The Gospel is entirely objective. The Gospel is completely outside of ourselves. The Gospel is not about the change which needs to be made in us, and it does not take place within us. It was completed in Christ, quite apart from us, almost two thousand years ago. The Gospel is not dependent on man in any way. The Gospel is distorted when we turn people's eyes to what is to be accomplished in them. We were not and cannot be involved in any part of Christ's historical, finished, redemptive work. The sinner must be taught to look completely away from himself and trust only in Christ and His work of salvation. — Trevor McIlwain

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. [ ... ] It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That's what death is, the great loneliness. — Philip K. Dick

There was a small woven basket waiting on his desk
the next day, still smelling like warmed-from-the-oven
sin. A note was attached written with the words
"Have a good day!" A drawing of a tiny dog chasing
a butterfly completed the absurdity.
He stood in front of his desk, just staring at it and
the basket for a full minute. Asps didn't smell like
baked items, but the latter were no less dangerous.
He tented the edge of the cloth cover with his
smallest finger. Three fruit tarts lay inside.
Poisoned most likely. — Anne Mallory

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Take, for example, the way in which physicians responded to the high mortality rates of children in orphanages early in the last century. Assuming that microorganisms were to blame, doctors separated children from one another and kept handling by adults to a minimum in order to reduce the risk of infection. Despite these mandates, children continued to die at such alarming rates that both intake forms and death certificates were completed at admission for the sake of efficiency. — Louis Cozolino

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is. — Samuel S. Vaughan

What is death? A "tragic mask." Turn it and examine it. See, it does not bite. The poor body must be separated from the spirit either now or later, as it was separated from it before. Why, then, are you troubled, if it be separated now? for if it is not separated now, it will be separated afterward. Why? That the period of the universe may be completed, for it has need of the present, and of the future, and of the past. What is pain? A mask. Turn it and examine it. The poor flesh is moved roughly, then, on the contrary, smoothly. If this does not satisfy you, the door is open: if it does, bear. For the door ought to be open for all occasions; and so we have no trouble. — Epictetus

The radical significance of Christ's substitutionary Priesthood does not lie in the fact that His perfect Self-offering perfects and completes our imperfect offerings, but that these are displaced by His completed Self-offering. We can only offer what has already been offered on our behalf, and offer it by the only mode appropriate to such a substitutionary offering, by prayer, thanksgiving, and praise. — T.F. Torrance

A great task has been completed and an even larger one remains. — Madeleine Albright

Because life is a symphony it must have its C Minor. Days there be when we hear only a discord of sharps and flats, and we wonder whether harmony will ever be restored. On other days we hear only an ominous, deep strain which seems to say that hope is fled. But why this chill despair? Symphonies are a blending of many tones, high and low, over and under, major and minor. One day cannot make a life a whole any more than shadows can make a picture or minor notes a symphony. We need to hear life's song, not as the discord of a single day, but as the completed harmony of all the years. Then will today's sorrow and tomorrow's disappointment ring forth in major key as glorious melody. — W. Waldemar W. Argow

In every successful still photographic project that I have completed, there has always been a turning point in the story where I felt that perhaps I was working on something that could be very special. — Mary Ellen Mark

The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models - those that are in fashion, that suit, that please - and enact them. — Milan Kundera

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely. — Rebecca West

We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly. — Virginia Woolf

No matter the outcome, having completed a series of MBA applications in a serious, thoughtful way is a real achievement. — Linda Abraham

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox. — Jane Smiley

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall. — W. Eugene Smith

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed ...
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Arteriosclerosis, removing people from active life when the period of maximum fertility has passed, is of benefit to the young if it relieves them of the care of parents, or brings them an inheritance as they enter adult life. . . . Any attempts to eradicate such a disease from the urban population will be frustrated by natural selection and the survival of more grandchildren in families with few grandparents. Those best fitted to survive in a world growing more urban are those who cease to require support as soon as their roles as parents have been completed. Atherosclerosis and hypertension are now the chief factors in determining that we do not overstay our allotted span of life too long. — Thomas H. Lee

I have completed a monument more lasting than brass. — Horace

You see?" Damien leaned over his desk and spread out half a dozen charcoal sketches. "These are only quick studies of course. But my agent in Florence tells me this artist, Leonardo, is a master and also quite an inventor of mechanical devices
which, as you know, are my passion. Leonardo just completed a portrait of Lisa de Giocondo. He calls it the Mona Lisa. I thought I might commission him to do a portrait of me, and while he's here, I can pick his mind for mechanical secrets. How does that sound?"
"Expensive," Gideon murmured. — Rick Riordan

A vow is a heavenly created obligation in motion that only ends when fully completed. — Lizelle DuPlessis

There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The awareness that we cultivate is what makes yoga a practice, rather than a task or a goal to be completed. Your body will most likely become much more flexible by doing yoga, and so will your mind. — Cyndi Lee

I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed. — Maxwell Maltz

My biggest love is space. I completed 800 hours' space training in Moscow and I became the world's oldest man to go to the North Magnetic Pole. At 67, I also became the oldest man to reach 28,400ft on Everest without oxygen. — Brian Blessed

So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed. — Edward Hirsch

To me 'they lived happily ever after' means to be happy with yourself! My parents always taught me that being happy has to work without Prince Charming. My life is completed without a prince but it's nice of course to have someone who loves you and fights for you. — Kristen Stewart

I have never held myself back because of poverty or the judgment of man to get a job completed. My ability, my heart, and mind have always gone beyond the boundaries of others' expectations of me. — Patricia H. Graham

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding
something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing. — Deb Caletti

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed. — William Gibson

Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Dealing with a simple burglary can require 1,000 process steps and 70 forms to be completed as a case goes through the Criminal Justice System. That can't be right. — Theresa May

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down. — William Peter Blatty

The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection ... the dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. — Okakura Kakuzo

The anxious wait lasted four years, and the alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs (36-37). — Alejo Carpentier

You dueled?" Lily asked
"Yes. And if we do it again, it will be-"
"DON'T SAY IT!" Thibaud screamed.
"-a dual duel," I completed, with satisfaction. — Rachel Cohn

My first album was completed in three months. — Adam Lambert

You should recognize that man's soul, this single entity whose powers and parts we have described, may be compared to matter, and that the power of reasoning is its completed form. As long as the soul lies dormant and does not acquire its form from knowledge, then the nature of the soul is useless and exists in vain. — Maimonides

Polybius foresaw Rome's decadence. "All things are subject to decay and change," he wrote. "When a state, after having passed with safety through many and great dangers, arrives at the highest degree of power, and possesses an entire and undisputed sovereignty, it is manifest that the long continuance of prosperity must give birth to costly and luxurious manners, and that the minds of men will be heated with ambitious contests, and become too eager and aspiring in the pursuit of dignities. And as those evils are continually increased, the desire of power and rule, and the imagined ignominy of remaining in a subject state, will first begin to work the ruin of the republic; arrogance and luxury will afterwards advance it; and in the end the change will be completed by the people; when the avarice of some is found to injure and oppress them, and the ambition of others swells their vanity, and poisons them with flattering hopes. — Anonymous

The melancholy of everything completed! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every beauty must be completed by another beauty: Windows with flowers, trees with birds, mountains with fogs, life with goodness ... — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Of agitating good roads there is no end, and perhaps this is as it should be, but I think you'll agree that it is high time to agitate less and build more. [Here is] a plan whereby the automobile industry of America can build a magnificent "Appian Way" from New York to San Francisco, having it completed by May 1, 1915 and present it to the people of the United States. — Carl G. Fisher

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas ... — Charles De Lint

This world is not without causes. There is Moksha [ultimate liberation] when one's causes stops. There is Moksha where everyone's 'claim' is completed. Without a cause, effect does not happen. — Dada Bhagwan

I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance. — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet

This Being out of God cannot, by any means, be a limited, completed, and inert Being, since God himself is not such a dead Being, but, on the contrary, is Life; but it can only be a Power, since only a Power is the true formal picture or Schema of Life. And indeed it can only be the Power of realising that which is contained in itself a Schema. — Johann Gottlieb Fichte

A scientist can hardly encounter anything more desirable than, just as a work is completed, to have its foundation give way. — Gottlob Frege

Although I completed two years of internship in various small hospitals, I decided against continuing my medical training. I was much more fascinated by the unsolved problems of medicine than by practicing it. — Gunter Blobel

We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine. — George Harrison

If I have learned anything great in this life it was unconditional love that didn't require reciprocation because giving always completed me more. — Shannon L. Alder

Nothing upsets the philosophical mind more than when he hears that from now on all philosophy is supposed to lie caught in the shackles of one system. Never has he felt greater than when he sees before him the infinitude of knowledge. The entire dignity of his science consists in the fact that it will never be completed. In that moment in which he would believe to have completed his system, he would become unbearable to himself. He would, in that moment, cease to be a creator, and would instead descend to being an instrument of his creation. — Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

The mid-stride step, never to be completed, was the worst regret anyone could have. — J.R. Ward

2. The Book of Revelation. Does the book of Revelation give us a blueprint of coming world turmoil (the futurist position)? Or have some of the events in Revelation already taken place throughout church history, with some still to come (the historicist or historical approach)? Or does Revelation report events that were current at the time of writing but are now completed (the preterist view)? Or does Revelation speak in a timeless, symbolic way of the life of the church between the comings of Christ (the symbolic or idealist view)? Or is some combination — Robert L. Plummer

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis. — LeRoy Neiman

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn't write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try. P. G. Wodehouse once said, "Stout's supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin." That's how I've always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, "Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?" She smiled, I recall, and said, "Why, yes. Dozens. — Rex Stout

Discussions about the ethics of suicide are immediately biased by the verb that customarily attaches to it in English. One "commits" suicide. Because this presupposes the wrongfulness of the suicide, I avoid that verb, opting instead for "carry out" suicide. This is evaluatively neutral, avoiding both the usual bias against suicide and the unusual bias in favor of it that the verb "achieve" would effect. "Carry out" is preferable to "practice", which implies something ongoing. Finally, "carry out" also implies a suicide that is completed rather than merely attempted. — David Benatar

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.) — E.B. White

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's. — E. M. Forster

'It is finished' is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work. — Stanley Hauerwas

I simply loved education. I mean, I always loved acting as well. It really was a major passion for me, but one I felt I could only fully explore once I'd completed my degree. — Jodhi May

Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren't able to kill themselves until their mood improves - spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call "completed" suicides. — Charles D'Ambrosio

In life, satisfaction is experienced when activities are brought to a state of completion. Loss of energy and loss of control are functions of incompletion. The result of completing things releases one's ability to create. Prioritize any items that need to be completed, set a completion date, then do it. — William Arthur Ward

There will be a great loss of learning before the moon's full cycle is completed. Fire and floods will be fomented by ignorant rulers; much time will go by before it is rectified. — Nostradamus

There was no way Baz was consciously mimicking the pose of the Howl's Moving Castle figurine, yet this was exactly what he was doing. Elijah's imagination completed the shadows into dark wings, but otherwise it was the same: shorter, hesitant Elijah standing before the taller, hunched, aching Baz, tentatively trying to capture his attention. — Heidi Cullinan

When your home is perfect, every plant in place, every piece of furniture suits the space completely - you've completed a task. — Frederick Lenz

Her insanely high Christian Louboutin stilettos made a click-clacking sound on the airport floor. Amber rolled a small Louis Vuitton luggage bag behind her. She wore a baby-blue Chanel skirt suit, which made her look like an elegant celebrity. Her hair was long and blond today and pinned up into a perfectly smooth up-do. A pair of gold earrings in the shape of four-leaf clovers and a matching pendant completed the outfit. — A.O. Peart

This looks very much as if the integration of the day's experience into our memory, the forging of new neural links, is either an easier or a more urgent task. As the night wears on and this function is completed, the more affecting dreams, the more bizarre
material, the fears and lusts and other powerful emotions of the
dream material emerge. — Carl Sagan

NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to
mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even
if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot
of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing
generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment,
that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly
stuck to its work through the course of a long life.
preface to the second edition of the world as will and representation — Arthur Schopenhauer

Sir, you said that if you don't believe God is real, then He can't do anything to you. In that case, sir, then. . . ." He paused. "None of us believe you're real." It took a moment for his meaning to settle in. Abby completed the logic in her mind - if they didn't believe Del Quera was real, then he couldn't . . . he couldn't do anything to them! She had the impulse to burst out in a laugh. No grand statements or famous words were necessary - a difficult question had just been disarmed by an eight year-old. — C.R. Hedgcock

In the battles over the Bible in the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first century, conservatives moved away from the word infallible in favor of inerrant. This happened in part because theological liberals had begun using the word infallible to mean something more like ... oh, I don't know, something more like fallible. And that reminds me of something else. How is it that liberals preen themselves for the virtues of frankness and honesty when they do things like this to words like infallible, or to words like frank and honest for that matter? Or even words like liberal. And now, in the latest go-rounds, the same kind of thing is happening to the word inerrant. Men with solemn faces and a shaky donor base affirm the inerrancy of the Bible, and they also affirm that this is not inconsistent with the subtle truth that the Bible has mistakes in it. The serpent was craftier than all the beasts of the field, having completed some post-doctoral work in Europe. — Anonymous

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts - manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story. — Mark Twain

Sometimes, months elapse before we've completed the song completely. There's no set rule. Something inside of you says - 'now you can present it!' If one of us feels it's not quite right, lyrically or melodically, we don't present it. — Richard Sherman