Over React Quotes & Sayings

If you thought about it you'd realize that you don't have control over everything, but you control how you react — Charles Benoit

Accept every day as a beautiful mystery. Don't try to control everything or worry about the things you can't control. If you do, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of frustration and misery. You must simply accept that some forces are out of your control. However, you can always control the manner in which you react to situations. Everyone's life has positive and negative aspects. Whether you are happy or not depends greatly on which aspects you focus on. The best thing you can do is let go of what you can't control and invest your energy in the things you can. Powerful, positive change will occur in your life when you decide to take control of yourself instead of craving control over everyone and everything else. — Anonymous

Toe. He was even wearing a ski mask with strange meshlike coverings over the eyes. We didn't get a lot of ninjas in Half-Moon Hollow. And I'm pretty sure Jed would have responded. So I wasn't quite sure how to react here. Was this some sort of test from Jane to determine whether I would survive a parking-lot attack? Couldn't I just roll around in a gym with a practice dummy or something? The figure cocked his head to the side, staring at me like some predatory creature considering his best approach. I dropped my bag and kicked out of my sandals. I could do this. Sure, I had no fighting experience, but I had superstrength and speed on my side. Then again maybe this guy did, too. He could be a ninja chupacabra for all I knew. But — Molly Harper

I am still frozen when he reaches out and brushes a finger over the three lines etched into the surface of my ring, then twists one of his own rings to reveal a cleaner but identical set of lines. The Archive's insignia. When I don't react - because no fluid lie came to me and now it's too late - he closes the gap between us, close enough that I can almost hear the bass again, radiating off his skin. His thumb hooks under the cord around my throat and guides my key out from under my shirt. It glints in the twilight. Then he fetches the key from around his own neck.
"There," he says cheerfully. "Now we're on the same page. — Victoria Schwab

The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what's valuable about what you do, you're either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can't go looking for validation from external sources. Once you put your work into the world, you have no control over the way people will react to it. — Austin Kleon

In the end it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them-that's where you have control over your life. — Lisa Unger

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. — Richard Preston

Austin?" she whispered, not sure what to do.
He turned to her and pulled her into his arms. Her mouth opened in surprise and the next thing she knew, he was kissing her. His mouth was warm against here. At first, she was too stunned to react. But after a moment, she put her arms around his neck and lost herself in the kiss.
As the headlights of the sheriff's car washed over them, the golden glow seemed to warm the night because she no longer felt cold. She let out a small helpless moan as Austin deepened the kiss, drawing her even closer.
As the sheriff's card went on past, she felt a pang of regret. Slowly, Austin drew back a little. His gaze locked with hers, and for a moment they stood like that, their quickened warm breaths coming out in white clouds.
"Sorry."
She shook her head. She wasn't sorry. She felt...light-headed, happy, as if helium filled. She thought she might drift off into the night if he let go of her. — B. J. Daniels

I love writing songs with people, which is about really taking risks, throwing yourself over the falls and really seeing what you're made of and seeing how it sticks. Seeing how others react to it, and seeing also how it can become a melody and how it can really take off from your experience. It's a way of seeing life unfold on the page before me. — Jason Mraz

Why did you come out when you knew how your family would react?" I murmured, wrapping my arms around his waist. I brushed my lips the length of Lock's neck.
"Because I didn't want to hide. I hated acting like I was someone I wasn't."
"I never did thank you for that sub."
Lock laughed. "Adan, you've thanked me a hundred times over."
"I don't recall."
"Every time we're together, or when you kiss me, it's a constant reminder of how we met, and I wouldn't exchange that for anything. — Shaye Evans

The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer. — Keith Richards

My first thought, as I followed Sean to that field behind the post office, was that he wanted a touch of this or that. And he did, really. But he also fancied himself a poetry lover. He would arrange us comfortably, then pull out a book and start to read. I would sit there on the plastic tarp, smoothing the plaid skirt of my uniform over my wool stockings, rather at a loss. How is a girl supposed to react to Keats? Does she gaze at the reader adoringly? Lie back seductively on one arm? — Katie Crouch

Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or "mental worth." In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created "does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. "Some recent thinkers," he said, "[have affirmed] that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing. — Ken Robinson

Too often we are lead to believe that our lives are at the mercy of other people or external circumstances, and in a way there is truth to that. We have no control over some things that happen around us.

But what we have total control over is the way in which we chose to meet challenges, to respond to life rather than react.
WE can make our lives great ones if we chose to — Steven Aitchison

I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper. — Martin Sorrell

An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow - whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister's private aviary - gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She'd been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown. All — Elizabeth Bear

Not that I mind this in the least," he said quietly, reluctant to give up the intimacy but worried enough that he had to ask, "but is something troubling you, Sam?"
Her breath caught, then began again. Slowly she nodded against his chest. Christ.
Okay, it was bad. Calculating how hard he should push and how she would react, he decided to cajole her into talking. "You're not sick, are you?"
"No," she said, her voice muffled against his shirt.
So far, so good. "I'm not sick, am I?"
"No."
"No one's died?"
"No. No one at all."
Nearly complete sentences now. That seemed like an improvement. Keeping his voice calm and quiet and the questions over the top and nonthreatening, he kept talking. "You haven't stolen anything that will force you to flee the country? — Suzanne Enoch

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one's first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts. — W. H. Auden

Mason prefers to switch over to Tea, when it is Dixon's turn to begin shaking his head. "Can't understand how anyone abides that stuff." "How so?" Mason unable not to react. "Well, it's disgusting, isn't it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie, and soak, and bloat?" "Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha, - what all tasteful London drinks, - that," pollicating the Coffee-Pot, "is what's disgusting." "Au contraire," Dixon replies, "Coffee is an art, where precision is all, - Water-Temperature, mean particle diameter, ratio of Coffee to Water or as we say, CTW, and dozens more Variables I'd mention, were they not so clearly out of thy technical Grasp, - — Thomas Pynchon

When you find the right person, yeah - this is what it feels like." He takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself before taking my hand and placing it over his heart. It's beating fast and hard. "Do you feel that? We haven't done anything yet and that's how I react to you. — H.M. Ward

At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game's AI, because software couldn't improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence. — Ernest Cline

Amelia was sitting on the pavement in her lawn chair, a glass of wine in her hand.
When we emerged, she set the glass down very carefully on the ground and then looked us over from head to toe.
'Okay, don't know how to react,' she said, finally. — Charlaine Harris

If you are willing to look at another person's behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all. — Yogi Bhajan

You want to be an alchemist so badly? Don't wait to react to the immediate problem.
Plan ahead. Look at the big picture and you won't ever have to deal with that problem.
Better to save yourself from a major catastrophe than drag your feet over a bunch of little inconveniences. — Richelle Mead

There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I'll have to use a strange term here ... "good." I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that there's an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don't believe in God, but I believe in this "goodness" like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It's always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes ... it gives you hope. — Charles Bukowski

He said, 'You have to understand, I'm an academic. I'm not trained in dealing with masses of people. I found out through the school of hard knocks that it is better not to deal with masses of people. It's not that they don't deserve the information but they really react in very strange ways. They get panicky and excited, or over-excited, and it is so easy for academics to forget that. We're trained in math. We're trained in science. We're not trained in the masses.'
He paused.
'The public is extremely wild,' he said, 'uncontrollably wild.'
Then he shrugged his shoulders.
'You have to understand,' he said, 'I'm an academic. — Jon Ronson

A business strategy roadmap is also composed of three elements: insights on technological possibilities, customer needs, and competitive intent. In other words, what could we build, how would people react to it, and does it give us an edge over the competition? — Michael Mace

Nice people who are beginning to live to a great age - as it were - react with such revulsion to the burgeoning horrors that confront them, they generally prefer suicide. It's only us slightly malevolent types who are able to survive that realisation and find a kind of pleasure - or at least satisfaction - in watching how the latest generation or most recently evolved species can re-discover and beat out afresh the paths to disaster, ignominy and shame we had naively assumed might have become hopelessly over-grown. — Iain M. Banks

We have no business squatting on other people's land and we have only ourselves to blame if they take a dim view of it. I mean, c'mon, what would you do if someone barged into our house and just took it over? How would you react? Are you going to say, welcome, intruders, take it all, we'll gladly confine ourselves to the bathroom. That is, until you want us out of the bathroom as well. Then we will happily kill ourselves and leave you to deal with our bodies as you please. Is that what you would say? Of course not. You would make a complete ruckus. So why are you surprised when other people do the same? — Sonal Panse

wanted to shout and lecture them, but she knew they would react poorly to such a chastisement, so instead she gave them her best verbal punch. "No." She smiled with all the tranquility she could muster. "I am filled with grave disappointment over your conduct, but I trust you - as I always have. I do hope you will act with greater wisdom next time, wisdom I know you possess. — K.M. Shea

Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?"
I know the Coca-Cola bottles."
They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again. — Samuel R. Delany

Nev tossed his pen down. "Fine. Here goes:
Ren and Cals lives may be torrid
for the young ones in Vail are quite horrid
Bine and Cos aren't too frail
Dax and Fey never pale
while Ansel and Bryn might get sordid
Bryn spit Diet Coke all over the table. Mason and Ansel clapped. I was too dumbfounded to react.
This is qhat quiet Nev does in his spare time?
"'Bine'?" Sabine frowned while Cosette mopped up the soda that flowed to their end of the table. "Since when am I 'Bine'? And we never call Cosette 'Cos.'"
"It's about cadence," Nev said. "Sorry. I said it wasn't very good."
"Why aren't you and Mason in it?" Ansel asked.
"Oh, he has another one about us." Mason wiggled his eyebrows. — Andrea Cremer

The more you get, the better you become' and therefore over the years you become more experienced and you learn how to deal with it. You know what can go wrong, and you also learn how to react if things go wrong. — Jill Douglas

You cannot control how people are going to respond to you and your work in the world. Surrendering the outcomes does not mean that we don't care or we aren't emotionally involved or we are indifferent to the results. We want to connect with people and move them and inspire them - and we want more kids to learn to read. Surrendering the outcomes is making peace with our lack of control over how people respond to us and our work. Surrendering the outcomes is coming to terms with the freedom people have to react to us and our work however they want. — Rob Bell

Don't over-react to the trouble makers. — Warren G. Bennis

Instead of testing a new idea or tool, "paralysis by analysis" takes hold. We overanalyze new options, mull over all of the things we don't know, think about how students will react, and then we don't act! — Matt Miller

It is not about what happens to you - it is about how you perceive it. How you react to it. That is what you have control over. You can crumple up and die. Or you can be strong. That is what separates girls from women. — Morgan Rice

Frankly, I didn't know how I would react to Apple's over-hyped MP3 player until I used one. Now I would have a hard time parting with it: Consider me converted. — Paul Thurrott

As we walked toward the dean's office, he reached over, trailing his fingers along my arm. "Do they still react when I touch you?"
Heat crawled through my veins, and I nodded. The marks had followed the path of his touch. "Yeah, they still like you."
One side of his lips curled up, and a look of male pride crossed his face. I shook my head. Boys. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don't imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny. — Mark O'Connell

People who are intolerant, categorize and over-react ... should all be dragged against a wall and shot. — Arthur M. Jolly

'Two things.'
'Name them. I am instructing you to name them.'
'I don't think you've been in love. Not recently, anyway. I'm not sure you remember what it's like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword. That's the first thing.' Yeats didn't react. If anything, he seemed baffled. 'The second thing is I wouldn't characterize Harry as indecisive and untrained with weapons.' — Max Barry

If you over-react to a crisis legislatively it generally ends in disaster. — Thomas Watson Jr.

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life. — Anais Nin

The most amazing part," Katherine said, "is that as soon as we humans begin to harness our true power, we
will have enormous control over our world. We will be able to design reality rather than merely react to it. — Dan Brown

I didn't react visually. This girl came up and knelt over the body and let out a God-awful scream that made me click the camera. (On photographing Mary Vecchio with slain student Jeffery Miller during the shootings of students at Kent State, April, 1970.) — John Filo

People tend to over react on situations to have a bigger and better story to tell, thus receiving more attention. — Johan Coetzer

I don't believe in hitting a bad shot and then insisting it's no big deal. No, you just messed up, so react. I'm not saying you need to throw your club. I mean, take 10 seconds to get angry at yourself, but then start over. — Camilo Villegas

What happens outside of us doesn't count. That's something we don't have control over. It's what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that's important. — James Lee Burke

We may win a battle, but if in doing so we have planted thousands of seeds of hatred and fear..the war is not over- only the present conflict has ceased. There will be no peace as long as we react to violence with violence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Can you live without charm, intimidation, or some form of influence over others? Without making others do your bidding on some level? You flirt, they react one way or another. Everything is manipulation. — Wildbow

It's up to you how you react to things. It's up to me how I handle situations. It's up to us how we deal with each other. Each couple is defined by themselves, not by society or any other outside factor ... unless they let them define them. And once they do, then they no longer have control over their own relationship. — Shelly Crane

Happiness is not the absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them. Raise your awareness to your own inner strength and positivity. You are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life, or you can choose to be positive instead by focusing on the great things that are truly important. So talk about your blessings more than you talk about your problems. Just because you're struggling doesn't mean you're failing. Every great success requires some kind of worthy struggle to get there. — Anonymous

When difficulties seem insurmountable, optimists react in a more constructive and creative way. They accept the facts with realism, know how to rapidly identify the positive in adversity, draw lessons from it, and come up with an alternative solution or turn to a new project. Pessimists would rather turn away from the problem or adopt escapist strategies - sleep, isolation, drug or alcohol abuse - that diminish their focus on the problem.9 Instead of confronting them with resolve, they prefer to brood over their misfortunes, nurture illusions, dream up "magic" solutions, and accuse the whole world of being against them. They have a hard time drawing lessons from the past, which often leads to the repetition of their problems. They are more fatalistic ("I told you it wouldn't work. It's always the same, no matter what I do") and are quick to see themselves as "mere pawns in the game of life. — Matthieu Ricard

Negatives only have power over you when you react to them — John Kehoe

You must see yourself run the race over and over, time and time again. You must put yourself in critical positions and see how you would react in those positions before the race so when and if they do happen, the feedback is automatic. — Rod Milburn

Everybody black knows how to react to a tragedy. Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the Same Old Anger, dump it all over the Usual Frustration, and water it with Somebody Oughtas, all of which Bethella did. Then quietly set some globs of Genuine Awe in a circle around the mixture, but don't call too much attention to that. Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible. — James Hannaham

My friend Wicker once said to be careful what and how you say what you're really thinking to a woman. After much screwing up in that department with Emma, I've learned it's not what you should hide, but what you say that makes her react the way she does. If I am unable to make myself clear, as I so often do, it's more likely going to go to pot if I try to explain how I really feel. Instead, I rework in my brain what she needs to hear. I don't always nail it, but I'm getting better at it. And it's always the truth even if it isn't how I see it.
Is it deceiving? No. It's being considerate and aware that she is an emotional creature, and that for some crazy reason, craves my attention. I love to make her happy. My jumbled up mess of a mind isn't important in the long run if it just confuses her. So I chose words carefully. When something goes right, I use it over and over again. -Ames — Cyndi Goodgame

Tin Win sat at an open window, his head buried in his hands. She called his name, but he did not react. With a shrill whistle blast, the engine started to move. Su Kyi walked along beside the window. The train picked up speed. The wheezing grew louder and stronger. She started to run. Stumbled. Bowled into a man, jumped over a basket of fruit. Then the platform came to an end. The two rear lights shone like tiger's eyes in the night. Slowly they vanished behind a gentle curve. When Su Kyi turned around the platform was empty. — Jan-Philipp Sendker