Quotes & Sayings About Saying What Matters

My job is to care about and be responsible for every frame of every movie I make. I know that all over the world there are young people borrowing from relatives and saving their allowances to buy their first cameras and put together their first student movies, some of them dreaming of becoming famous and making a fortune. But a few are dreaming of finding out what matters to them, of saying to themselves and to anyone who will listen, "I care." A few of them want to make good movies. — Sidney Lumet

The reality is what you wear matters. If you're a singer and on TV and in the living room of some 12-year-old girl, she's watching what you're wearing and saying and doing ... That's what little girls do, so there is a big responsibility and I take it very seriously. — Taylor Swift

Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most. — Jonah Goldberg

Are you serious right now?" Hailey asks. "What's wrong with saying his life matters too?" "His life always matters more!" My voice is gruff, and my throat is tight. "That's the problem!" "Starr! — Angie Thomas

When people are coming to Krakow and we show them how and where we practice, they are like, 'Seriously? Are you kidding me?' But we're always saying that what matters about the courts - the lines, the nets - are the same. I'm practicing in Poland even when I don't have good facilities. — Agnieszka Radwanska

And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think ... Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. — Samuel Beckett

Poetry or science, what matters is saying it how you see it. Saying precisely what and how you saw, and no more. In science, poetry or describing a journey, accuracy is all you can do. Saying it as you saw. — Ruth Padel

D.H. Lawrence says that myths are "inexhaustible" because they are symbols of heart mysteries. That is, they can't be exhausted - they somehow have embodied some central human mystery (love, loss, being a body in time, who knows which or what?) and thus can be retold infinitely and still be rich. That's part of your saying: it's old, but it's also new. Or: there's nothing "new" in the human heart, but it still matters lots. — Gregory Orr

You! You tricked me! I never want to see you or that bottle of liquid arsenic again!"
I chucked the empty moonshine jug at him. Or tried to. It missed him by a dozen feet.
He picked it up in astonishment. "You drank the whole bloody thing? You were only supposed to have a few sips!"
"Did you say that? Did you?" He reached me just as I felt the ground tip. "Didn't say anything. I've got those names, so that's all that matters, but you men ... you're all alike. Alive, dead, undead - all perverts! I had a drunken pervert in my pants! Do you know how unsanitary that is?"
Bones held me upright. I would have protested, but I couldn't remember how to. "What are you saying?"
"Winston poltergeisted my panties, that's what!" I announced with a loud hiccup.
"Why, you scurvy, lecherous spook!" Bones yelled in the direction of the cemetery. "If my pipes still worked, I'd go right back there and piss on your grave! — Jeaniene Frost

As the CG in motion capture made it look realistic, it put more of an onus on the game makers to make the dialogue they're saying more realistic. It doesn't matter what they say when they're 8-bits, but if they look almost photo-real, it matters. More and more, the games industry is realising that. — David S.Goyer

You won't lose me. There is nothing in this world that matters more to me than you. Absolutely nothing. You come first. Always. I love you. I don't think you realize how much. Or how much I need you in my life. How whole and totally at peace I feel when you're in my arms and I'm deep inside you. You're the one, princess. The reason I wake up with a smile on my lips. The reason it stays on my face all fucking day. When I hurry home from work, I'm hurrying back to you. To you, Tate. Do you understand what I'm saying? I've made my choice. Don't you ever say I deserve better. — Elle Aycart

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new. — Philip K. Dick

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass - our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? — John Green

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful ... that's what matters to me. — Steve Jobs

If you find yourself saying 'I can't do something', but you know it in your heart of hearts that if you do it, you're going to grow, you're going to be a better person, it's going to contribute to your family or to your kids or to something that matters, and you keep saying 'I can't do it,' there is no question - you must do it. You don't discuss it anymore. You just take immediate action ... You do what's necessary. — Tony Robbins

Why don't we just say it already?" He smirked. "I mean come on now."
I eyed him carefully not knowing where to step. "What is it you think we want to say?"
"That we love each other. I kick myself every time I stopped myself from saying it. And I know you love me and that's all that matters," he said, pulling me close instead of away this time. We stared at the water in a shared silence.
My mind wished I could say the same thing, but knowing if I wanted to was the problem. Did I even know how? — Holly Hood

A brand precedes, parallels, and leaves a path behind. What your brand will say, is saying, and has said matters more the deeper we go into the globalized, digitized, connection economy. — Ryan Lilly

Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don't matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions. — Peter Atkins

This is not about you making a million dollars. This is about you embracing the journey. The success was in finally taking this path. And by doing that you are empowering yourself! You are saying, 'My voice matters! What I feel matters! Who I am matters!' That is a full victory right there. — Laura Lynne Jackson

Nothing disturbs me more than superficiality and mere sloganizing on matters of public policy, and the suspicion that what the speaker is saying represents the full extent of his knowledge on the subject. — Preston Manning

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains. — Robert Kirkman

I like what hes created, I enjoy the life he has, but what interests me more is the mind behind it all and how willing he is, to chase everything that matters to him. — Nikki Rowe

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication. — W. Somerset Maugham

I don't even know how to say it." "You just say it. That's how you say something that's hard. You put one foot in front of the other. You take it step by step. You say the words. There is no magic formula. There is no secret sauce. But there are words," she says emphatically, as if she's delivering an impassioned speech. As if she's saying something that matters deeply to her. "And words are all we have. That's all there really is between people. At the end of the day, we have our actions, and we have our words. And you simply say them." I try them on for size, as if I'm talking about what I did today. Casual, — Lauren Blakely

And what about the question which looms up continually within Christian discussion, about how human behavior as a whole relates to the overwhelming grace of God? This is the point at which the story of the rich young man, and the other scenes in Mark 10, seem to be saying, No: what matters isn't simply keeping a bunch of rules; what matters is character. Not just any old sort of character, either, but a particular sort: the sort Jesus was urging and modeling - the character of patience, humility, and above all generous, self-giving love. And the message of Mark at this point seems to be that you don't get that character just by trying. You get it by following Jesus. — N. T. Wright

The trick is to find what you're good at. Plus you can be good at a lot of things...it doesn't have to be one thing. Sharing well-roundedness is just as important. You get my point?
No, honestly, I don't. You just said it yourself. Look around. We're just specks out here in the scheme of things. What does it matter?
I get what you're saying, but it does. It matters what you do with yourself. What kind of trajectory you send yourself on out here
This out here, he gestures to the lakes and the peaks, it's right in our faces that it's billions of years olld. And you're right, each of our imprints seems small against that, but really each one of our imprints is fascinating. And just like those rings in the water that those fish make, we make them too. And what we do reverberates way beyond what you can ever imagine. — Christine Carbo

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more importance. And what is worse, the habit of mind engendered by thinking of these things is a bad one; it leads to competition, envy, domination, cruelty, and almost all the moral evils that infest the world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force. Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber. Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. — Bertrand Russell

So all I'm saying is, everything that seems important
our quarrels, or philosophical differences
in the end, it doesn't matter much. You know? In the end, what matters is what remains. — Thrity Umrigar

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. — Samuel Beckett

Ephraim, it's an incredibly intimate thing to share one of your favorite books with someone else. I think so, anyway."
"How do you mean?"
"Your father gave me a book on our second date, the first gift he ever gave me." She turned to the front page and studied it. "When you give someone a book, it's lie saying: 'I'm trusting you with something that means a lot to me.' It doesn't matter whether you like it or not, though it helps if you do. What matters is that you understand why she likes it. Why she gave it to you. — E.C. Myers

She was saying she was sorry that she couldn't always hang out when I wanted to, but that "when you get a boyfriend," he becomes the only person you want to spend all your time with. He becomes your best friend, and (this part was not said, but was definitively implied) the only friend that really matters. "You'll know what I mean, when you get one," she said. So that's when I gripped my upper jaw and pulled back the skin and muscle of my face to reveal an alien, like the one in the film Alien, and I jumped through the glass in Leigh's window and ate every boyfriend in the city, and the country, and the world. I swallowed them whole, and many of them cried, and those were the ones I liked best. — Katie Heaney

What healthy religion is saying is that the real life is both now and later. You have to taste the Real first of all now. The constant pattern, however, is that most Christians either move both backwards (religion as nostalgia) or into the distant future (religion as carrot on the stick) and consistently avoid where everything really happens and matters-the present moment. — Richard Rohr

It doesn't matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn't matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. It only matters what you are being in relationship to that. — Neale Donald Walsch

Guys who would make fun of girls for sexual inexperience are terrible people, and when girls do it to other girls it feels even shittier. Guys who shame girls who haven't had sex want them to feel like they aren't doing their job, which is to be sexually available and attractive to guys. (And never mind if they are gay, or just uninterested.) Girls who shame other girls for these reasons are helping those guys. They are saying this: You are not accomplished where it matters, and I am better than you. I have proven that men find me attractive, and that is what counts. These people, boys and girls and men and women alike, are all dickheads. — Katie Heaney

Living with intention means saying no to the things that aren't important to us so we can say yes to what matters most. — Crystal Paine

And it always will be this side of heaven. What I'm saying is, He's the One, the only One, you can rely on. Not yourself. Not whether you stay here now or get on back. Not any lifestyle you might choose, no matter how healthy you may believe it is. If you don't learn to trust the One who created it all, then nothing else really matters. You give that some thought." She — Kathryn Cushman

There was bread enough for us in the army, on the front line. We were fed by the Russian people. And no one had to teach them how to do it." "You're right there," said the economist. "What matters is that we're Russians. Yes, Russians - that's quite something." The inspector smiled and winked at his companion. It was as if he were saying those well-known words: "The Russian is the elder brother, the first among equals. — Vasily Grossman

Some well-meaning folks think if we stop talking about racism, it'll magically disappear, like the smell of an errant fart. But like a fart, people might try to be polite and ignore it, but everyone knows it's there. Avoidance has never been a great tactic in solving any problem. For most situations in life, not addressing what's going wrong only makes matters worse. It's like someone breaks your arm, and the person who slammed the baseball bat into it is saying, 'The only reason it won't heal is because you keep complaining that it hurts.' How about you get me a cast so the bone can set straight again? America does not want to put the effort into providing this cast. This is why we must talk about race, and we must do it openly. — Luvvie Ajayi

If we're all saying that rap is an art form then we gotta be more responsible for our lyrics. If you see everybody dying because of what you're saying, it don't matter that you didn't make them die, it just matters that you didn't save them. — Tupac Shakur