Take Nothing For Granted Quotes & Sayings

In 2012, I was diagnosed with melanoma - skin cancer - and had to get surgery on my left foot. I was out for four weeks - no dancing, no walking, nothing! It was horrible, but it taught me patience and to never take for granted the simple things we have. — Witney Carson

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Take nothing for granted. Not one blessed, cool mountain day or one hellish, desert day or one sweaty, stinky, hiking companion. It is all a gift. — Cindy Ross

Knowledge is power. Knowledge is what makes information valuable. For knowledge to be useful, it must be acted upon. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1834 - 1902). All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. (Edmund Burke, 1729-1797) A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. (George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950). We must never take our freedom for granted. — Al Zelczer

Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood. — Hermann Hesse

When you hear the word 'disabled,' people immediately think about people who can't walk or talk or do everything that people take for granted. Now, I take nothing for granted. But I find the real disability is people who can't find joy in life and are bitter. — Teri Garr

Make no mistake- you can change things. Question everything, take nothing for granted; argue with all received ideas, don't respect what does not deserve respect; speak your mind, don't censor yourself; use your imagination and express what it tells you to express. These are the weapons of the mind. — Salman Rushdie

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character
shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the
bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual - her mother did the same. — Harper Lee

I count my blessings every day, quite honestly, because I take nothing for granted. — Mario Andretti

I feel that it's nothing if not an incredible privilege to be able to get up on stage and play for people, and I don't ever take it for granted. — Mary Chapin Carpenter

Scouting exposes young men to people and experiences that encourage and nurture positive moral values. But we mustn't take Scouting for granted. You can do nothing more important for young people today than to continue, or begin, your support of Scouting. I have never met anyone with devoted Scouting experience who was not a solid citizen, a loyal friend, and a patriot. We need more of them. — Wallace G. Wilkinson

While Victoria wasn't a bear, she was the embodiment of everything else he'd desired in a mate. There was no one better suited for him, and he'd long decided her tenacity in the face of danger only made her braver than his powerful clan sisters. Victoria had been made for him, a gift from the stars, and he'd never regret a day of heeding Heldreth and Talbot's advice. Visiting Creag Morden hadn't merely granted him a reprieve from his duties: a holiday in her kingdom had brought him to the love of his life. And nothing would ever make him take her for granted. — Vivienne Savage

Happiness is a road seldom traveled by the multitudes. If you find it, please, don't take it for granted. If you Happen to stray from it, don't let negative obstacles overcome you. Anger and rage only detour you from your final objectives. The future holds nothing but opportunity, and good things happen to good people I promise — Jeff Hardy

Miroslav Holub seems to expect his readers to act like scientists, who are curious in every direction, take nothing for granted, and are willing to accept any truth, however unexpected. — Matthew Zapruder

Dear Livia McHugh
I'll be your husband. I'll be nothing but yours for the rest of forever. A single, simple day with you is something I'll refuse to take for granted. You have been the reason my heart beats since the moment I saw you, long before your hands actually had to do the job for me. Sleep in my arms. Wake up by my side. My beautiful love, be my wife and make me the happiest man. And I will never, ever lose count. Love always, Blake Hartt — Debra Anastasia

I have no lucky charm. I am 100 percent superstition-free, and I take nothing for granted. — Jeff Bridges

Most of us take seeds for granted. The fate of human kind is resting on these genetic
resources: Seeds. So nothing could be more important. — Cary Fowler

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason. — Steven Pinker

said, "Is it so hard to believe anyone could love you, Eris? Is it so hard to believe I could fall for you just because you're you? You're everything I could ever want. You're pure and brave and honest and strong, you're quick and intelligent and dedicated. You take nothing for granted and yet you live life on your own terms. If all of that isn't enough, we can discuss what you do to me — S.K. Epperson

By contrast, a man who has just learned to read and write responds, "To go by your words, they should all be white." To go by your words - in that phrase, a level is crossed. The information has been detached from any person, detached from the speaker's experience. Now it lives in the words, little life-support modules. Spoken words also transport information, but not with the self-consciousness that writing brings. Literate people take for granted their own awareness of words, along with the array of word-related machinery: classification, reference, definition. Before literacy, there is nothing obvious about such techniques. "Try to explain to me what a tree is," Luria says, and a peasant replies, "Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don't need me telling them. — James Gleick

There's nothing you can take for granted; not a single day, not a single minute, not a single relationship. — Brian Stann

Nothing thrills me more than to be good at something. It's very rewarding, and I feel grateful and blessed, and I never take it for granted. — Jane Elliot

I guess that's just how people are. We take for granted that we'll always have the chance to tell someone what they mean to us. We take for granted that nothing is going to happen to them, and so we all walk around not realizing how much we're loved. How much we're valued. — Debra Dockter

But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women - I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful. Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience. — Aldous Huxley

She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world. — Elena Ferrante

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer's benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office. — Ayn Rand

What we once found thrilling, we now take for granted - exotic foods, illicit drugs, attractive sex partners. The more you get, the more you want. So things that make us feel good in the moment are doomed to lose some of their luster. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with feeling good in the moment, continually seeking more is obviously not the best path to happiness. — Anonymous

If somebody knew every time they did something it was going to be a hit there would never be any failures. Sadly, that's not how it works. You take nothing for granted. — Adam Rayner

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come. — Richard Ford

Take nothing and no one for granted. Time used to be my friend, and now it's a skittish acquaintance at best.
Let life unfold, say what you mean. You can't always think about what you've lost, or what you don't have, or what you didn't get. Because when you do that, you're missing out on the now. You can't know if you'll be here tomorrow or a year from now. — Adriana Trigiani

There are no absolutes in relationships. You can't take anything for granted. You can count on absolutely nothing but the unexpected. You only get in trouble when you start thinking that you're some kind of exception to the rule. — Emily Giffin

An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection - to the conceptual identification of your inner states - you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. The men who scorn or dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions. This means that they choose to act without knowing the context (reality), the causes (motives), and the consequences (goals) of their actions. — Ayn Rand

And so [my brother] Gilbert and I, brought up without a formal religion, remained throughout our lifetimes just what Father was, freethinkers. And, likewise, doubters and dissenters and perhaps Utopians. Father's rule had been 'Question everything, take nothing for granted,' and I never outlived it, and I would suggest it be made the motto of a world journalists' association. — George Seldes

We take for granted that we need to take showers, clean our house, and wash our clothes. Yet the mind and its thoughts need cleansing and ordering as much as our bodies. While few of us would consider eating dinner on yesterday's dirty dishes, we think nothing of tackling our problems with yesterdays cluttered minds ... The purpose to any meditation technique is to move beyond the normal contents of our consciousness, empty your mind of its habitual chatter, and concentrate your attention for the purpose of experiencing a higher state — Anodea Judith

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you'd need to be the chairman of MIT's computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. "By 2020, a chip with today's processing power will cost about a penny," CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 "which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries - cell phone, Internet - that we all seem to take for granted. — Peter H. Diamandis

Take nothing for granted. Make an emotional discovery as often as you can find one in every scene. Ask yourself: What is new? — Michael Shurtleff

The vital point to remember is that the swine who just sent your pearl of a story back with nothing but a coffee-stain and a printed rejection slip can be wrong. You cannot take it for granted that he is wrong, but you have an all-important margin of hope that might be enough to keep you going. — Brian Stableford

He would have to ask questions constantly, take nothing for granted. There would be so many opportunities to miss the obvious, so many chances to misunderstand, so many ways of taking the wrong path. 11 — Isaac Asimov

I take nothing for granted. I now have only good days, or great days. — Lance Armstrong

Nothing evades our attention as persistently as that which we take for granted ... the decades roll on without even a suggestion that perhaps the whole matter must be rethought — Marion Brady

To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude. — Albert Schweitzer

risks. Thus we take it for granted that, when a relationship to a special loved person is endangered, we are not only anxious but are usually angry as well. As responses to the risk of loss, anxiety and anger go hand in hand. It is not for nothing that they have the same etymological root. — John Bowlby

I try to keep my head on straight and take nothing for granted. — Anna Faris

The charged atmosphere made every little thing stand out as a performance, a movement distinct and vastly important. It was one of those hypersensitive moments when all your automatic movements, however long established, however habitual, become separate acts of will. You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all. — Raymond Chandler

Creative people have an abiding curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn how and why things work. They take nothing for granted. They are interested in things around them and tend to stow away bits and pieces of information in their minds for the future use. And, they have a great ability to mobilize their thinking and experiences for use in solving a new problem. — William Redington Hewlett

The Greeks, or more correctly the Athenians, invented the idea of theatre, as they invented so many other social and cultural institutions which the west then came to take for granted. There is nothing self-evident about the idea of theatre, of plays and players through whom private individuals, lacking priestly or other authority, publicly examined man's fate and commented on it by a poetic play which, despite the many traditional elements, was in its essential qualities a creation of the playwright. — Moses I. Finley

It's amazing the things you realize
when you lose someone:
you get mad at yourself for not
saying the things you could've a million times,
you take for granted the days
spent doing nothing when
you could have been with them.
Anyone can be taken,
at any time in our lives,
but we always wait until they're gone to say
the things we never had the courage to before. — Melody Carlson

Never give up and take nothing for granted in life. — Dwyane Wade

Jeronimo, my grandfather, swine-herder and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again. To truly appreciate life we must remember that nothing lasts for ever and take nothing we enjoy for granted. In so doing we stay grateful and happy for all our good fortune. — Jose Saramago

The best ideas aren't hidden in shadowy recesses. They're right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Innovation seldom depends on discovering obscure or subtle elements but in seeing the obvious with fresh eyes. This is easier said than done because nothing is as hard to see as what's right before our eyes. We overlook what we take for granted. Billions of tea drinkers observed the force of steam escaping from water boiling in a kettle before James Watt realized that this vapor could be converted into energy. — Richard Farson

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted. — William B. Irvine

If we buy a plant of a horticulturist we ask him many questions as to its needs, whether it thrives best in sunshine or in shade, whether it needs much or little water, what degrees of heat or cold; but when we hold in our arms for the first time a being of infinite possibilities, in whose wisdom may rest the destiny of a nation, we take it for granted that the laws governing its life, health, and happiness are intuitively understood, that there is nothing new to be learned in regard to it. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If nothing else, we today need a reminder that we must never take civilization for granted. I — Poul Anderson

[4.7-11] Everything in the world is about to be wrapped up, so take nothing for granted. Stay wide-awake in prayer. Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless - cheerfully. Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God's words; if help, let it be God's hearty help. That way, God's bright presence will be evident in everything through Jesus, and he'll get all the credit as the One mighty in everything - encores to the end of time. Oh, yes! — Eugene H. Peterson

If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn't safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. — M.L. Stedman

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

G. K. Chesterton said that his goal in life was to take nothing for granted - not a sunrise, not a smile, not a flower, nothing. That is a truly wonderful approach to life. Don't take anything for granted. Truly appreciate every minute that you have to live. My near-death experience has helped me be better at that. If I hadn't almost died, I wouldn't have figured out how to live. — Mark Batterson

Communities now find themselves in possession of improvements [resulting from the WPA] which even in 1929 they would have thought themselves presumptuous to dream of ... [but] everywhere there had been an overhauling of the word presumptuous. We are beginning to wonder if it is not presumptuous to take for granted that some people should have much, and some should have nothing; that some people are less important than others and should die earlier; that the children of the comfortable should be taller and fatter, as a matter of right, than the other children of the poor. — Harry Hopkins

TAKE' nothing for granted..The 'GIVE' may be expensive! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

Look at everything upside down.Take absolutely nothing for granted. — Dick Francis

It is a long journey, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Take nothing and no one for granted, be humble always, be kind especially when it's difficult and never forget the place where you came from and the people that helped you get where you are. These things will live on in you and through you, long after the words have faded. — C.K. Webb

One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped it ... Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you're too real. Your endeavors are too real, your moods are too real. Don't take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself. — Carlos Castaneda