The Beats Quotes & Sayings

The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy engraved with the words 'you are still alive.' You are still alive. Act like it. — Rudy Francisco

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I hated that greeting. "Q!" he shouted over the music. "How good does this feel?" And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her. "It beats calculus, — John Green

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart. — Haruki Murakami

All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. — Virginia Woolf

When he was close enough, he kissed my earlobe and at the same time grabbed my cock, shook it twice, then let it go. He did the same to Callum and Zane. Was this how dragons welcomed each other? Damn. Sure beats a hand shake. Good thing I was naked. I think I would have reacted differently if Devlyn had unzipped my pants and began rummaging around in my underwear just to say hello. — Mark Alders

No worries" is the best thing to happen to sullen teenagers since I was one - even better than vampire sexting, GTL, or Call of Duty. When I was a sullen teenager, we had to make do wtih the vastly inferior "whatever".
"No worries" beats "whatever" six ways to Sunday. I'ts a vaguely mystical way of saying "I hear your mouth make noise, saying something that I plan to ignore." It has a noble Rasta-man vibe, as if you're quoting some sort of timeless yet meaningless proverb on the nature of change - "Soon come," or "As the cloud is slow, the wind is quick." In terms of ignoring provocation, "no worries" is just about perfect. — Rob Sheffield

Garbage, you know, is very revealing.It beats the shit out of tarot cards. — Armistead Maupin

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum. — Amy Lowell

Dreamt I stood in a china shop so crowded from floor to far-off ceiling with shelves of porcelain antiques, etc. that moving a muscle would cause several to fall and smash to bits. Exactly what happened but instead of a crashing noise, an august chord rang out, half cello, half celeste, D major (?), held for four beats. My wrist knocked a Ming vase affair off its pedestal-E flat. Whole string section, glorious, transcendant, angels wept. Deliberately now, smashed a figurine of an ox for the next note, then a milkmaid, then Saturday's Child-orgy of shrapnel filled the air, divine harmonies my head. — David Mitchell

Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see. — C.S. Lewis

Nothing beats a private visit to Number Ten or Chequers to take the wind out of rebellious sails. — Andy Coulson

Beats is inherently different: the company is a consumer electronics company but also a media company; a packaged goods company but also an entertainment company. — Luke Wood

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more. — Justin Torres

Growing old beats the alternative - dying young. — Regina Brett

If you do something really well, the entire world beats a path to your door. The number three, number five, number 400 player gets nothing. It's almost a winner take all. — Lloyd Blankfein

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator's felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney — Siri Hustvedt

I want to beat the world record for the number of beats per second on a drum pad. — Travis Barker

My heart beats, echoes into the cold streets where nightmares and darkness begin to meet. — Tyga

When her touch feels like this is the way perfect should be.
When her heart beats so peacefully next to mine.
When we intertwine our fingers and pretend like we're never going to be apart and it feels like everything is right with the world.
When every moment I spend with her, feels like I'm falling in love all over again.
We might never find forever, or a happily-ever-after. Not with the things I now know. But for those few moments, we can pretend that we have it all.
But that's the thing about moments.
No matter how hard you try to hold on -
They always end. — Kady Hunt

As a member of a zippier generation, with sparkle in its eyes and a snap in its stride, let me tell you what kept us as high as kites a lot of the time: hatred. All my life I've had people to hate - from Hitler to Nixon, not that those two are at all comparable in their villainy. It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine — Kurt Vonnegut

Switch if you have to! It's not the mismatch that beats you, it's the open shot! — Rick Majerus

Woody Weatherman showed me two beats, the "do do dat, do do dat" rock beat and the "ooh at ooh at ooh at" punk beat and other than that I was pretty limited. I had just gotten a drum kit for Christmas, which I was stoked about so I was ready to go. Back then, the prerequisite for playing punk rock drums wasn't very high, it was really pretty generic as I'm sure you can imagine. — Reed Mullin

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore. — Dorothea Lange

Oh, Cameron," Eldon replied in a whisper, moving closer and brushing his lips over Cameron's mouth. "You are literally the very reason my heart beats. Nothing I have lost can compare with the love in you I have found. — Zathyn Priest

In whatever you choose to do, do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That's what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you're the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It's a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine, but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn't a truism because most policemen think the word 'empirical' is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be. — Ben Aaronovitch

the Captain held the Bible in one hand and July's hand in his other hand and said, "Love found, need not be delayed, but must be rushed towards and I rush to you. As long as my heart beats it will belong to you, and if I lose you there will be a hole in my soul, and no grave will be deep enough to bury my pain. I take you to be my life partner and will do everything in my power to make the rest of your life as happy as I am on this day, the beginning of our life together. — Toni Mariani

I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them. — John Green

Christ was vitoe magister, not scholoe; and he is the best Christian whose heart beats with the purest pulse towards heaven; not he whose head spinneth out the finest cobwebs. — Ralph Cudworth

Hard work beats all the tonics and vitamins in the world. — Colonel Sanders

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALL
When he is born, a baby's head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes look out with the blur of eyes which see for all species. He has remembered his own nature from past patterns. Now his heart beats through rock, sky, oceans. He feels the silence and the sound all around the world beneath his skin.
We all hold somewhere deep within us the truth we accepted in innocence. The seas, the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, are all vital parts of an ongoing system. By harming any part of it we must ultimately harm ourselves. It is that simple. — Jay Woodman

Every man's heart one day beats its final beat. His lungs breathe their final breath. And, if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized. By the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory of those who honor him, and make the running the man did live forever. — Warrior

I don't do this for the money, I don't do it for record sales, I don't really care about that, I just want to make beats. — David Guetta

I used to do the beat box. A friend of mine, he was the rapper and after, we'd be doing a block party or something or a house party, and he's gettin' all the attention and I'd end up with a handful of spit, you know, from doing the beats. — DMX

Before you can beat me (this is the easy part), you have to allow yourself to win. — John Brady

The pro keeps coming on. He beats Resistance at its own game by being even more resolute and even more implacable than it is. — Steven Pressfield

My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint. — David Rakoff

I don't think the drums are a solo instrument. Drums are there to set the beat for the music. — Keith Moon

There's a light somewhere.
It may not be much light but
it beats the darkness. — Charles Bukowski

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay. — Saul Bellow

Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb. — William Makepeace Thackeray

You made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. In this creative restlessness beats and pulsates what is most deeply human - the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, nostalgia for the beautiful, and the voice of conscience. — Pope John Paul II

When comedy is good, it's jazz. The beats of it, the looseness, the improvisational part, the music-the way you hit the inflection, the high notes of a joke. It's all melody to me. — Billy Crystal

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit. — Adam McKay

Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.
One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument. — Robert Graves

Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation. — Anne Waldman

I find, however, it's a much more freeing way to live. It certainly beats walking around with the "Don't you know who I think I am?" voice in your head. I find that only leads me down dark monkey-mind paths and patterns of behavior that benefits no one. — Patrick Fabian

I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical. — Yo-Yo Ma

The longer I stay clean, the better my beats are getting and the easier it is to zero in on one idea. Because I really want to, often, try to get an idea across. I can really get to the essence of a song better if I'm clean and I'm not waking up with a hangover. — Larry Tee

I think the good news for me in life is that I really trust my instincts when I come to work. Maybe less in life and in love, but in work and in comedic beats, I feel pretty confident. — Ari Graynor

There is an inward state of the heart which makes truth credible the moment it is stated. It is credible to some men because of what they are. Love is credible to a loving heart; purity is credible to a pure mind; life is credible to a spirit in which life beats strongly it is incredible to other men. — Frederick William Robertson

The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second-and more important in the long run-they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance. — Paul Goodman

I started making my own beats because I just couldn't afford to pay for the other ones. — Big K.R.I.T.

I'm beat to the square, and square to the beat, and that's my vocation. — William Everson

It's Friday night the city is a heart that beats alone,despite the millions of blood cells that race through its dog-legged arteries, oblivious to each other yet performing a life sustaining dance. [...] You're tired of being part of this blood dance. The immune system has been trying to excise you as diseased for as long you can remember, but you've been tenacious,clinging to the walls and floors as the torrent pushes you around. — A.J. Fitzwater

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say to 'David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha' though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes. — Jack Kerouac

Beauty - what is beauty, forsooth? Form and color; that is, surface only. Fortune - what is fortune? Nothing is ever a pleasure or a real profit to him who has to labour for it. Truth - you die in the pursuit, and the sea beats the beach as it did a thousand years ago. The stolid are alone happy. — Richard Jefferies

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum. — Rick Perlstein

In the stillness of the night I have walked in your streets, and my spirit has entered your houses,
And your heart-beats were in my heart, and your breath was upon my face, and I knew you all.
Aye, I knew your joy and your pain, and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams.
And oftentimes I was among you a lake among the mountains.
I mirrored the summits in you and the bending slopes, and even the passing flocks of your thoughts and your desires.
And to my silence came the laughter of your children in streams, and the longing of your youths in rivers. — Kahlil Gibran

Be the wisdom your support. Be the compassion your guide and listen to the Divine Music that beats in every heart. — Guru Nanak

Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses. — Robert Jordan

Don't never follow your first mind, cause that's the one that's wrong. 'Cause the Devil beats God to you every time. — Son House

As the palm-tree standeth so straight and so tall, The more the hail beats, and the more the rains fall. — Simon Dach

That's the clarinet I used to use ... but it's just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you're supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops ... and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything ... — Artie Shaw

He isn't Eric, so our lips don't move in a familiar rhythm. He isn't Eric, and so our teeth grit against each other. He holds the back of my head, as if he is afraid I will break away. My heart beats so hard I begin to feel it in forgotten places: behind my eyes, at the base of my throat, between my legs. — Jodi Picoult

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. — Erica Jong

As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company. — Sam Altman

For Lao-tzu's Taoism is the philosophical equivalent of jujitsu, or judo, which means the way of gentleness. Its basis is the principle of Tao, which may be translated the Way of Nature. But in the Chinese language the word which we render as "nature" has a special meaning not found in its English equivalent. Translated literally, it means "self-so." For to the Chinese, nature is what works and moves by itself without having to be shoved about, wound up, or controlled by conscious effort. Your heart beats "self-so," and, if you would give it half a chance, your mind can function "self-so" - though most of us are much too afraid of ourselves to try the experiment. — Alan W. Watts

The borrowers of America and all the world turn to New York ... It is to the quotations on the New York Stock Exchange that men of affairs from Penobscot to Honolulu turn each morning to find how beats the pulse of prosperity and enterprise. — Charles A. Beard

Rhythms, beats, etc., are fundamentally central to my creative drive: my first instrument was the drums, nearly every band I have been involved in or at the helm of, is driven by rhythm, my band is driven entirely by rhythm, machine rhythm, and the purpose of the rock instrumentation is literally to speak the beats, to emulate the rhythms with guitars and bass, with very little articulation, and without being 'progressive'. — Justin Broadrick

Deaf folk hear the fairies However soft their song; 'Tis we who lose the honey sound Amid the clamor all around That beats the whole day long. — Rose Fyleman

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Daddy says the world is a drum tight and hard and i told him i'm gonna beat out my own rhythm — Nikki Giovanni

How can you build a relationship when you're just sending out beats? Most people will come in and play their beats, but I like to make mine on the spot. — Young Chop

Age isn't triggered by wrinkles,nor by the reduction of strong footing,for the true youth exists effectively in your heart,brightens through your smile and beats slow when your heart is right, innocent like that of a child — Nwilliams S C

You are my heart as it beats within my chest, my soul as it moves through my mind. The breath in my body that so fascinates you is your essence pouring in and out of me in a wave that drowns me over and over again until I cannot breathe for wanting you. Needing you. — Jacquelyn Frank

I love the golf courses because it brought the best out of me. It made me prepare, made me work at it, made me do the things I needed to do to be better, and that's what I loved about USGA events. If you couldn't handle it, then you got beat, and that's OK. — Jack Nicklaus

A little bit of something beats a lot of nothing. Break the largest of difficult tasks into the smallest of steps and it can be done. — Dan Millman

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound. — Nicholson Baker

Gather Me


Scatter me into the digression of this noise
For, I hear not when my eyes are at peace.
I smother the audacity in my voice
Hiding behind a half-charred fleece;
Let me dwell with the fleeting score,
For, I breathe not when my heart is agog!
I strangle the remains of what you tore
Building the ruins of a deserted synagogue;
Then, gather me
From the compositions of a faded song,
From the reverberations of an unaided gong;
From the mirth of our spring sky,
From the waters where thirsts lie;
From the sleekness of white-rose petals,
From the shrieks of remorse bells;
From the digression of laughter beats,
From the silence of bloodied streets;
From the eyes of their precarious silence,
From there; thence, from there; thence,
Then, gather me. — Ashfaq Saraf

A French Republican is a Republican who beats up on conservatives and is constantly praising the Democrats and contributing to the massive spending in this country while they go home and pretend otherwise. — Mark Levin

The heart is a repository of emotions
real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future
and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell. — A.A. Patawaran

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats. — Billy Collins

In the distance, a Benz motor sounds. A neon light wraps itself around the driver and the winter that beats in his heart. His heart stays cold. stays melting. — Gwen Calvo

Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become. — Edgar Allan Poe

I experienced the happiest moment of my life when you took me in your arms as your wife and pressed me to your heart; when I even think of that moment my heart beats madly and I have a terrible longing for you, and I think I would hug you to death if I had you here now. — Hannah Pakula

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Jack the Orderly: I've come for your tv. You've been using too much juice. Another 10,000 kilowatts again this month. Beats me how an old, homicidal loony can use that much power. — Earl Mac Rauch

He stood up. His heart was leaping against his ribs like a frantic bird. Perhaps it knew it had little time left, perhaps it was determined to fulfill a lifetime's beats before the end. He did not look back as he closed the office door. — J.K. Rowling

I do a little improv in my shows. Kind of like our movie, I'll do beats and ideas of dialogue, but I think there's less pressure because it's a live show. If you mess up, the audience laughs because we don't really know what we're doing. But as far as shooting, that was very scary, trying to make a point and drive the film. It definitely helped improvising. — Charlyne Yi

I love catching, being involved in every pitch of the game; obviously, it beats you up both mentally and physically. — Joe Mauer

You're too good for me."
He laughed. "Are we talking about the same person? The selfish fucker who curses and yells, blows up cars and beats up people, because he has a temper he can't control? You know, the one who drinks like a fish and fries his brain with drugs? That person is too good for you?"
She shook her head. "I'm talking about the boy who shared his chocolate bar with me when he probably never shared anything before, who gave me his mama's favourite book, because he thought I deserved to read. The one who seems to be constantly fixing me up when I get hurt. I'm talking about the boy who treats me like I'm a regular girl, the one who desperately needs his bedroom cleaned and laundry washed but chooses to live in a mess and wear dirty clothes, because he's too polite to ask the girl he kisses for help."
"Wow," Carmine said. "I'd like to meet that motherfucker. — J.M. Darhower

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you've split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays. — Francesca Lia Block

When I notice that all the beats sound exactly the same, it starts to wear on me. — Judd Apatow

*** You know that place in between nightmares and dreams? The place where tomorrows never come and yesterdays don't hurt anymore? The place where your heart beats in sync with mine? The place where time doesn't exist, and it's easy to breathe? I want to live there with you. — Brittainy C. Cherry

My name on his lips is a symphony. How can two simple beats of basic human language engulf me so completely? We stare at each other for a mini infinity. I'm terrified of speaking and breaking the spell that's fallen over us. — Sarah Nicolas

I'll keep going. Because that's all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going. It — Robyn Schneider

There is no other complex field in our society in which do-it-yourself beats out factory production or market production. Nobody makes his or her own car. But it is still the case that parents can perform the job of educating their children [homeschooling], in many cases better than our present education system. — Milton Friedman

The physical heart, which houses the spiritual heart, beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping two gallons of blood per minute and over 100 gallons per hour. If one were to attempt to carry 100 gallons of water (whose density is lighter than blood) from one place to another, it would be an exhausting task. Yet the human heart does this every hour of every day for an entire lifetime without respite. The vascular system transporting life-giving blood is over 60,000 miles long - more than two times the circumference of the earth. So when we conceive of our blood being pumped throughout our bodies, know that this means that it travels through 60,000 miles of a closed vascular system that connects all the parts of the body - all the vital organs and living tissues - to this incredible heart. — Hamza Yusuf

It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape. — Ivy Compton-Burnett