What are your favorite quotes?

Well...many come to mind. I am not sure what would be my favorite, but three I have been known to repeat are

The unexamined life is not worth living--Plato

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. --Emmerson

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means --Inigo

Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, but when I woke, I wondered if I was a butterfly dreaming I was a man. --Not sure

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone --Jesus


All of these are things I find I say to my kids at times. They never seem to understand what I am talking about.

 

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true. ~ James Branch Cabell

Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full. ~ Carl Sandburg

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. ~ G.K. Chesterton

 

First thought, a long one from Wizards, the movie.

Max: Fritz! Fritz, get up for God's sake! Get up! They've killed Fritz! They've killed Fritz! Those lousy stinking yellow fairies! Those horrible atrocity-filled vermin! Those despicable animal warmongers! They've killed Fritz! Take that! Take this! Take that, you green slime! You black hearted, short, bow-legged...
Fritz: Max! Max, I'm okay! I'm okay max. Just a scratch. Look I'm all right.
Max: Oh. Oh, damn. There you go again, stepping on my lines, raining on my parade, costing me medals. Oh, damn.
[Accidentally shoots Fritz]
Max: Ohh. Oh, Fritz? Fritz, get up for God's sake! Get up! They've killed Fritz! They've killed Fritz! Those lousy stinking yellow fairies! Those horrible atrocity-filled vermin! Take that! Take that! They killed Fritz!

 

"For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” -Arther C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey

" Dr. Ian Malcolm: John, the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is.

John Hammond: [sardonically] There it is.

Henry Wu: You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will... breed?

Dr. Ian Malcolm: No. I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way." Jurassic Park (film)

I have so many more but that's all that came to my head immediately. I save quotes, espicially while reading, to inspire me when I write.

 

'No, ma'am. We're musicians' Elwood Blues [The Blues Brothers] - Just about all that film is quotable.
'The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year!' Elwood Blues [The Blues Brothers]
Not a quote from a film, game or novel just a quote I really like.
'You must do good, but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it you're taking advantage of others misfortunes' for your own gain.' Gino Bartali

 

Joseph de Maistre (translated from the French):

• False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.
• Every nation gets the government it deserves.

Mark Twain:

• We have the best government that money can buy.
• Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
• A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
• Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
• Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
• The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
• Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
• All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
• Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
• It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
• If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.

From Cool Hand Luke, later included in a Guns 'N Roses song:

What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it.

Megadeth:

Lyrics to "Captive Honor"

When you kill a man, you're a murderer.
Kill many, and you're a conqueror.
Kill them all and you're a god.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

"Yes, we have, Your Honor, we find the defendant guilty on all counts for crimes against all humanity."

"By virtue of the jury's decision and the power vested in me by the state, I hereby sentence you to be incarcerated with no possibility of parole for life."

"Life? What do you mean life? I ain't got a life!"

"Boy, your soul better belong to Jesus, 'cause your ass belongs to me!"

Grimes:

Lyrics to "Kill V. Maim"

You gave up being good when you declared a state of war.

Lyrics to "Butterfly"

There is harmony in everything
It’s a butterfly whose wings span the world
So fly away

 

There are loads of lines I love, but I'll just drop this gem from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence:

A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.

 

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

Huzzah for quotes from Dune! I'm a huge fan. But I thought you might like to know, this quote above is not from the books. It's only from the David Lynch movie Dune. Still a pretty good quote though.

I just reread Dune on my kindle so here's a few that I highlighted (I highlighted way too many passages to include them all):

"Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place." ~Thufir Hawat

"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carried its lesson." ~From "The Humanity of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

"Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain." ~a Bene Gesserit Proverb

"Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people." ~ Liet Kynes

"Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife- chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here." ~Collected sayings of Muad'Dib

"To accept a little death is worse than death itself." ~ Chani

 

"I am human, and I think that nothing of that which is human is alien to me." –Terence

"Oh you Pretty Things
Don't you know you're driving your
Mamas and Papas insane
Let me make it plain
You gotta make way for the Homo Superior" –David Bowie, "Oh! You Pretty Things"

"And I close my eyes and tighten up my brain
For I once read a book in which the lovers were slain
For they knew not the words of the Free States' refrain
It said:
'I believe in the power of good
I believe in the state of love
I will fight for the right to be right
I will kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right'" –David Bowie, "Cygnet Committee"

(I could quote Bowie endlessly.)

 

Oh wow, post a hard thread.


"There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it."-- "It Couldn't Be Done" by Edgar Albert Guest

 

Hard to decide.

"You mistook stars reflected in a pond at night for those in the sky."
A quote repeated many times in different variations in the witcher-books from Andrzej Sapkowski. I just really like the tone of it, and how perfectly it blends into the story.

Also from the witcher books, from the character Regis, "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing."

"But in the end it's only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass." Tolkien in Lord of the Rings.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.", George R. R. Martin, in A Dance with Dragons.