Quotes on Ifs

I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn't have much money. Then that generation went, 'OK, great', and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn't caught up.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way.

If I spent all my time criticising myself, I wouldn't be able to function. There are actors who theorise till the cows come home. I haven't the patience for them. It's maybe shallow, but that's why I'll never be part of the acting set.

Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you....If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it.

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

If the only reason I coached was to win basketball games, my life would be pretty shallow

If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it...you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

For 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way.

And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

Our country demands all our strength, all our energies. To resist the powerful combination now forming against us will require every man at his place. If victorious, we will have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for.

when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

I know it won't be eight medals again. If you want to compare me to that, that's your decision, not mine. I'm going out there to try to accomplish the things that I have in my mind and in my heart.

Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.

If I had time in a bottle, if words could make wishes come true, I'd save everyday for eternity passes. And then I would spend them with you.

God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.