Quotes on Ifs

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.

If I'm alone at home, I get increasingly restless, bothered by the idea that I'm missing some crucial encounter out there somewhere. But if I'm left by myself in someone else's place, I often find myself a nice sense of peace engulfing me. I love sinking into an unfamiliar sofa with whatever book happens to be lying nearby.

Even if it’s not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

When do you think people die? When they're shot through the heart with a pistol? ...No. When they have an uncurable disease? ...No. When they drink soup made from a poisonous mushroom? No! When they are forgotten! Even if I die, my dream will come true. The hearts of the people will be cured..!

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?" "I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps." "Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?" "Comprehension.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

All men and women are connected by an energy which we call love, but which is, in fact, the raw material from which the universe was built. This energy cannot be manipulated, it leads us gently forward, it contains all we have to learn in this life. If we try to make it go in the direction we want, we end up desperate, frustrated, disillusioned, because that energy is free and wild.

I wonder if it hurts to live, And if they have to try, And whether, could they choose between, They would not rather die.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.

Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.

But one of the things I have learned during the time I have spent in the United States is an old African American saying: Each one, teach one. I want to believe that I am here to teach one and, more, that there is one here who is meant to teach me. And if we each one teach one, we will make a difference.