Quotes on Ifs

If I look at the mass I will never act.

If I didn't care about doing right and didn't feel uncomfortable doing wrong, I should get on capitally.

A lot hinges on the fact that, in most circumstances, people are not allowed to hit you with a mallet. They put up all kinds of visible and invisible signs that say, 'Do not do this' in the hope that it'll work, but if it doesn't, then they shrug, because there is, really, no real mallet at all.

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.

Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be?

You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.

Write as if your parents are dead.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

If there were camera phones back in the day, the biggest athletes in the world would have had a lot of explaining to do.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

You cannot talk to people successfully if they think you are not interested in what they have to say or you have no respect for them.

I'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it.

I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness ... Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

People give flowers as present because flowers contain true meaning of love. Anyone who tries to posses a flower will have to watch its beauty fading. But if you simply look at a flower in the field, you'll keep it forever. That is what the forest taught me. That you will never be mine, and that is why i will never lose you.

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

If Christ is not all to you He is nothing to you. He will never go into partnership as a part Saviour of men. If He be something He must be everything, and if He be not everything He is nothing to you.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.