Elements quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside elements — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"You can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor, like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I'd just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor's trade. You don't have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little then you can make him explain why he's right."
"You have to know the rules, otherwise you have no tools to communicate to the audience, but to keep it fresh you have to break some. I don't choose genres as the element, but the material itself is the element, then I'll decide what genre I need. That's just how I work."
"The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity."
"Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious."
"After all the statistics and calculations are formulated, the one element that breathes life into marketing is good design."
"I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don't want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character."
"Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society."
"The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made."
"In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded."
"Believe it or not, there are interesting elements in everyone. So, if I can't talk to everybody for at least 7 to 10 minutes, then I'm in the wrong profession."
"It is the moral element contained in it that alone gives value and dignity to a religion, and only in so far as its teachings serve to stimulate and purify our moral aspirations does it deserve to retain its ascendency over mankind."
"When you have put all your faith in man and continue to be disappointed, don't you hope there is something out of there that is not of human element?"
"One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are."
"What All The World Knows Water is the principle, or the element, of things. All things are water."
"Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it."
"Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things."
"What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless."
"Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things."
"Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same."
"A schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of a return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new."
