Negative quotes
1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside negative — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Love is a positive effect. Love can never have a negative effect, only a positive effect. That would be the revelation of love. If you have a question of whether this is love, think about the effect."
"Beautiful things happen in your life when you distance yourself from the negative things."
"Negative thinkers always have a negative vision."
"People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative."
"You think you're being given all of these things: phones that can communicate with other devices, car service that's better than a taxi, all of these amazing things that are available to you at any time. It isn't until you've swum across the river that you can start to see the negative aspects of it all."
"A state of negative energy means that you are essentially getting something for nothing."
"Are you negative in a world that never stops turning on you?"
"I have to say, the other day I was reading some negative comments, and I was thinking they were really funny. So I guess they don't anymore."
"When I look back on it now, I am so glad that the one thing that I had in my life was my belief that everything in life is a learning experience, whether it be positive or negative. If you can see it as a learning experience, you can turn any negative into a positive."
"The villains are all parts of me. For years I've been wondering what it would be like if all those negative elements were forced onto the main character's side. I can understand a character with that kind of anger."
"I myself become terrified of death when I am in a negative state of mind. But the thought of death ceases to bother me once I become productive."
"I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own."
"I had a mother complex going on and I was projecting all my negative mother stuff onto her and all of my need for her to love me and to make me whole and to approve of me."
"We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge."
"Energy wasted on negative ends."
"If there is one thing to get excited about, it's your ability to turn the negative into success."
"I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner."
"The fact is when I get pissed off about something or something awful has happened, I just say, 'You know what? Thank you very much. Thank you for the lyrics. Because that is exactly what you just gave me.' There's no real negative then. So if something happens, I don't cry about it. I just find myself a pen and I figure it out."
"Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them."
"Nobody can ever say that being negative ever helped them at all - not in any way."
