Taken quotes
5.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Struggle hard and then if you do not succeed, you are not to blame. Let the world praise or blame you. Let all the wealth of the earth come to your feet, or let you be made the poorest on earth. Let death come this moment or hundreds of years hence. Swerve not from the path you have taken. All good thoughts are immortal and go to make Buddhas and Christs."
"If something makes you happy in this world, you should think of what will happen to you if that thing were taken away."
"Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight."
"I’ve been offered jobs by companies that supported apartheid many times in the 25 years of my modeling career, but I have never taken one of them. I have to refuse that money, because I’m not going to work against my people. They’ve suffered enough."
"I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back."
"A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness."
"I'm not gonna give up, shut up, or let up, until I'm taken up... as a matter of fact, I'm just getting warmed up."
"One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves."
"Greatest thing we can produce is character. Everything else can be taken from us, but not our character."
"People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy."
"Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter."
"I have never let gender get in my way. It has taken me over 30 years to get from a garage to the huge campus that we have today. And it's been a long journey."
"No greater mischief can happen to a Christian people, than to have God's word taken from them, or falsified, so that they no longer have it pure and clear. God grant we and our descendants be not witness to such a calamity."
"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable."
"Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking. They pay more attention to that than to what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course, you cannot feel someone else's Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is."
"Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d' at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips."
"If you have never taken the train across Canada, you really should put it on your life list... Meanwhile, I get to sit back and watch for moose from the dome car as we roll through the lake-dotted vastness of the boreal forest."
"The United States has lost her unique position as a leader in the progress of civilization and has taken up her place simply as one of the grasping and selfish nations of the present day."
"Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of."
"Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally."
