“If one has to conform to a certain taste, he/she might lose his/her own individuality and imagination. But if you don't really care about winning competitions and think of them as chances to learn from the experience, they would become good ways to learn about others and yourself. Competitions are also stages where one becomes known to the public.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 950 of 4756
“Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.”
“No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.”
“I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.”
“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.”
“Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.”
“Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”
“If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.”
“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.”
“Sometimes I think everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending is how you get brave, I don't know.”
“- Some men think because they are afraid to do. - There is a difference between fear and caution.”
“Just where do you think you are going, Arya?' the septa demanded. Arya glared at her. 'I have to go shoe a horse,' she said sweetly taking a brief satisfaction in the shock on the septa's face.”
“They were never my pack, not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little girl, and no wolf at all.”
“Nobody likes cravens,” he said uncomfortably. “I wish we hadn’t helped him. What if they think we’re craven too?” "You're too stupid to be craven,” Pyp told him. “I am not,” Grenn said. “Yes you are. If a bear attacked you in the woods, you’d be too stupid to run away.” “I would not,” Grenn insisted. “I’d run away faster than you.” He stopped suddenly, scowling when he saw Pyp’s grin and realized what he’d just said.”
“I never wanted to see half the things I've seen, and I've never seen half the things I wanted to. I don't think wanting comes into it. You'd best go all the same.”
“He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.”
“Mothers." The man made a word sound like a curse. "I think birthing does something to your minds. You are all mad.”
“Nothing. My father is very good at doing nothing. He calls it thinking.”
“Much as I admire Tolkien, I once again always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, "Fly, you fools." What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.”