"Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark."
What If quotes
What If
507 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside what if — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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What If quotes (page 4 of 26)
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"I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?"
"Hey, what if those crop circles are just ads for Target?"
"If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don't, and what if I do?"
"But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?"
"What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?"
"What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?"
"But is it just then that the few and the wealthy should be the rulers? And what if they, in like manner, rob and plunder the people, - is this just?"
"What if the house catches fire?” “Roast marshmallows. And if it floods, you’ll go down with the ship. If there’s a tornado, I’ll meet both you and this house in Oz, after my shift. Got it?"
"If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are."
"What if you take a human mind, and upload it into one of these machines?"
"What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense."
"What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke."
"I'm convinced that imagination is at the heart of everything we do - in art, science, even astrophysics and higher mathematics. Imagination leads us to ask, "What if?""
"I like working in series, so instead of just doing one separate body of work, what if I come up with a different rhythm, instead of every week, what if I make it every year? And so I'm still setting up a series, a repetition, but it's a completely different work flow."
"And what if---what are you if the people who are supposed to love you can leave you like you're nothing?"
"What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?"
"So what if you're not perfect? nobody else is either."
"What if English toil and blood Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty, To dim, but not extinguish thee."
"What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again."