Wish quotes
4.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"I don't really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are. For example, if people wish I would sound like I used to sound, then it says more about them than it does me."
"Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies."
"Much success to you, even if you wish me the opposite."
"Any who may wish to profit himself alone from the knowledge given him, rather than serve others through the knowledge he has gained from learning, is betraying knowledge and rendering it worthless"
"If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then is it possible to help him."
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Sometimes I wish I could go back in life, not to change things but just to feel things twice"
"Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to."
"We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become."
"I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person."
"Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it - and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart's indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you - for only the truth that builds up is truth for you."
"I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this."
"I wish you music to help with the burdens of life ,and to help you release your happiness to others."
"It is legal because I wish it."
"Leadership does not mean domination. The world is always well supplied with people who wish to rule and dominate others."
"I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence."
"I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end."
"If I had one wish I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss."
"I could only achieve success in my life through self-discipline, and I applied it until my wish and my will became one."
"The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he even suggests the wish to undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. He does not care how many plans and beginnings we make, provided nothing is finished."
"You will attract to yourself people who harmonize with your own philosophy of life, whether you wish it or not."
"You may force me to say what you wish; you may revile me for saying what I do. But it moves."
"I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea."
"We must not think that [God] takes no notice of us, when He does not answer our wishes: for He has a right to distinguish what we actually need."
"Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence"
"We all wish we had super powers. We all wish we could do more than we can do."
