Wish quotes
4.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside wish — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything."
"One thing I've tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead."
"Sometimes when relationships end, you write an e-mail and say everything you wish you said. Sometimes you don't push send."
"When I go to a restaurant, yeah, I know that a line is probably going to form in front of the table, but didn't I always wish for that? Yeah, I did."
"Oh I don’t wanna grow up, wish I’d never grown up It could still be simple."
"Everything that happens to me gets put into a song. For some reason, I'm really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs. There, I don't hold back: names, dates, times, expressions on people's faces, exactly where we were and how it felt, what I wish I would have said to them in the moment. So I'm not only excited about sharing the songs with fans; I'm also pretty interested to hear the response from the guys I've written about on the record."
"The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence."
"Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know."
"I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste."
"If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes."
"Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life."
"Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act."
"Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold"
"A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips."
"I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already."
"I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom."
"There was a sentence in your letter that struck me, “I wish I were far away from everything, I am the cause of all, and bring only sorrow to everybody, I alone have brought all this misery on myself and others.” These words struck me because that same feeling, just the same, not more nor less, is also on my conscience."
"Don't lose heart if it's very difficult at times, everything will come out all right and nobody can in the beginning do as he wishes."
"That we must all die, we always knew, I wish I had sooner remembred it."
"We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass."
