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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"What makes us so often discontented with those who transact business for us is that they almost always abandon the interest of their friends for the interest of the business, because they wish to have the honor of succeeding in that which they have undertaken."
"We are very far from always knowing our own wishes."
"In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances."
"It is oftener by the estimation of our own feelings that we exaggerate the good qualities of others than by their merit, and when we praise them we wish to attract their praise."
"All of us write wish fulfillment."
"I'm very romantic and very soppy, but sometimes I wish I wasn't!"
"There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves."
"If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had."
"I wish people would stop talking about my birthday."
"Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first."
"It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right."
"What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing."
"She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man."
"Suddenly, I was thirty, very unhappy entertaining people in their forties, and here came a group of people in their teens and twenties who had similar anti-authority problems and similar dreams and wishes, hopes for mankind. So I gravitated toward them."
"Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, And serve the ends of wisdom."
"I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot."
"Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build."
"It's funny how much one learns from context. Throughout that entire visit to Kenya, with all its meetings, there was an experience of the place that taught me things I couldn't learn by reading global newswires. The fact that I learned so much makes me wish that I could visit more places. So many of the zones, of course, are closed, so one knows about them only in secondhand ways. My research has only scratched the surface. There are thousands of zones around the world. There's just so much work to do."
"I love making object form; I wish I was doing more of it. I admire the research of my colleagues, and sometimes it makes me sad when their beautiful work - the deep dives into formal research and nuances of geometry and so on - ends up circling in more and more circumscribed contexts. I wish they were more powerful. It's not a modern proposition. Active form doesn't kill object form. I want my students to have all those skills related to geometry, shape, measure, scale, etc., plus skills for using space to manipulate power in the world."
"I wish there would be more movies about scientists."
