Finest Quotes

• The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

  Rene Descartes

  Wisdom, Book, Reading

  291 Copy quote

• The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

  M. Scott Peck

  Inspirational, Happiness, Spiritual

  156 Copy quote

• The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Carpe Diem, Fire, Steel

  Nixon, Richard M. (1975). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1973”, p.525, Best Books on

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• The finest pleasure is kindness to others.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Kindness, Pleasure, Kindness To Others

  3 Copy quote

• I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

  Winston Churchill

  Determination, Military, War

  Speech in House of Commons, 13 May 1940

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• When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

  Salman Rushdie

  Pain, Thinking, Action

  Salman Rushdie (2010). “Midnight's Children”, p.497, Random House

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• Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

  Jane Austen

  Love, Motivational, Friendship

  Jane Austen (2005). “Jane Austen: 8 Books in 1”, p.441, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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• I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

  Vince Lombardi

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Vince Lombardi (2012). “What it Takes to be Number One”, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read the lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.

  Henry Miller

  Inspirational, Life, Believe

  26 Copy quote

• The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

  Mark Twain

  Society, Skins, Demand

  Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst (2006). “Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews”, p.563, University of Alabama Press

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• The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

  George Eliot

  Writing, Simple, Language Words

  9 Copy quote

• I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

  Stephen King

  Trying, Proud, Emotion

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.

  Goran Persson

  Inspirational, New Year, Time

  77 Copy quote

• An acute first-class brain is the finest asset anyone can have- and, if we want to be happy, it is an asset we must exploit to the uttermost.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Class, Brain, Want

  3 Copy quote

• The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a finished man.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Men, Earth, Fruit

  8 Copy quote

• There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Ideas, Heaven

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 404, 1895.

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• The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

  Thomas Malthus

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

  Thomas Malthus (2015). “An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings”, p.171, Penguin UK

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• Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Real, Book, Character

  Louisa May Alcott (2018). “Louisa May Alcott Collection”, p.1224, Youcanprint

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• He must understand that if he is the world's finest plum and someone he loves does not like plums, he has the choice of becoming a banana. But he must be warned that if he chooses to become a banana, he will be a second rate banana. But he can always be the best plum.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Love, Choices, Doe

  12 Copy quote

• Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

  Louise Bogan

  Strong, Real, Men

  Louise Bogan (2005). “A poet's prose: selected writings of Louise Bogan : with the uncollected poems”, Swallow Press

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• to tempt and be tempted are closely allied; and in spite of all the finest moral maxims buried in the mind, when emotion interferes, when feeling makes its appearance, one is already much further involved that one realizes, and I have still not learnt how to prevent its appearance.

  Catherine the Great

  Feelings, Temptation, Mind

  11 Copy quote

• The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Art, Taste, Firsts

  "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson". Book by Thomas Jefferson, p. 30, 1904.

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• Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.

  James Russell Lowell

  Reading, Mean, Eye

  James Russell Lowell (1887). “Democracy and other Addresses”

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• The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fashion, Past, Clothes

  Henry David Thoreau (1992). “The Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.87, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Life is the finest secret. So long as that remains, we must all whisper.

  Emily Dickinson

  Long, Secret, Life Is

  Emily Dickinson, Thomas Herbert Johnson, Theodora Ward (1986). “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”, p.482, Harvard University Press

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