These finishing quotes will inspire you. Finishing brings (a task or activity) to an end; complete.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging finishing quotes, finishing sayings, and finishing proverbs.
Best Finishing Quotes
- “You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “Do not plan for ventures before finishing what’s at hand.” ~ Euripides
- “The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.” ~ John Bingham
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“All’s well that ends well.” ~ John Heywood
- “The pride in finishing a marathon is much greater than all the pain endured during the marathon.” ~ Hal Higdon
- “Finishing races is important, but racing is more important.” ~ Dale Earnhardt
- “Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.” ~ Richard M. Nixon
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“I enjoyed in every way my 12 years of playing Archie, and I wasn’t personally sad about finishing a long job.” ~ Carroll O’Connor
- “Each thing leapfrogs. I do a Genesis project – like now, we’re just finishing off an album – and then by the time the album is doing its thing, I could do nothing or I could do a film.” ~ Phil Collins
- “I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.” ~ Jackie Collins
- “The difficult part was to tell the world that I was finishing.” ~ Gabriela Sabatini
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“Surely it is time for Jews, worried over the huge growth of Arabs in Israel, to consider finishing the exchange of populations that began 35 years ago.” ~ Meir Kahane
- “We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.” ~ Bill Gates
- “When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.” ~ Marc Chagall
- “Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.” ~ William Feather
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“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” ~ Truman Capote
- “I’m never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.” ~ Claude Monet
- “To put it as simply as possible – and this is a simple answer, not a total answer – I know when a painting’s finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place.” ~ James Elkins
- “I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.” ~ Claude Monet
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“If you’ve worked over all of your drawing, it should finish itself – often when you least expect it.” ~ Stan Smith
- “It is difficult to stop in time because one gets carried away. But I have that strength; it is the only strength I have.” ~ Claude Monet
- “I must for myself insist that when finished, that is when all the parts are in place and are working, that now it has become an object and will therefore have its boundaries as definite as the prow, the stern, the sides, and bottom bound as a boat.” ~ John Marin
- “Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.” ~ Henri Matisse
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“I favor a picture which arrives at its destination without the evidence of a trying journey rather than one which shows the marks of battle.” ~ Charles Sheeler
- “When you’ve just done it, you’re not sure. But when you’ve sat with it for a couple of hours and you don’t want to do anything more to it, that’s a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “The so-called new Russian man is characterized mainly by his complete exhaustion. You may find yourself wondering if he has the strength to enjoy his new-found freedom. He is like a long-distance runner who, on reaching the finishing line, is incapable even of raising his hands in a gesture of victory.” ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
- “One of Cezanne’s unfinished paintings… appears to be a completed work even though only a few strokes of paint have been put down. My methods are similar… I expect each of my paintings to appear whole in every stage.” ~ Christopher Willard
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“I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.” ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir
- “How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven’t really been completed.” ~ Peter Doig
- “Finishing is torture… There’s always some newly seen flaw. But the little glimpses of beauty between the anxiety make it worth it.” ~ Jacob Collins
- “I paint very directly. I go from top to bottom. When I get to the floor, the painting is finished.” ~ Neil Welliver
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“Put off finish as it takes a lifetime – wait until later to try to finish things – make a lot of starts.” ~ Charles Webster Hawthorne
- “A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.” ~ Eugene Delacroix
- “However minutely labored the picture may be in the detail, the whole will have a false and even an unfinished appearance, at whatever distance, or in whatever light it can be shown.” ~ Joshua Reynolds
- “Always quit for the day when you know what you want to do next.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
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“I can’t bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There’s something so dead about a finished painting.” ~ John Updike
- “The strength and clarity of the picture you envision at the start will tell you when you are done. You are finished when you have said what you wish to say, when nothing added can make it better.” ~ Richard Schmid
- “While sincerity and over-anxiety can spoil a picture, through superfluous elaboration and unnecessary correction, the carelessness that would leave it in an unfinished state is even more reprehensible.” ~ Walter J. Phillips
- “While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.” ~ Claude Monet
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“Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.” ~ Daniel H. Pink
- “Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.” ~ Paul Gauguin
- “The beginning of a painting is a very energized, exciting time, and it generates most of the energy I have. If I’ve gotten 75 per cent of it down, then it takes an effort to really get up that kind of energy to finish it in the same way it’s begun.” ~ Burton Silverman
- “Every great painting is left incomplete at the point where its completion is obvious.” ~ Robert Breault
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“A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.” ~ James Whistler
- “Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “A painting is finished when to have done less would be considered a sin and more a crime.” ~ Ted Godwin
- “The marathon is a charismatic event. It has everything. It has drama. It has competition. Every jogger can’t dream of being an Olympic champion, but he can dream of finishing a marathon.” ~ Fred Lebow
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“One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.” ~ Eugene Delacroix
- “To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “They are called finishing-schools and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything.” ~ Olive Schreiner
- “Here’s the secret to finishing that first book. Don’t rewrite as you go.” ~ Laurell K. Hamilton
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“When I started finishing games and coming off the field shaking hands, it was a beautiful thing. I mean, you start seeing that you’re an important part of the team.” ~ Dennis Eckersley
- “When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it” ~ Marc Chagall
- “We’ve observed that people who stall in their personal growth work often have counterproductive soft addictions that stand in their way of growth and having the life they say they want. It can be a simple thing, such as watching TV instead of finishing a project.” ~ Judith Wright
- “I often wonder, if there were no deadlines, would anything ever get ended?” ~ Judith Weir
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“It is often the easiest move that completes the game.” ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
- “I just get focused on whatever is in front of me. When I was filming Crossroads, it had all my focus. Now I’m all focused on finishing my recording so I can get that out. It’s just day by day.” ~ Taryn Manning
- “Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.” ~ Richard Ernst
- “Up until doing this movie, I hadn’t really paid a huge amount of attention to those genres, but after finishing this movie, it really gave me a different sense of appreciation of the way the movies play out.” ~ Chiaki Kuriyama
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“I’m planning on finishing the Gospels at some point.” ~ Chester Brown
- “Peace is not the product of a victory or a command. It has no finishing line, no final deadline, no fixed definition of achievement. Peace is a never-ending process, the work of many decisions.” ~ Oscar Hammerstein II , Finishing quotes line
- “I was playing the best football of my career at the time, finishing top scorer in Italy three year’s running. There were other good players around but I think I was the best at that time.” ~ Michel Patini
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“The finishing off of the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe.” ~ Franz Halder
- “I’ve done that quite often, but I’ve got to be quite honest… as much as you would want to only do one at a time, sometimes projects overlap and there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes you to have begin writing a new project just as you’re finishing off another.” ~ Trevor Rabin
- “I was sent to a finishing school, which didn’t last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I ‘came out’ before going to a domestic science school.” ~ Mary Wesley
Finishing to complete something or come to the end of an activity.
