These second hand quotes will inspire you.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging second hand quotes, second hand sayings, and second hand proverbs.
Best Second Hand Quotes
- “I’m really interested in fashion but at the same time I find it quite competitive. Second-hand stuff leaves you more open to whatever your own personal style is rather than feeling dictated to by shops.” ~ Sophie Ellis Bextor
- “Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage – it’s okay for clothes not that great for people” ~ Karl Lagerfeld
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“Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.” ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- “I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.” ~ John le Carre
- “My sister and I are both diagnosed with second-hand smoke syndromes. We have never smoked, but we grew up with second-hand smoke our entire lives.” ~ Loni Anderson
- “Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.” ~ Herta Muller
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“If you ever need a helping hand, it is at the end of your arm. As you get older you must remember you have a second hand. The first one is to help yourself. The second hand is to help others.” ~ Audrey Hepburn
- “I get highs, to be totally honest, in second-hand shops. My hunting instinct, I expect, really kicks in.” ~ Bjork
- “I wear a lot of second hand clothes unless I have a concert and then I wear beaded and sequined second hand clothes. No stylist dresses me although I do have a woman that assists me with the buttons.” ~ Chris Isaak
- “I’ve always been quite thrifty. I can’t bear to spend hundreds of pounds on designer clothes. I shop in second-hand shops in Portobello Road and go to Sue Ryder.” ~ Ashley Jensen
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“I do a lot of vintage shopping. I love going to second-hand stores.” ~ Victoria Justice
- “To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.” ~ Galway Kinnell
- “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” ~ Mark Twain
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“Hope, however, isn’t all that’s needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith.” ~ Dean Koontz
- “True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “The amount of knowledge which we can justify from evidence directly available to us can never be large. The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs continue therefore to be held at second hand through trusting others, and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of comparatively few people of widely acknowledged standing.” ~ Michael Polanyi
- “Colombe Josse is the older Jesse daughter. Colombe Jesse is also a sort of tall blonde leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man’s scorn for a poor man’s longing.” ~ Muriel Barbery
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“Why do ‘slow down’ and ‘slow up’ mean the same thing? Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?” ~ George Carlin
- “They know you can’t get people to stop smoking, so they develop a system of informants. That’s the whole idea of second-hand smoke, you know. Make second-hand smoke dangerous and turn everybody against smokers. Then they say you can’t even smoke in a bar – a bar! – because bartenders have a right to a smoke-free “workspace.” Ah, bartenders, those health nuts.” ~ Fran Lebowitz
- “We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter — exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place — the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.” ~ Mark Twain
- “My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn’t make at my family reunion.” ~ Wentworth Miller
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“In high school, I came to realize I had a second-hand faith, derived from my parents and family background. I had no actual reasons for believing it.” ~ Nancy Pearcey
- “Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.” ~ Charles Caleb Colton
- “Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.” ~ Mark Twain
- “By nature, an auction is kind of a wholesale beast anyway. You’re buying second hand goods, even with the historical, antique or aesthetic value. You look to get the wholesale price and you hope for retail spikes periodically when you get two or three people in the audience that want the same thing.” ~ Paul Brown
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“Photography extends our perception allowing us to see and experience more – second hand.” ~ John Paul Caponigro
- “I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.” ~ E. B. White
- “… by then I was getting a little work, doing some playing and getting paid for it, not very much, but enough for me to feel justified in buying a real instrument. I bought a Gretsch with a De-Armond pickup on it and a second-hand Gibson amplifier; it looked like the one Charlie Christian used. I guess it was the same, although there were several models coming out at that time – this would be in I939.” ~ Tal Farlow
- “The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of the a splendid procession; it is by them that the mob are influenced; it is they who the inspectors cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second hand carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them.” ~ Walter Bagehot
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“All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.” ~ George Henry Lewes
- “Ya know it’s funny, what’s happening to us. Our lives have become digital. Our friends, now virtual. And, anything you could ever wanna know is just a click away. Experiencing the world through second hand information isn’t enough. If we want authenticity we have to initiate it. We will never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it. It’s this self-discovery that inevitably takes us to the wildest places on earth.” ~ Travis Rice
- “Oh what’s love got to do, got to do with it
What’s love but a second hand emotion
What’s love got to do, got to do with it
Who needs a heart
When a heart can be broken” ~ Tina Turner - “Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.” ~ Virginia Woolf
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“What is love but a second-hand emotion?” ~ Tina Turner
- “We should always aim to read something different=not only the writers with whom we agree, but those with whom we are ready to do battle. Their point of view challenges us to examine the truth and to test their views…and let us not comment on nor criticize writers of whom we have heard only second-hand, or third-hand without troubling to read their works for ourselves…Don’t be afraid of new ideas.” ~ J. Oswald Sanders
- “Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours – he was incredibly good at it.” ~ Terry Pratchett
- “When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.” ~ Zadie Smith
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“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle
- “Why is the third hand on a watch called a second hand?” ~ Steven Wright
- “[D]on’t ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that’s what they’re there for. Use your library). Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend’s copy. What’s important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read.” ~ Neil Gaiman
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“Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books.” ~ Graham Greene
- “The information I have about Iran is second hand.” ~ Marjane Satrapi
- “While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: “To —-, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw.” He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: “With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
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“I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?” ~ Hilary Mantel
- “To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure. [author’s dedication]” ~ Agatha Christie
- “One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.” ~ Edmund Spenser
- “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. […] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.” ~ Aldous Huxley
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“A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.” ~ Samuel Butler
- “I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I’m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me… I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman’s place!” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
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“A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.” ~ Cyril Connolly
- “I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams” ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- “One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide and made my pains his prey. Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay A mortal thing so to immortalise; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wipèd out likewise. Not so (quod I); let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame; My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name: Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.” ~ Edmund Spenser
- “Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.” ~ Stephenie Meyer
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“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” ~ Ben Hecht
- “It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
- “People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.” ~ David Ogden Stiers
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“Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.” ~ Karl Kraus
- “But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
- “I think my favourite song on the album [Second Hand Rapture’] is ‘Head Is Not My Home’, I love the vocal melody and it’s such a power hit of a track. Every time it pops on I like listening to it, I’m really drawn to it.” ~ Lizzy Plapinger
