These select quotes will inspire you. Select to pick out from a group or carefully choose as being the best or most suitable.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging select quotes, select sayings, and select proverbs.
Famous Select Quotes
- “The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.” ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer
- “America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to a select few.” ~ Will Rogers
- “There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
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“Think of what you have rather than of what you lack. Of the things you have, select the best and then reflect how eagerly you would have sought them if you did not have them.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
- “But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine’s inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was to select two names at random, better if different sex, and ask a third person, “What happened with those two?” and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else.” ~ Primo Levi
- “The simple combination of letters and sounds you select as a name for your baby can result in a life of carefree coolness or decades of expensive therapy. Hi, I’m Jake versus Hi, I’m… Tapioca” ~ Paul Reiser
- “In a monetary system, most of us live near our work with a house, car, and lifestyle we can afford (or, all too often, cannot afford), rather than the one we prefer. We are only as free as our purchasing power permits. Even many wealthy people today select a residence mainly to impress others with their status. Lacking a true sense of self worth, many live to impress others.” ~ Jacque Fresco
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“When I am with others, they are my teachers. I can select their good points and follow them, and select their bad points and avoid them.” ~ Confucius
- “In the era of modern technology, people could just vote on their phones for who they want to be judges. We could amend all of the ways in which we select our leaders, with the advent of modern technology. We haven’t done so. It’s actually served us fairly well. Ours is the longest enduring constitutional, written constitution in the world. At the moment, I think it’s strained. It’s showing the strains of politics and a frustration.” ~ Martha Minow
- “It is too much for a husband to have a wife who is a coquette and sanctimonious as well; she should select only one of those qualities.” ~ Jean de la Bruyere
- “For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them all, would select those of
his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best” ~ Herodotus -
“Once a player joins our team, our priority is to teach him, not worry about the player we didn’t select.” ~ Tony Dungy
- “As history shows us, when colonization is voluntary, people will self-select better than any testing system. It’s like those foolish attempts to control immigration to American based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically is “descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there.” Willingness is the single most important test.” ~ Orson Scott Card
- “He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with.They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’ t that worth something? He existed.” ~ Patricia Highsmith
- “Attempt to be creative for the joy it brings… Select something like music, dance, sculpture, or poetry. Being creative will help you enjoy life. It engenders a spirit of gratitude. It develops latent talent, sharpens your capacity to reason, to act, and to find purpose in life. It dispels loneliness and heartache. It gives a renewal, a spark of enthusiasm, and zest for life.” ~ Richard G. Scott
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“She genuinely likes people. All people, not just a select few she’s spent years making up her mind about.” ~ Suzanne Collins
- “There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e. in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in our study of the material universe-before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification.” ~ Roy Crowson
- “Apart from a commendable determination to discomfit Trump and members of his inner circle (select military figures excepted, at least for now), journalism remains pretty much what it was prior to November 8th of last year: personalities built up only to be torn down; fads and novelties discovered, celebrated, then mocked; “extraordinary” stories of ordinary people granted 15 seconds of fame only to once again be consigned to oblivion – all served with a side dish of that day’s quota of suffering, devastation, and carnage. These remain journalism’s stock-in-trade.” ~ Andrew Bacevich
- “No general can fight his battles alone. He must depend upon his lieutenants, and his success depends upon his ability to select the right man for the right place.” ~ Philip Danforth Armour
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“Roarke cares very much for Beth and for me, and a few select others. But loves? I’m not sure he’d let himself risk quite that unstable an emotion.” ~ Nora Roberts
- “What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
- “Evolution is variation and selection. If you can vary alternatives, and select among them, improvement emerges. It works in technology, in apps, and in life itself. What stunned me about seasteading is that it’s a technology for variation and selection in governance itself. The reason some two hundred nation-states do a poor job of governing seven billion people is that they don’t vary, and people don’t select.” ~ Joe Quirk
- “When I devoted myself to poetry – and poetry is a very serious medium – I don’t think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor…well, it didn’t always lend itself to my poetry. When you’re writing poetry, it’s like working with gold, you can’t waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you’re going to select. But when you’re writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor’s main task is to cut back, not ask for more.” ~ Ana Castillo
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“After you produce you can select. you can curate. you can censor. But for now, have bad ideas, lots and lots of bad ideas.” ~ Seth Godin
- “It’s fun to play around… it’s human nature to try to select the right horse… But for the average person, I’m more of an indexer… The predictability is so high… For 10, 15, 20 years you’ll be in the 85th percentile of performance. Why would you screw it up?” ~ Charles R. Schwab
- “The Phrygians select a natural hillock, run a trench through the middle of it, dig passages, and extend the interior space as widely as the site admits. Over it they build a pyramidal roof of logs fastened together, and this they cover with reeds and brushwood, heaping up very high mounds of earth above their dwellings. Thus their fashion in houses makes their winters very warm and their summers very cool.” ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
- “It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don’t work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.” ~ Sebastiao Salgado
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“A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.” ~ Burton Malkiel
- “There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.” ~ J. R. R. Tolkien
- “Your ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop.” ~ Brian Tracy
- “Why aren’t people more successful? Because most people do not select and pursue a vision without regard for other objectives. Most people shift from one activity to another without any focused or directed purpose, naively assuming that things will take care of themselves or will be taken care of by others. George Bernard Shaw said, “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”” ~ Ari Kiev
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“Confidence comes from seeing so many sides, angles, views, and tangents. Because when you do select an approach or direction, you are doing so with better/ more complete information.” ~ Thomas Leonard
- “One must search diligently to find laudatory comments on education (other than those pious platitudes which are fodder for commencement speeches). It appears that most persons who have achieved fame and success in the world of ideas are cynical about formal education. These people are a select few, who often achieved success in spite of their education, or even without it. As has been said, the clever largely educate themselves, those less able aren’t sufficiently clever or imaginative to benefit much from education.” ~ Edward Gibbon
- “Vegetables, which are the lowest in the scale of living things, are fed by roots, which, implanted in the native soil, select by the action of a peculiar mechanism, different subjects, which serve to increase and to nourish them.” ~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
- “The constitution has broken down. We have no enemies except the ones we select and direct towards the nearest nuclear bombs. They need an enemy to provoke, a diversion. This is the mentality of tenth-rate people who are in politics because corporate America likes them. They are malleable. They give them contracts to build missile shields that will never work. It’s deeply corrupt.” ~ Gore Vidal
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“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “I come to this debate, Mr. Speaker, as one at the end of 10 years in office on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was one of my top priorities. I applaud the President on focusing on this issue and on taking the lead to disarm Saddam Hussein… Others have talked about this threat that is posed by Saddam Hussein. Yes, he has chemical weapons, he has biological weapons, he is trying to get nuclear weapons.” ~ Nancy Pelosi
- “Individuals for whom no orthodox cure is available surely are entitled to select a health care approach…..This right (is) specifically within,,,the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments to the (US) Constitution….To be insensitive to the very fundamental civil liberties….(:) the choice…of the person whose body is being ravaged (by disease), is to display slight understanding of the essence of our free society and its constitutional underpinnings.” ~ Luther L. Bohanon
- “If we are to achieve long-range goals, we must learn to set up and accomplish short-range goals that will move us along the way. If we do not consciously select our goals, we may be controlled by goals not of our own choosing – goals imposed by outside pressures (such as the expectations of others) or by our habits (such as procrastination) or by our desire for the approval of the world.” ~ Ezra Taft Benson
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“Let God fling you out (as seed), and do not go until He does. If you select your own spot, you will prove an empty pod. If God sows you, you will bring forth fruit.” ~ Oswald Chambers
- “While you should be friendly with all people, select with great care those whom you wish to have close to you. They will be your safeguards in situations where you may vacillate between choices, and you in turn may save them.” ~ Gordon B. Hinckley
- “The big trouble is not really who isn’t in the Hall of Fame, but who is. It was established for a select few.” ~ Rogers Hornsby
- “Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only.” ~ Max Muller
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“God is the same, even though He has a thousand names; it is up to us to select a name for Him.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “I have so many favorite writers, it’s very hard to select a few… of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- “Some politicians are scared of Putin and some are extremely apologetic, actually. And I feel very sorry for this because some people who are like my friends from the left flank, they praise Putin because they see him as the fighter against American imperialism, which he is not. You know, why would you select between American imperialism and Russian imperialism? To my mind, it’s exactly the same thing.” ~ Ilya Ponomarev
- “Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.” ~ John F. Kennedy
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“I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.” ~ Jose Saramago
- “Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on. The country cannot afford amateur hour in the White House.” ~ Donald Rumsfeld
- “Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the running to spread the truth among such persons.” ~ Bertolt Brecht
- “This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.” ~ Cormac McCarthy
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“God has called us to be His representatives in our nation and in our world. Select candidates who represent your views and work for their election.” ~ James Dobson
- “If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.” ~ William Strunk, Jr.
- “On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.” ~ Gabrielle Zevin
- “TV writers live life of well-paid, specialty prostitutes. We have a very special skill set and we occupy one of the higher floors in the bordello that is writing. We do a very particular job for a very select clientele.” ~ David Simon
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“In Europe and the United States, you’ve got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect.” ~ Karl Rove
- “The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. If you’re a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. As an actor you develop how angry you should be. You select how angry you should be. You listen to the other actor and then you react. In film, sometimes the other actor isn’t even there. You have to play the scene. What I do is I call on my experience on the stage. I play the scene and I hope that I reach a certain level of integrity because that’s what I learned on the stage.” ~ Jack Klugman
- “One theme that fascinates me is cognitive enhancement. It seems only a matter of time until we live in a world where steroids for the brain are readily available to all. And once we come to grips with that reality, I suspect the debate over the ethics will be much more heated than the debate over steroids in baseball or any other sport, where the use is limited to a select group of freakish athletes.” ~ Ben Casnocha
- “At the root of the shy temperament is a deep fear of social judgment, one so severe it can sometimes be crippling. Introverted people don’t worry unduly about whether they’ll be found wanting, they just find too much socializing exhausting and would prefer either to be alone or in the company of a select few people.” ~ Jeffrey Kluger
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“Time is very important to art and if you don’t have the time to select, art goes out the window.” ~ Jack Klugman
- “The recent arrest of Younis Tsouli in the United Kingdom was no doubt a significant victory in the war against online terrorism. Tsouli was one of a very select few individuals who have successfully used the Internet as a means to network and share resources with a host of Al-Qaida-linked terrorist organizations.” ~ Evan Kohlmann
- “I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you’re not married or coupled up, whether you’ve been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.” ~ Jennifer Weiner
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“Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people’s thoughts.” ~ Hilary Mantel
- “I generally don’t select my chicken or my hamburgers based on the personal ideology of the person who is either flipping the hamburgers or making the money back at corporate headquarters. But if people want to do that, they’re free to do it.” ~ Alan Dershowitz
- “What’s less well known is that the CIA’s executive management staff is far more concerned with selecting the right candidates to serve as CIA officers than it is about selecting agents overseas. The CIA dedicates a huge portion of its budget figuring how to select, control, and manage its own work force. It begins with instilling blind obedience. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a sacred chain of command that cannot be violated. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it. Or you’re out.” ~ Douglas Valentine
