These selective quotes will inspire you. Selective relating to, or characterized by selection or tending to choose carefully.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging selective quotes, selective sayings, and selective proverbs.
Best Selective Quotes
- “Be selective about your external influences. Your multi-dimensional brain is influenced by everything you see, hear, read, smell, touch, feel or say.” ~ Brian Tracy
- “Being selective-doing less-is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.” ~ Tim Ferriss
- “Everything you do, every thought you have, every word you say creates a memory that you will hold in your body. It’s imprinted on you and affects you in subtle ways – ways you are not always aware of. With that in mind, be very conscious and selective.” ~ Phylicia Rashad
-
“The selective memory isn’t selective enough.” ~ Blake Morrison
- “Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.” ~ Wole Soyinka
- “Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind –without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” ~ William James
- “In your thoughts, you need to be selective. Thoughts are powerful vehicles of attention. Only think positive thoughts about yourself and your endeavors, and think well of the endeavors of others.” ~ Frederick Lenz
-
“To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective.” ~ Claude Simon
- “Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; one is no longer interested in being happy; beyond happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source.” ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Selective quotes love
- “I have selective hearing.” ~ Eddie Van Halen
- “The best thing you can give as a leader is a reason to trust. People want to trust. They’re hungry for it. But they’re selective. They’ll only give it to a motivator, a communicator, a teacher, a real person. Someone who in good times and bad always does the right thing.” ~ Jeffrey R. Immelt
-
“A mind that is very selective to forms… is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.” ~ Susanne Katherina Langer
- “What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood.” ~ Phyllis Schlafly
- “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.” ~ Richard Koch
- “The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species’ most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.” ~ Orson Scott Card
-
“The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.” ~ Philip K. Dick
- “The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.” ~ Simon Sinek
- “I’m pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down.” ~ Herb Ritts
- “I’ve got to be kind of careful because I’ve had good advice: “Don’t sell yourself too short.” I have to not be too available to everything that comes along. I’ve always been a people pleaser and now I’m upping the ante in terms of price so I can be more selective. I really enjoyed working on three tracks on Sara Groves’ [parenthood-focused] album Station Wagon. I love playing on those songs and I love the heart in that album.” ~ Phil Keaggy
-
“Forgiveness is ‘selective remembering’–a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go.” ~ Marianne Williamson
- “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.” ~ Diane Ackerman
- “People have presences, both online and in real life. You can choose to show everything, meaning all sides of you, or you can choose to be selective.” ~ Kevin Systrom
-
“I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does.” ~ Virgilia Peterson
- “I’m a lot more selective with work these days. My perfect plan is to do one movie every nine months. It would have to be a project that I found inspiring. It would also have to include other actors and a director I am inspired to work with.” ~ Gwyneth Paltrow
- “An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.” ~ Graham Greene
- “Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don’t put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.” ~ Garrison Keillor
-
“Composition is selective improvisation.” ~ Igor Stravinsky
- “Propaganda by censorship takes two forms: the selective control of information to favour a particular viewpoint, and the deliberate doctoring of information in order to create an impression different from that originally intended.” ~ James A.C. Brown
- “As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-‘teleological activity.’ He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort.” ~ Thorstein Veblen
- “Trout aren’t naturally as selective as they’ve become in crowded tailwaters – they’ve been trained to be like that by too much fishing pressure. I’ve seen tailwater fish that are so hysterical they’ll refuse naturals. You wonder how they get enough to eat.” ~ John Gierach
-
“I am selective. If I do splash out, it’s an investment, and I wear things for years.” ~ Erin O’Connor
- “Doing the same things you did when the economy was good is not good enough. You will have to put more coals on the fire in a poor economy to get the same heat you received in a good economy. You must give more energy, more thought, more service, and get into positive thinking material more frequently. Become more selective about who you spend time with. Love a little more, hate a little less. Think about it. You can progressively move on an upward path toward any goal. The choice is yours as to who or what controls you!” ~ Bob Proctor
- “I’ve had a wonderful career and I’m very happy to have had all of the opportunities that I’ve had to tell stories and work for as long as I have. I’m sure there’ll be a few more films but I’m happy that I’m able to be selective.” ~ Angelina Jolie
- “The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.” ~ Thorstein Veblen
-
“Eugenics, which had started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and prevention of conception… Recently it had cropped up again in the form of selective breeding.” ~ Margaret Sanger
- “History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.” ~ Julian Jaynes
- “The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
- “For the past few years, I’ve been more selective than I have any right to be, but I think that’s finally starting to work in my favor. I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it’s only because I made a decision to stop worrying about making money.” ~ Lizzy Caplan
-
“Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.” ~ Daniel Dennett
- “It’s nice to be in a place where I can be a little more selective, and to be sought out for ideas that I have.” ~ Will Ferrell
- “By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond ‘black’ and ‘white,’ we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression.” ~ Manning Marable
- “It is most critical for a woman, or for a man who is very sensitive and opens up his heart, to be very selective about the people they have sex with.” ~ Frederick Lenz
-
“We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.” ~ Irving Babbitt
- “When all actions are used for feedback, the consequence of making mistakes will be a corrective and appropriate response, because everything everybody does matters. … The more selective you are in the feedback you accept, the more insane your reasoning will become as you will necessarily reject corrective feedback that would have led to better reasoning.” ~ Erik Naggum
- “The artist… standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams – ‘a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty.’ To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success.” ~ James Joyce
- “Extreme picky eaters may have what’s called Selective Eating Disorder. People with this experience physical and psychological discomfort over certain tastes, smells, textures.” ~ Emily Yoffe
-
“What part of our history’s reinvented and under rug swept? What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?” ~ Alanis Morissette
- “Although eugenics flourished in Nazi Germany, the ideal of a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s. It may surprise many to know that, in Mein Kampf, Hitler credited America with helping formulate his ideas on eugenics, and he admitted he’d studied the laws of US states to familiarize himself with selective reproduction and other eugenics issues.” ~ James Morcan
- “I’m certainly not a person who spends their every waking moment soaking themselves in signs and signals of the sort that cult studies people study; and it’s partly, I suppose, because some of those signs and signals aren’t worth bothering about. You have to be selective about these things.” ~ Peter York
- “Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.” ~ E. L. Doctorow
-
“I always set out to just work, as an actor, and try to do as many different things as I possibly could, and not be too selective or too careful. I think just working is fun.” ~ Jason Lee
- “Reality is ultimately a selective act of perception and interpretation. A shift in our perception and interpretation enables us to break old habits and awaken new possibilities for balance, healing, and transformation.” ~ David Simon
- “Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction.” ~ William Zinsser
- “Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.” ~ Sam Keen
-
“My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and to be ruthlessly selective.” ~ Burton Silverman
- “I’m a big skeptic so I won’t just go off what an individual may tell me. I gotta do the research. I’ma get different literature on that one subject and just compare and contrast. I do my own selective studies.” ~ Kevin Gates
- “One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate – obviously you couldn’t be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it’s not always there in the foreground. If you don’t understand that, you’re missing a lot.” ~ Robert Neelly Bellah
- “If you want to create something that’s worth doing you have to self-edit from the get-go. You really must be careful and selective with whom you work, you must constantly ask yourself the hard questions about your art, and you must set a nearly unattainable standard for yourself.” ~ John Dyer Baizley
-
“I’m still reading some scripts and I model as well, so I’m still doing that. But I don’t want to do like just anything so we’re being really selective about the stuff I’ll do.” ~ Kim Smith.
- “When the shot is afterwards subjected to white light, colour appears because of selective reflection.” ~ Gabriel Lippmann
- “The thing about film is that your eye is selective. Film isn’t. You have to make film do what you want. Simply photographing something doesn’t do it. You have to know how to apply light and know what it does on film.” ~ Gordon Willis
-
“It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.” ~ Jonathan Haidt
- “Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to own them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again.” ~ Barry Ritholtz
- “Sometimes you can’t help but pay attention to what is written about you. You are trying not to because it’s generally not constructive, it can be very funny, in which case it’s fine to pay attention to it if you’re going to laugh about it. But if it’s going to get you angry then it’s a pretty pointless waste of energy, so I try and be selective about what I take an interest in about myself.” ~ Daniel Radcliffe
