These standstill quotes will inspire you. Standstill, a state characterized by the absence of motion or of progress or a situation or condition in which there is no movement or activity at all.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging standstill quotes, standstill sayings, and standstill proverbs.
Best Standstill Quotes
- “The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
- “A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.” ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
- “Every journey is played out between standstill and flight.” ~ Claudio Magris
- “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.” ~ Barbara Tuchman
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“Fear isn’t an excuse to come to a standstill. It’s the impetus to step up and strike.” ~ Arthur Ashe
- “While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill – little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.” ~ John Adams
- “Success cannot come from standstill men. Methods change and men must change with them.” ~ James Cash Penney
- “Each one of us has some goal we want to reach, and we must work toward that goal one step at a time. You can’t reach toward that goal and expect it on the first try. All your small steps will bring you just a little closer. You must continue to work toward this goal. You may take a few steps back or be at a standstill, but you will be learning from each step. Through hard work, self-confidence and motivation, you will find ways to move ahead. You alone can help yourself to move ahead in life and gain personal satisfaction. You only get out of life what you put into it.” ~ Sid Luckman , Life standstill quotes
- “Good things don’t come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!” ~ Julian Bond
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“Never try to leap from a standstill.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “To face tomorrow with the thought of using the methods of yesterday is to envision life at a standstill. To keep ahead, each one of us, no matter what our task, must search for new and better methods-for even that which we now do well must be done better tomorrow.” ~ James F. Bell, III
- “Your reason and your passion are your rudder and sails of your seafaring soul, if either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.” ~ Harry S. Truman
- “Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a standstill under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.” ~ Ward Cunningham
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“At present there are such goings-on that everything is at a standstill.” ~ Boyle Roche
- “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” ~ Bill Gates
- “Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, “Lighthouses” as the poet said “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.” ~ Haruki Murakami
- “In nature, nothing is at standstill, everything pulsates, appears, and disappears. Heart, breath, digestion, sleep and waking – birth and death – everything comes and goes in waves. Rhythm, periodicity, harmonious alternation of extremes is the rule. No use rebelling against the very pattern of life.” ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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“I started working on a line of clothes last year, but right now we’re kind of at a standstill.” ~ Beverley Mitchell
- “Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance, and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.” ~ Helen Keller
- “Never mind, love, it’s not the end of the world.” ~ Simon Barnes
- “We are up against the unseen power that controls this dark world and the spiritual agents are from the very headquarters of evil. Therefore, we must wear the “whole armor of God,” that we may be able to resist evil in its day of power, and that even when we have fought to a standstill, we may still stand our ground.” ~ Corrie Ten Boom
- “It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.” ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg
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“Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.” ~ Barbara Tuchman
- “The best defense of the country is the fear of the fighter. If we are strong in fighters we should probably never be attacked in force. If we are moderately strong we shall probably be attacked and the attacks will gradually be bought to a standstill. . . . If we are weak in fighter strength, the attacks will not be bought to a standstill and the productive capacity of the country will be virtually destroyed.” ~ Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding
- “It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.” ~ Tove Jansson
- “The position of First Lady has no rules, just precedent, so its evolution has been at a virtual standstill for years. If Martha Washington didn’t do it, then no one is sure it should be done.” ~ Paula Poundstone
- “It is said that life is too short, and that’s quite true unless you are lonely. Loneliness can bring time to its knees; an absolute and utter standstill.” ~ Jonathan Hull
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“Some people wait so long for their ship to come in, their pier collapses.” ~ John Goddard
- “But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “In the war, you lose areas, but you recapture another area. So, it is difficult to tell whether you are losing or gaining or it was a standstill. No one has this answer.” ~ Bashar al-Assad
- “He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess… the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leas to stand still or to anarchy.” ~ Emanuel Lasker
- “Whenever calamity howlers shake their heads and impress upon you that this, that, and the next dire catastrophe is to befall this nation or the nations of the world such as, for example, that exhaustion of the world’s oil supply will bring all transportation and machinery to a standstill through lack of lubrication, or that exhaustion of the earth’s stores of coal will make life unlivable in these cold climates-just smile and reply that the worst troubles of all are those that never happen [and] that you prefer not to cross shaky bridges until you come to them.” ~ B. C. Forbes. , Never standstill quotes
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“The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas – all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it’s unfamiliar but because I don’t know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul – as the only reality of this moment – there’s an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.” ~ Fernando Pessoa
- “At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn’t miserable anymore: I wasn’t anything at all. I was a nothing– a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn’t know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.” ~ David James Duncan
- “We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organized society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “Listen, global warming is a real problem, but it’s not the end of the world. A 30-centimeter sea level rise is just not going to bring the world to a standstill, just like it didn’t over the last 150 years.” ~ Bjorn Lomborg
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“If you say, ‘You’ve made it,’ then you kind of come to a standstill, and I don’t think any actor wants to do that.” ~ Jenna Ushkowitz
- “When he utilizes combined energy, his fighting men become as it were like unto rolling logs or stones. For it is the nature of a log or stone to remain motionless on level ground, and to move when on a slope; if four-cornered, to come to a standstill, but if round-shaped to go rolling down.” ~ Sun Tzu
- “When I got to the library I came to a standstill, – ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.” ~ Elizabeth von Arnim
- “I’m the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.” ~ Austin Grossman
- “By that time it was already clear that the next prime minister was going to be Golda Meir, a woman whom I frankly detested – a mutual sentiment, I might add. I knew her as an opinionated, obstinate person, primitive in her outlook, rigid in her attitudes, with a genius for reaching and exploiting the deepest fears and prejudices of the Jewish masses. I was certain that with her as prime minister, all peace efforts would come to a total standstill.” ~ Uri Avnery
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“Scepticismcan never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill.” ~ George Eliot
- “If somehow every volunteer vanished tomorrow, so much of this country would come to a standstill: schools, hospitals and libraries. You can’t name an institution that doesn’t depend on volunteers.” ~ Al Roker
- “What the carburetor, sparkplug, and self-starter are to an automobile, initiative, private enterprise and executive ability are to industry as a whole, including the wage earner, wage payer, wage spender and wage saver, i.e., the investor. If the sparkplug and self-starter get out of commission, the car will come to a standstill.” ~ William J. H. Boetcker
- “The idea of suicide, understandable as it is, does not seem commendable to me. We live in order to gain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness. As long as life is possible, even if only in a minimal degree, you should hang onto it, in order to scoop it up for the purpose of conscious development. To interrupt life before its time is to bring to a standstill an experiment which we have not set up. We have found ourselves in the midst of it and must carry it through to the end.” ~ Carl Jung
- “We are reaching the point where the temperature standstill is becoming the major feature of the recent global warm period that began in 1980. In brief, the global temperature has remained constant for longer than it has increased.”” ~ David Robert Whitehouse
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“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “The spring in Boston is like being in love: bad days slip in among the good ones, and the whole world is at a standstill, then the sun shines, the tears dry up, and we forget that yesterday was stormy.” ~ Louise Closser Hale
- “And this, incidentally, is my thumbnail sketch of American marriage: A woman sees a man; she likes him. Now she jumps on this thing and rides it to some kind of standstill. Then she changes it and trains it, and to the exact degree that she’s able to do this, she disrespects him.” ~ Jack Nicholson
- “The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
- “The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.” ~ Slavoj Žižek
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“Poverty can turn a person into a flaming torch for change and revolution, without which mankind would come to a standstill.” ~ Jean Sasson
- “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.” ~ Elmore Leonard
- “It’s not the end of the world to lose.” ~ Andy Murray
- “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) “lighthouses erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.” ~ Barbara Tuchman.
- “The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.” ~ Barbara Tuchman
