Invert Quotes

• It was strange how your world could shift on its axis and everything you trusted could invert itself in what seemed like no time at all.

  Cassandra Clare

  Axes, World, Strange

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.1855, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts

  Jeff Bezos

  Motivation, Educational, World

  10 Copy quote

• Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.

  Stephen Covey

  Victory, Conservative, Privacy

  Stephen R. Covey (1994). “Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People: Living THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE Every Day”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Moving, Reading

  "The Poetics of Reverie". Book by Gaston Bachelard, 1960.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

  Ishmael

  Gorges, Woe, Madness

  8 Copy quote

• Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

  Herman Melville

  Fire, Giving, Woe

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.400

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Private victories precede public victories.

  Stephen Covey

  Success, Keeping Promises, Victory

  Stephen R. Covey (1992). “Principle Centered Leadership”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• To put labour and wages first and human ordomestic life second is to invert the order of God and of nature.

  Henry Edward Manning

  Order, Wages, Firsts

  1889 On the London dock strike.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is better to invert reality than to copy it.

  Giuseppe Verdi

  Reality, Copies

  50 Copy quote

• Start with a premise and then somehow invert it.

  William Wegman

  Premises

  4 Copy quote

• Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.

  Alice Sebold

  Father, Nice, Fall

  Alice Sebold (2002). “The Lovely Bones”, p.5, Hachette UK

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The difference is as great between The optics seeing as the objects seen. All manners take a tincture from our own; Or come discolor'd through out passions shown; Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.

  Alexander Pope

  Passion, Differences, Giving

  Alexander Pope (1846). “An Essay on Man: In Four Epistles to H. St. John (Lord Bolingbroke). To which are Added, The Universal Prayer, An Essay on the Knowledge and Character of Men, and Other Pieces, with Notes”, p.61

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Invert, always invert.

  Charlie Munger

  10 Copy quote

• Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

  Jodi Picoult

  Reality, Opposites, Expectations

  Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #3: Vanishing Acts, The Tenth Circle, and Nineteen Minutes”, p.1018, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There can be only two questions that are asked with regard to human relationships: Where am I going? Who is going with me? Do not invert the order of the questions. Do not - under any circumstances - invert the order of the questions. Is that clear?

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Soulmate, Order, Two

  8 Copy quote

• I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

  Jeff Bezos

  Business, Successful, Thinking

  "The Zen of Jeff Bezos" by Chris Anderson, www.wired.com. January 01, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.

  Dennis Nurkse

  Art, Dark, Silence

  4 Copy quote

• That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.

  Oliver Harris

  Letters, Able, Rewriting

  Source: bigother.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You don't need to justify your rights as a citizen - that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, "I don't need them in this context" or "I can't understand this," they are no longer rights.

  Edward Snowden

  Responsibility, Rights, Government

  Source: www.thenation.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A revolution cannot progress without the fuel of terror. With time that relationship inverts: the revolution presses forward for the sake of terror. Like an artist, the man creating terror should be detached, cold-blooded. He must keep in mind that the energy of the terror he releases can consume him.

  Young-Ha Kim

  Artist, Men, Creating

  Young-ha Kim (2007). “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen!

  Charles Dickens

  Heartbreak, Taken, Unrequited Love

  Charles Dickens (1868). “Barnaby Rudge, And, Hard Times: With Ten Illustrations”, p.193

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Faulty execution of a winning combination has lost many a game on the very brink of victory. In such cases a player sees the winning idea, plays the winning sacrifice and then inverts the order of his fellow-up moves or misses the really clinching point of his combination.

  Fred Reinfeld

  Moving, Sacrifice, Player

  4 Copy quote

• One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

  Michel Foucault

  Real, Opposites, Proliferation

  4 Copy quote

• That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.

  William James

  Independent, Mean, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.27, 谷月社

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Winning, Years

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

  6 Copy quote

  Show source