Nine Quotes

• Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

  James A. Garfield

  Swimming, Men, Poverty

  "Elements of Success". "President Garfield and education. Hiram college memorial". Book compiled by B. A. Hinsdale, p. 331, 1882.

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• All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Song, Food

  53 Copy quote

• The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Life, Dream, Inspiration

  59 Copy quote

• Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Truth, Creativity

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Virtue and Vice: A Dictionary of the Good Life”, p.12, Harper Collins

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• Success is falling nine times and getting up ten.

  Jon Bon Jovi

  Positive, Success, Fall

  111 Copy quote

• If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Stress, Mean, Animal

  45 Copy quote

• Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Freedom, Men, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer (2007). “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”, p.353, Yale University Press

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• Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

  George Washington Carver

  Inspirational, Motivational, Badass

  607 Copy quote

• If you think that one individual can't make a difference in the world, consider what one cigar can do in a nine-room house.

  Bill Vaughan

  Thinking, Differences, House

  4 Copy quote

• I can't do nothin except try to find cloud nine.

  Assata Shakur

  Clouds, Trying, I Can

  9 Copy quote

• From 1997 to 2003, there was a decline of 50 percent in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland.

  Richard Louv

  Beach, Children, Fishing

  Richard Louv (2013). “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, p.34, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

  Isak Dinesen

  Morning, Eye, Dark

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

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• Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

  Adrienne Rich

  Daughter, Mother, Two

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

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• It is easy to be independent when all behind you agree with you, but the difficulty comes when nine hundred and ninety-nine of your friends think you are wrong.

  Wendell Phillips

  Independent, Thinking, Ninety Nine

  Wendell Phillips (1969). “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, Second Series”, Ayer Company Pub

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• The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up - like a nine-year-old who won't draw pictures, for fear everybody will laugh. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks. Think about how children play. They run around the playground, they trip, they fall, they get up and run some more. They believe everything will be all right. They feel capable; they let go. Good businesspeople behave in a similar way: they lose $15 million, gain $20 million, lose $30 million and earn it back. If that isn't playing, I don't know what is!

  Faith Ringgold

  Letting Go, Running, Fear

  70 Copy quote

• My childhood, I wouldn't say it was bad. It helped me grow up. I stayed out of trouble. My parents taught me what's wrong and right, and knowing that I had a little brother following me, I had to make sure I was doing the right thing so he knows what's right, too. I was in the house nine days out of 10. There wasn't nothing good outside for me.

  Russell Westbrook

  Brother, Growing Up, Knowing

  19 Copy quote

• Nine-tenths of wisdom is appreciation.

  Dale Dauten

  Appreciation

  "Daily Word for Families". Book by Colleen Zuck et al., 1999.

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• Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

  Agnes Repplier

  Believe, Writing, Men

  Agnes Repplier (1898). “Varia”

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• You can talk about strategy all you want, but what really matters is resilience. On the last nine holes of the Masters or the Open, there's going to come at least one point when you want to throw yourself in the nearest trash can and disappear. You know you can't hide. It's like you're walking down the fairway naked. The gallery knows what you've done, every other player knows and worst of all, you know. That's when you find out if you're a real competitor.

  Hale Irwin

  Real, Golf, Player

  6 Copy quote

• To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten. The first 'second' is when you come out of the blocks. The next is when you look up and take your first few strides to attain gain position. By that time the race is actually about half over. The final 'second' - the longest slice of time in the world for an athlete - is that last half of the race, when you really bear down and see what you're made of. It seems to take an eternity, yet is all over before you can think what's happening.

  Jesse Owens

  Sports, Block, Athlete

  Jesse Owens, Paul G. Neimark (1972). “I Have Changed”

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• One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Christian, Dark, Europe

  10 Copy quote

• Staying in the present is the key to any golfer's game: once you start thinking about a shot you just messed up or what you have to do on the next nine to catch somebody, you're lost.

  Paul Azinger

  Golf, Thinking, Keys

  10 Copy quote

• I'm 100% better with a little bit of controlled chaos. I just know if I have three things to do, or nine things to do, I'm just better at them if I have nine.

  Ryan Seacrest

  Three, Littles, Chaos

  Source: www.billboard.com

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• What the world is like from a nine-year-old's point of view? My memory is that nothing is explained to you, you've got to try to figure it out, pick up clues from the people around you, try to figure it out from their reactions.

  Spike Jonze

  Memories, Views, Years

  6 Copy quote

• I'm a smart enough person to know that I don't want everyone to be cookie-cutter versions of the nine guys who wear Converse sneakers.

  Mindy Kaling

  Smart, Sneakers, Guy

  Interview with Kathryn Borel, www.believermag.com.

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