Second Hand Quotes

• The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage - it’s okay for clothes not that great for people

  Karl Lagerfeld

  Past, Thinking, Hands

  36 Copy quote

• I'm really interested in fashion but at the same time I find it quite competitive. Second-hand stuff leaves you more open to whatever your own personal style is rather than feeling dictated to by shops.

  Sophie Ellis Bextor

  Fashion, Hands, Feelings

  "The close-up". Interview with Imogen Fox, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2007.

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• Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.

  Charles Dickens

  Hands, Clothes, Care

  Charles Dickens (2007). “A Tale of Two Cities”, p.21, Penguin

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• Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

  Herta Muller

  Memories, Hands, Literature

  "Herta Müller: a life in books". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2012.

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• If you ever need a helping hand, it is at the end of your arm. As you get older you must remember you have a second hand. The first one is to help yourself. The second hand is to help others.

  Audrey Hepburn

  Helping Others, Remember You, Remembers You

  69 Copy quote

• Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

  H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

  Wedding, Second Chance, Hands

  15 Copy quote

• I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

  John le Carre

  Reading, Book, Men

  8 Copy quote

• My sister and I are both diagnosed with second-hand smoke syndromes. We have never smoked, but we grew up with second-hand smoke our entire lives.

  Loni Anderson

  Hands, My Sister, Grew Up

  13 Copy quote

• I wear a lot of second hand clothes unless I have a concert and then I wear beaded and sequined second hand clothes. No stylist dresses me although I do have a woman that assists me with the buttons.

  Chris Isaak

  Hands, Clothes, Buttons

  9 Copy quote

• I get highs, to be totally honest, in second-hand shops. My hunting instinct, I expect, really kicks in.

  Bjork

  Hunting, Hands, Getting High

  "I didn't like being a celebrity. It's a service job. Like washing toilets" by Polly Vernon, www.theguardian.com. July 7, 2007.

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• I do a lot of vintage shopping. I love going to second-hand stores.

  Victoria Justice

  Hands, Vintage, Shopping

  "Go Back-to-School Shopping with Victoria Justice!". Seventeen Interview, www.seventeen.com. August 24, 2010.

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• I've always been quite thrifty. I can't bear to spend hundreds of pounds on designer clothes. I shop in second-hand shops in Portobello Road and go to Sue Ryder.

  Ashley Jensen

  Hands, Designer Clothes, Bears

  56 Copy quote

• True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.

  William Hazlitt

  True Friend, Real, Errors

  William Hazlitt (1870). “The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things”, p.114

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• To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Hands, Together

  Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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• Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

  Galway Kinnell

  Memories, Love Is, Hands

  Galway Kinnell (2001). “A New Selected Poems”, p.95, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Inspiring, Truth

  Autobiography ch. 78 (1959)

  87 Copy quote

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• Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith.

  Dean Koontz

  Hands, Two, Achieve

  Dean Koontz (2007). “One Door Away from Heaven: A Novel”, p.214, Bantam

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• Why do 'slow down' and 'slow up' mean the same thing? Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

  George Carlin

  Time, Mean, Hands

  4 Copy quote

• Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others.

  Ayn Rand

  Lying, Eye, Men

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.441, Penguin

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• A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That's the second hand, George.

  Dennis Miller

  Hands, Racing, Looks

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• On his first hand he wore rings of stone,
  Iron, Amber, Wood and Bone.
  There were rings unseen on his second hand,
  One was blood in a flowing band,
  One was air all whisper thin,
  And the ring of ice had a flaw within.
  Full faintly shone the ring of flame,
  And the final ring was without name.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Iron, Air, Flames

  "The Wise Man's Fear". Book by Patrick Rothfuss, 2011.

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• Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.

  Mark Twain

  Fighting, Thinking, Government

  Mark Twain (2010). “What Is Man?”, p.85, BoD – Books on Demand

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• The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

  George Steiner

  Writing, Men, Hands

  George Steiner (2010). “Language and Silence”, p.3, Faber & Faber

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• Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the Spring!—the great annual miracle.... which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!... We are like children who are astonished and delighted only by the second-hand of the clock, not by the hour-hand.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Children, Spring, Heart

  5 Copy quote

• So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

  Will Self

  Phones, Hands, Cards

  4 Copy quote