Summing Up Quotes

• In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

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• The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

  Aristotle

  Peace, Philosophical, Logical Reasoning

  James McLean Watson, Aristotle (1909). “Aristotle's criticisms of Plato”

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• We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Love, Life, Change

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• [About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

  Hannah Arendt

  Taught Us, Long, Evil

  Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ch. 15 (1963)

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• The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Inspirational, Success, Congratulations

  Summing Up (1938) p. 187

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• A painting is more than the sum of its parts

  Wendelin Van Draanen

  Logical Reasoning, Mathematical Logic, Greek

  Wendelin Van Draanen (2008). “Flipped”, p.34, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Men, Guilt

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Order, Evil, Universe

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

  Margaret Atwood

  Mathematical Logic, Greek, Fists

  Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.401, Anchor

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• The world is more than the sum of its suffering.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Mathematical Logic, Greek

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• Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Teaching, Diversity, Social Justice

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Art, Travel, Adventure

  "Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard" by W. Somerset Maugham, (p. 310), 1930.

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• There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Order, Evil, Atheism

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Broken, Habit

  W. Somerset Maugham (2010). “The Summing Up”, p.179, Random House

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• Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Perfection, Dull, Irony

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• In all modesty, my summing up of 1955-6 and 1956-7 must be that no club in the country could live with Manchester United.

  Matt Busby

  Country, Clubs, Modesty

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• You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true. Don't you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter.

  Gene Wolfe

  Dream, People, Ignorant

  Gene Wolfe (2011). “The Citadel of the Autarch: Urth: Book of the New Sun”, p.40, Hachette UK

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• For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

  Hal Borland

  Fall, Autumn, Years

  Hal Borland (1946). “An American year: country life and landscapes through the seasons”, New York

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• Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Opportunity, Order

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• Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Book, Writing, Ends

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• On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.

  Sylvia Plath

  Land, Nurse, Broken

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.94, Anchor

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• I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.

  Ayn Rand

  Want, Lasts, Accomplished

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.361, Penguin

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• There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

  Anais Nin

  Attitude, Book, Leaving

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• It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.

  Kurt Koffka

  Meaningful, Said, Procedures

  Kurt Koffka (1999). “Principles of Gestalt Psychology”, p.176, Psychology Press

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• Fear and hope remain the same; therefore the study of the psychology of speculators is as valuable as it ever was. Weapons change, but strategy remains strategy, on the New York Stock Exchange as on the battlefield. I think the clearest summing up of the whole thing was  expressed by Thomas F. Woodlock when he declared: “The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.”

  Edwin Lefevre

  New York, Mistake, Successful

  Edwin Lefevre (2013). “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”, p.388, Lulu Press, Inc

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