Moment Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.

It's a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

Ought I to say that the form of change is fixity, or more precisely, that change is an endless search for fixity? A nostalgia for inertia: indolence and its frozen paradises. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary. It is transition. But the moment I say transition, the spell is broken. Transition is not wisdom, but a simple going toward… Transition vanishes: only thus is it transition.

By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Heroism, the Caucasian mountaineers say, is endurance for one moment more.

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

Dorothea Brande

Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve.

Ryszard Kapuściński

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.

In every moment the past is born and the present flows into the future, taking the moment that already passed.

Dejan Stojanovic

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

On his 1985 book, In The American West

I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.

Jacques Maritain

Each moment of the happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Vita Sackville-West

There comes a moment on a journey when something sweet, something irresistible and charming as wine raised to thirsty lips, wells up in the traveller's being.

Patrick MacGill

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you free.

Swami Vivekananda

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

Procrastination is the thief of time:
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Dissidents should be paid 13 months' salary for a year, otherwise our mindless unanimity will bring us to an even more hopeless state of stagnation. It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

Archibald MacLeish

"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

Nikos Kazantzakis

The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

Let us embrace, and from this very moment vow an eternal misery together.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

The news of the discovery spread fast all over the country, and inquisitive enquiries mingled with congratulations from this moment became the daily programme.