value Quotes

“This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness.”

“I hung the painting across the room from my bed. It’s the first thing I see every morning and the last thing I see every night. And now that I can look at it without crying, I see more than the tree and what being up in its branches meant to me. I see the day that my view of things around me stated changing.”

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”

“It cost nothing to think bigger than you are, BUT cost a fortune to think less of yourself.”

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially your own. No one belongs here more than you.”

“Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness.”

“God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.”

“I can give you convincing evidence of what I say, not words only, but what you value far more—actions.”

“For nothing is more precious to me, and rarer, than honesty.”

“Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t “bad kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.”

“When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it.”

“If you’re not able to value yourself, no one else will either.”

“The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread; for, how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep, was a sheep still, for all its wearing it.”

“They find pearls on their coasts, and diamonds and carbuncles on their rocks; they do not look after them, but, if they find them by chance, they polish them, and with them they adorn their children, who are delighted with them, and glory in them during their childhood; but when they grow to years, and see that none but children use such baubles, they of their own accord, without being bid by their parents, lay them aside, and would be as much ashamed to use them afterwards as children among us, when they come to years, are of their puppets and other toys.”

“The folly of men has enhanced the value of gold and silver because of their scarcity; whereas, on the contrary, it is their opinion that Nature, as an indulgent parent, has freely given us all the best things in great abundance, such as water and earth, but has laid up and hid from us the things that are vain and useless.”

“It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man’s life for a little money, for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man’s life.”

“If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.”

“In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them.”

“TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.”

“‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. . . . And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!‘”

“No one is ever going to give you anything of value. You have to work for it, sweat for it, fight for it. But there is far greater value in accomplishments you earn than in accolades that are merely given to you. When you earn something, you never have to worry about justifying that you truly deserve it.”

“The great value of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

“The Hundred Poems...this poem is not one of them. She took a great risk hiding this paper, and my grandfather and grandmother took a great risk keeping it. What poems could be worth losing everything for?”

“You think there’s nothing here because we’re not putting up a fight. But there are words in our heads that no one else knows. And my grandfather died on his terms, not yours. We have things of value but you can never find them because you don’t even know how to look.”

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“Your value doesn’t come because of who you are. It comes because of whose you are.”

“But if you will learn to receive your value from your Heavenly Father and listen to what He says about you, then you’ll feel accepted, approved, redeemed, forgiven, confident and secure. You will feel extremely valuable and that’s exactly the way God wants you to be.”

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

“You have to fight because you can’t count on anyone else fighting for you. And you have to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves. To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it.”

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.”

“The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself — ultimate cost for perfect value.”

″‘You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy? […] No dodging, please. You have the prize — here, I’ll write it out: ‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.‘” He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. ‘There! Are you happy? You value it — or don’t you?’ Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. ‘It doesn’t make you happy?’ ‘You know darn well I placed fourth!’ ‘Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it.‘”

″‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relationship to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human — ‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible. … This very personal relationship, “value”, has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him… and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him.”

Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural, biological.

“There’s some real utility in gratitude.”

“And if you could just go and buy everything, what was the value of it? What was the value of a man?”

“The tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.”

“Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

“In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this World, are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and more.”

“No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

“What do you mean less than nothing? I don’t think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It’s the lowest you can go. It’s the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it’s just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.”

“Wilbur blushed. ‘But I’m not terrific, Charlotte. I’m just about average for a pig.‘”

“Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”

“The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul”

“Don’t give up! I believe in you all. A person’s a person, no matter how small!”

“It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.”

“So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!”

“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.”

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.”

“The God who made the moon and the stars and the mountains and the oceans, The Creator who did all of those things, believed that you and your baby were meant to be a pair. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be a perfect fit. That doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. It does mean that you need not fear failure because you can’t fail at a job you were created to do.”

“When you get . . . to the end, you see that love and family are all there is. Nothing else matters.”

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. . . . With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

It was . . . simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do.

Yet it remained unsatisfied, and would exclaim, “Oh, if I could but keep on growing tall and old! There is nothing else worth caring for in the world!”

“Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”

“Keep only things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest.”

“People have trouble discarding things that they could still use (functional value), that contain helpful information (informational value), and that have sentimental ties (emotional value). When these things are hard to obtain or replace (rarity), they become even harder to part with.”

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”

“Books: Once you have pile your books, take them in your hand one by one and decide whether you want to keep or discard each one. The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it.”

“The sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be.”

“A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?”

“While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought..”

“That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.”

“I would like to love you, but I do not know you and I value space more than even love, for in space we can play.”

“The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”

“Among the mud and ashes of extravagance and nonsense there is from time to time a piece of pure gold cut up, ready smelted from the central fires of truth.”

“It is a simple law of human psychology that your thoughts will tend to revolve around what you value most.”

“You must value learning above everything else.”

“It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.”

“There was no question about it: for the sort of country we lived in, a good dog around the place was sometimes worth more than two or three men.”

″‘It’s yours,’ said Father. ‘You could buy a sucking pig with it, if you want to. You could raise it, and it would raise a litter of pigs, worth four, five dollars apiece. Or you can trade that half-dollar for lemonade, and drink it up. You do as you want, it’s your money.‘”

I love the way she talks about her family, because it’s sorta different to how an adult would see it. I wasn’t super into the art style at first, but it definitely grew on me, so much so that I now think the art style really adds to the charm and value of this picture book. I’d love to read more about Clarice Bean!

“Gold. A funny thing, really, for the world to place such value on, thought Inez vaguely. Something lying about in the ground. Why not something hard to come by? Something men had to climb up high for...”

“I was an animal to them, a pack mule. But beasts were never treated so poorly. Working animals were expensive. They had value. I was a Jew. We were lower than animals.”

“What I know now is that when we derive our worth from the relationships in our lives—the intimate ones, the social circles we belong to, the companies we work for—we give away our power and become dependent upon external validation. When that is taken away, our sense of value, and identity, goes with it.”

“Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

“People are more important than things.”

“Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think.”

‘This is the story of Juan the Thief whose pursuit of an old lady’s riches teaches him the value of helping others.”

“The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of femininity.”

“Maybe a goat. Or a small pig. The family has so little, and bride prices have come down so much. The girl wouldn’t need any jewelry.”

“The true value of an organization is measured by the desire others have to contribute to that organizations ability to keep succeeding, not just during the time they are there, but well beyond their own tenure.”

“Wealth, my son, should never be your goal in life. Your words are eloquent, but they are mere words. True wealth is of the heart, not of the purse.”

“That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of human life.”