44 Quotes Tagged: importance

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

When your madness is creative and necessary, people will not notice the fact that you are crazy.

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

La pensée n'est qu'un écliar au milieu d'une longue nuit. Mais c'est cet éclair qui est tout.

Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night. But this flash means everything.

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

Theology is a superstition — Humanity a religion.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you seem to be naturally motivated to continue.

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.