Value Quotes

“Accomplishments don’t erase shame, hatred, cruelty, silence, ignorance, discrimination, low self-esteem or immorality. It covers it up, with a creative version of pride and ego. Only restitution, forgiving yourself and others, compassion, repentance and living with dignity will ever erase the past.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Once you embrace your value, talents and strengths, it neutralizes when others think less of you.”
― Rob Liano

“Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“Someone out there is looking for exactly what you've got…and will never try and undercut your value or question your worth. Some things in life just can’t be bartered over or placed on the sale rack – and your self-worth is at the top of the list.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence

“Don't waste your time trying to provide people with proof of deceit, in order to keep their love, win their love or salvage their respect for you. The truth is this: If they care they will go out of their way to learn the truth. If they don't then they really don't value you as a human being. The moment you have to sell people on who you are is the moment you let yourself believe that every good thing you have ever done or accomplished was invisible to the world. And, it is not!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Laziness can be a value on its own for those who want to show supremacy through contempt for work and wish to be free individuals by fighting the enslavement to labor. While they don’t want to become dependent on ‘wage slavery’ and their livelihood only hinges on salaries, they feel confined to a social stratification, causing a collective stigma that results in poverty and underfeeding. (The daily job)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Sanjit says his apartment, the same one in which he grew up, has been flooded many times by the midsummer torrents. For what has been for millennia a primarily agricultural society, rains simultaneously destroy, create, and preserve life in India, similar to the functions of the three premier Hindu gods, Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu. Every time Kolkata gets pounded by a cyclone, or when the monsoon first erupts in June (although the recent warming of the Indian Ocean increasingly disturbs a once-consistent timeline), Sanjit never fails to send along a video, his house flooded – seemingly destroyed – but the smiles on his, Bajju’s, or other house-guest’s faces signify just the opposite, having been cooled and relieved of perpetual heat. Flooded, they remain preserved.”
― Colin Phelan, The Local School

“The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.”
― John Lubbock, Peace and Happiness

“Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Spinoza: The Letters

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“The value of surrounding yourself with positive people is not what you get from them, but how good a person you have become because of them.”
― Roy T. Bennett

“When you think this pain is all you deserve, you are right. You are the only one that can decide how long you will walk in hell.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The scholar does not consider gold and jade to be precious treasures, but loyalty and good faith.”
― Confucius, The Ethics of Confucius

“No matter how valuable you are and your ideas, fools will certainly play both of you down, so exclude yourselves from the inflammatory environs of fools.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Now, your Honor, I have spoken about the war. I believed in it. I don’t know whether I was crazy or not. Sometimes I think perhaps I was. I approved of it; I joined in the general cry of madness and despair. I urged men to fight. I was safe because I was too old to go. I was like the rest. What did they do? Right or wrong, justifiable or unjustifiable -- which I need not discuss today -- it changed the world. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarian uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school, aye in the Sunday schools. The little children played at war. The toddling children on the street. Do you suppose this world has ever been the same since? How long, your Honor, will it take for the world to get back the humane emotions that were slowly growing before the war? How long will it take the calloused hearts of men before the scars of hatred and cruelty shall be removed?

We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and we rejoiced in it -- if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy -- what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.”
― Clarence Darrow, Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom

“But what's worth more than gold?"

"Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren't you worth more than that?”
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money

“We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“A person that does not value your time will not value your advice.”
― Orrin Woodward

“And who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?”
― Alice Steinbach, Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman

“Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Value is more expensive than price.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“I do not care about happiness simply because I believe that joy is something worth fighting for.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Wylan hadn’t realized it then, but Kaz had known his true identity all along. Dirtyhands kept tabs on anyone who took up residence in the Barrel, and he’d placed Wylan under Dregs protection, certain that one day a rich mercher’s son would come in handy.

He had no illusions about why Kaz had looked out for him, but he also knew he never would have survived this long without his help. And Kaz didn’t care if he could read. Kaz and the others teased him, but they’d given him a chance to prove himself. They valued the things he could do instead of punishing him for the things he couldn’t.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“His attentive treatment of her had nothing to do with the presumption that she was weak, and everything to do with the conviction that she was valuable.”
― Angela N. Blount, Once Upon a Road Trip

“Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“أي قتيل في سبيل شيئ فوق نفسه فهو شهيد، وقد تتغير قيم الأشياء أما موقف الإنسان منها فهو قيمة لا تتغير.”
― نجيب محفوظ, Sugar Street

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire --
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One