Quotes About Turning Points: top 57 Turning Points quotes from famous authors

“Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.”

— J.I. Packer

“The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved.”

— George Washington

“There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.”

— Junius Williams

“There are moments that define our existence, moments that, if we recognize them, become pivotal turning points in our life.”

— C.W. Gortner

“It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice.”

— Andre Agassi

“1. Institutions shape politics. The rules and standard operating procedures that make up institutions leave their imprint on political outcomes by structuring political behavior. Outcomes are not simply reducible to the billiard-ball interaction of individuals nor to the intersection of broad social forces. Institutions influence outcomes because they shape actors' identities, power, and strategies. 2. Institutions are shaped by history. Whatever other factors may affect their form, institutions have inertia and "robustness." They therefore embody historical trajectories and turning points. History matters because it is "path dependent": what comes first (even if it was in some sense "accidental") conditions what comes later. Individuals may "choose" their institutions, but they do not choose them under circumstances of their own making, and their choices in turn influence the rules within which their successors choose.”

— Robert D. Putnam

“Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.”

— Kate Morton

“Every war has turning points and every person too.”

— Meg Rosoff

“It happened in pieces, tiny little turning points. I'll never figure out when it all turned, because it wasn't a single moments. It doesn't matter how many times I look back, how many times I try to figure it out. There is no before and after. Just a year of choices.”

— Amanda Grace

“Being poised to shatter the adaptive illusion of God is arguably one of the most significant turning points our species has ever faced in its relatively brief 150,000-year history. The belief instinct may never be completely deprogrammed in our animal brains, but by understanding it for what it is rather than subscribing uncritically to the intuitions it generates, we can distance ourselves from an adaptive system that was designed, ultimately, to keep us hobbled in fear.”

— Jesse Bering

“In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.”

— Kate Morton

“Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled memories.”

— Kate Morton

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

“But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

“Naturally-and why should I not admit this-I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run ... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision ... I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened.
But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere ... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently ... ? And perhaps-occurring as it did around the same time as these events?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

“What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.”

— David McCullough

“One of the stall doors swings open and a fortyish-year-old woman walks out tucking her shirt into her jeans. Her heavy lined eyes land on Seth. "This is the women's restroom." She points a finger to the door. "Can't you read?"
"Can't you see that everyone in this club is about twenty years younger than you?" Seth retorts, turning to the mirror. With his pinkie, he messes with bangs. "Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to have some fun.”

— Jessica Sorensen

“As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.”

— W.B. Yeats

“Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.”

— Arthur Koestler

“Indeed, four men like them, four men devoted to each other from their money to their lives, four men always supporting each other, never retreating, performing singly or together the resolutions they had made in common; four arms threatening the four points of the compass or all turning to a single point, must inevitably, be it surreptitiously, be it openly, be it by mines, by entrenchments, by guile, or by force, open a way to the end they wanted to reach, however well defended or far off it might be.”

— Alexandre Dumas

“I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.”

— Tana French

“I see a wiser person than when I was younger: having babies, and passing 30, were the turning points. What women in their 40s - I am 39 - lack in gorgeousness, they make up for in wisdom. I love ageing, despite the drawbacks - thinner, drier skin.”

— Thandie Newton

“I don't believe in right-angled turning points.”

— Timothy West

“I have had a few turning points, the first day I entered a gymnastics school at age 6.”

— Nadia Comaneci

“My life is one long curve, full of turning points.”

— Pierre Trudeau

“One of the turning points in the look of the Guardian is when we decided Logan Thackeray would be a Guardian as opposed to a Warrior. Logan's own protective nature and the fact that the humans have been knocked back into defensive positions informed a lot of what the Guardian became.”

— Jeff Grubb

“What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.”

— Hilary Mantel

“Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.”

— Anupam Kher

“I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'”

— Ken Follett

“Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.”

— Stephen Ambrose

“We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life ... And the sea was there, forty feet away and getting closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life.
I'd had high points before.
Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn.
Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through.
But always alone. By myself.
This time I was not alone.
I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Atoms of Element 118 fill an outer shell with electrons, creating a special type of element called a noble gas. Noble gases are natural turning points on the table, ending one row and pointing to the next.”

— Sam Kean

“One of our jobs is to keep women working, which we do by keeping women coming to the movies. And doing that means making good, smart, often funny movies that women can identify with-with terrific dialogue we all remember and cherish, and stories that illuminate our lives and decisions and turning points.”

— Lynda Obst

“At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). Those who live the most fully realized lives-giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves-tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where our treasure lies.”

— Susan Cain

“I think one of the turning points for me was when my brother recorded the Neil Young MTV "Unplugged" performance from the TV. My brother is eight years older than me and he was starting to get into things like that.”

— James Walsh

“We are each other's reference point at our turning points.”

— Elizabeth Fishel

“Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if - as the poet Rumi put it - everything is rigged in our favor.”

— Arianna Huffington

“Turning points in my life ... the bush, the trails, lakes, waterfalls ... moving camp from one wonderful lake to another ... the companionship of a great individual, a wonder with canoe, axe and fish line.”

— Arthur Lismer

“People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.”

— Grace Lee Boggs

“The cardinal points are a direct reference to the astrological colures. The Cardinals surround the Pope as the cardinal points surround the sun. The sun casts its rays on the Houses as it passes, turning them crimson. The color worn by the physical Cardinals is red, to symbolize that they are illuminated by their proximity to the Pope, the representative of God on earth. The word Pope, may also be a derivative of the word in Egyptian for the evil serpent Apep, Apophis or Apopsa (See Poop Deck and Pupa, and Pepsi, Pepsid, Dr. Pepper, Sgt. Pepper, etc,).”

— Michael Tsarion

“Peter Tertzakian's analysis of world oil is a fascinating reminder that history often foretells the major turning points of the future.”

— Gwyn Morgan

“Transition is the natural process of disorientation and reorientation that marks the turning points in the path of growth ... transitions are key times in the natural process of self-renewal”

— William Bridges

“It is strange, but true, that the most important turning-points of life often come at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.”