I Am Not Settling Quotes

“Chaos, I think, is youth. Youth at any age. Because as long as you have chaos, you are free of responsibility. When you are in chaos, when you don't know what's going on, when you're an ignorant dreamer ... when you're floating through space like that, you aren't supposed to get anything right, you aren't supposed to make sense, you're supposed to be ... amused,,,and aware. It can't go on. Not unless you choose that life. A life of never settling down, never making a claim on who you are, who you love ... Once you make those claims you become accountable. You have to get to work ... Dreams end. That's one thing I'm discovering.”

— Jeanne Marie Laskas

“Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving and self-fulfillment. Sin is not wanting too much, but settling for too little. It's settling for self-gratification rather than self-fulfillment.”

— Scott Hahn

“I glanced up at Zay, then walked over to stand next to him.
"You look good with a baby in your arms," he murmured.
I took his hand, careful with his fingers that were still wrapped in tape.
"Don't get your hopes up, Jones. I'm not the settling-down type."
"Want to bet on that?" he asked.
"Sure." I made a fist; so did he. We pumped three times.
I threw paper. Zayvion threw scissors.
I'd lost. Startled, I looked up at him. "Two out of three?"
Zay grinned. So did I.”

— Devon Monk

“Settling for not-so-bad sounds okay. But, you know, it's hard when you tried so much to make life really good.”

— Abigail Tarttelin

“Some individuals have the courage to make it, even feel the need to do so; for them the quest is a necessity, not an option. Most people setting out on such journeys are never heard from again, but part of the romance of any field lies in keeping the dream alive, in not settling for what is familiar and comfortable.”

— Gino Segrè

“For paradise we long. For perfection we were made ... This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives ... This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for ... nothing less than perfect communion with the ... one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together ... we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled ... The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less.”

— Richard John Neuhaus

“When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood and marrow used to be, pushing every other feeling out as it fills you from your feet to your scalp. It leaves you with nothing.”

— Alexander Gordon Smith

“Everything's going to be fine. Sooner or later you're going to find someone who knocks you right off your feet. Someone who makes you feel alive. Someone who kisses you and makes your knees weak. Relationships are complicated enough as it is. It's not worth settling for anything less.”

— Lindsey Kelk

“Ew. Can you not talk about my dad ogling people? Scarlett Johansson may be gorgeous, but still."
"It'll be a challenge, but I think I can refrain from licking the screen," Brendan deadpanned, placing the wine bottle on the coffee table next to the bowl of popcorn before settling into the chair where he'd been working on his computer earlier.
"Ew! Dad!”

— Amelia C. Gormley

“That's not making love; it's getting laid. There's a world of difference between the two. Settling for less is cheating yourself."
He looked at her steadily. "It's worth the wait.”

— Kat Attalla

“I would definitely want the one with the bed,' I say and then realize how that sounds. I wonder if I will ever be able to flirt intentionally, as opposed to just accidently.
'Really?' he says, a little too innocently.
I can do this- I can say something flirtatious and mean to. 'Or maybe not. You were always horrible at sharing your things,' I tease, but then realize that was just an insult said with an eyebrow wiggle.
James leans in close enough that our arms touch and he smiles, slow and deliberate. 'I've gotten better.'
I think all of my internal organs just evaporated. 'Why do you have a bed if you don't sleep?' I blurt. 'It looks new.'
'Yeah, that's not where I thought this conversation was going at all,' he says before settling back against the wall.”

— A.M. Robinson

“I was observing her closely as I talked, and after a while I began to get the impression that she was not, in fact, quite so merry and smiling a girl as I had been led to believe at first. She seemed to be coiled in herself, as though with a secret she was jealously guarding. The deep-blue eyes moved too quickly about the room, never settling or resting on one thing for more than a moment; and over all her face, though so faint that they might not even have been there, those small downward lines of sorrow.”

— Roald Dahl

“However much he may tell her he loves her and thinks her beautiful, his loving gaze could never console her. Because the gaze of love is the gaze that isolates. Jean-Marc thought about the loving solitude of two old persons become invisible to other people: a sad solitude that prefigures death. No, what she needs is not a loving gaze but a flood of alien, crude, lustful looks settling on her with no good will, no discrimination, no tenderness or politeness - settling on her fatefully, inescapably. Those are the looks that sustain her within human society. The gaze of love rips her out of it.”

— Milan Kundera

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things
some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor
who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

— Barack Obama

“After the Jews crossed the sea and the desert, they reached the Promised Land. Scouts were sent to look at the land before settling. When the scouts came back, they reported that the people in the land were giants. "We looked at them and they looked at us as if we were grasshoppers," they said.
Sometimes when we make a decision to make a change in our lives, we feel just like those scouts. However, if you pay attention to the words of the Bible, it was not the giants living in the land of Israel who believed that the Jews looked like grasshoppers. It was the Jews' own perception. When they looked at the giants, they believed they were the grasshoppers.”

— Celso Cukierkorn

“What if I could be happy with Will? Really happy. Not settling. What if I have waited my whole life to find this person who fits me like the missing piece of my puzzle? What if my entire life has led to this point, not to teach me a lesson about appreciating what I have, but to help me let it all go?”

— Megan Hart

“What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters-looks, money, tennis-we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.”

— Atul Gawande

“I've always believed the greater danger is not aiming too high, but too low, settling for a bogey rather than shooting for an eagle.”

— Peter Scott

“I want more. I want everything. I want you."
"Nathan ... "
"I'm not settling for less, Whitley," he said. "And neither should you.”

— Kody Keplinger

“I think a lot of people settle with comfort. I've kinda pushed my whole life not to do that. There's nothing wrong with settling, it's definitely an easier life than the one I've chosen to live.”

— Aubrey O'Day

“There have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of existence, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidean earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Characteristic of a very great number of people, some of them very clever ones, not like Fyodor Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch carried the business through vigorously, and was appointed, with Fyodor Pavlovitch, joint guardian of the child, who had a small property, a house and land, left him by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, pass into this cousin's keeping, but as the latter had no family of his own, and after securing the revenues of his estates was in haste to return at once to Paris, he left the boy in charge of one of his cousins, a lady living in Moscow. It came to pass that, settling permanently in Paris he, too, forgot the child, especially”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I feel so unhappy."
I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me would arouse my sympathy more than the longest, most painstaking account of a woman's life. It amazes and astonishes me that I have never once heard a woman make this simple statement. This woman did not say, "I feel so unhappy" in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a "withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool." I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.”

— Osamu Dazai

“Would it have been worthwhile
If one settling a pillow by her head should say:
That is not what I meant at all
That is not it at all”

— T.S. Eliot

“Preacher is a book that somehow allows me time by its settling on it's characters, that sort of modern gothic western feel. You're not likely to see the boat veering too far from that.”

— Garth Ennis

“I think there is probably no better person to aspire to emulate than Steve Jobs and what he has done at Apple in terms of his leadership, his innovation, not settling for mediocrity.”

— Howard Schultz

“It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness-a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect.”

— Azar Nafisi

“Any kind of creativity is not settling down into a happy little space. I don't try to be mellow or anything. I think I have quite ... my voice is what it is, no matter what I'm singing, it's always going to sound like me. There's not too far I could go. I sound like myself. I hope that I haven't put any boundaries on anything.”

— Teddy Thompson

“Politics is not about justice. It's about the settling of personal vendettas under a thin veneer of civilization. All politics is personal.”

— Cinda Williams Chima

“F
off. It's not like that. Her and me. I'm just saying
"
"That you hadn't left her for good. I never said you had. You just wanted to withdraw long enough to get used to the idea that you'd lost your chance. Lick your wounds, suck it in, and bounce back to being her friend and mentor, and be happy with just that."
"I am happy with just that. It's all I want."
"Is it? Or is that what you're telling yourself because you think you never had a shot in the first place? You'd better wake up fast, Jack, or she's going to settle for Quinn, and let me tell you, it's settling, because it's not Quinn she
”

— Kelley Armstrong

“I spent centuries wandering the world, from empires to kingdoms to wastelands, nver settling, never stopping-not for one moment. I was always looking toward the horizon, always wondering what waited across the next ocean, over the next mountain. But I think ... I think that whole time, all those centuries, I was looking for you”

— Sarah J. Maas

“At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“And I don't recommend murder as a way of settling difficult situations. It tends to lead to complications-but not nearly as many as marriage.”

— Diana Gabaldon

“A pearl in the shell does not touch the ocean. Be a pearl without a shell. a mindful flooding. a spark turned to flame. bird settling nest. love lived”

— Rumi

“Capitalism, in its imperialist phase, is a system which considers war to be a legitimate instrument for settling international disputes, a legal method in fact, if not in law.”

— J. Stalin

“'I cannot face you if you think I look at you and see anything less than the man you are. I am not settling for you, I am reaching for you, and there is a difference, and you are that man.'”

— Amy Lane

“What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”

— Albert Camus

“I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

“My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a hardening, or settling process. Education is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves.”

— Robert M

“I'm not even worried about settling down. I think it's way too early. I'm 25 and I'm in show business. I mean, if things go well, my wife hasn't even been born yet.”

— Arj Barker

“A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning ... I am certain that we well not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country, either by mutual agreements with our Arab neighbors or by some other means ... [If the Arabs refuse] we shall have to speak to them in another language. But we shall only have another language if we have a state.”

— David Ben-Gurion

“No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Leave a cavity behind the [wall] facings, and on the inside build walls two feet thick, made of red dimension stone or burnt brick or lava in courses, and then bind them to the fronts by means of iron clamps and lead ... the beds and builds, all settling equally and bonded at the joints, will not let the work bulge out, nor allow the fall of the face walls which have been tightly fastened together.”

— Marcus Vitruvius Pollio