Missed Quotes
More Missed Quotes
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing a life has to give.
bertrand russell
Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.
Gloria Naylor— American novelist (1950 - 2016)
You state that the Bureau under the [counter-intelligence program] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] "Breakfast for Children." … You have obviously missed the point.… This program was formed by the BPP for obvious reasons, including their efforts to create an image of civility, assume community control of Negroes, and to fill adolescent children with their insidious poison.
j. edgar hoover— "Racial Intelligence: Black Panther Party (BPP)" (27 May 1969)
This could but have happened once, and we missed it, lost it forever.
Robert Browning— Robert Browning, Youth and Art, XVII.
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
— p. 178, first American edition (1970)
The United States -- indeed the world -- had come to respect President Zia's profound and compassionate commitment to a better life for his people and his dedication to the rule of law. His wisdom in international affairs will be sorely missed.
ziaur rahman— Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States of America, Message to Acting President Abdus Sattar of Bangladesh on the Death of President Ziaur Rahman (31 May 1981). Retrieved on 2007-05-06.
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night , or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value , and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty , not only in wisdom , but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance .
gilbert keith chesterton— Robert Browning. (1903)
Here in the UK, we've now got an evangelical television channel - it's the kind of thing that will be very familiar to everyone in the United States, especially if you've ever turned on your TV set on a Sunday morning, and seen one holy man after another, urging you to send money so that Jesus can buy a new cadillac. Apparently, Jesus can't save the world until he's been properly kitted out with a million-dollar mansion, and a private jet - some small print in the Gospels that we must have missed.
pat condell— YouTube video (April 25, 2007; from YouTube)
Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.
roger ebert— Review of The Sleepy Time Gal (22 November 2002)
It was somewhere between the interview with the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to do my taxes from Bangalore and the one who wanted to write my software from Bangalore, and the one who wanted to read my x-rays from Bangalore, and the one who wanted to trace my lost luggage from Bangalore...I was realizing that, while I had been sleeping, while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, I had missed something really fundamental in this globalization story. I had lost the thread, and I found it in Bangalore.
— Thomas Friedman, "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century".
You missed, loser!
— Who: Reginald Jenkins
— Note: Character has escaped prison and stolen a military Humvee with two other convicts and has started killing survivors in the park area of the mall with the Humvee turret. He is referring to his fellow convict missing Frank with a baseball bat as they drove by him. Reginald is then killed by Frank.
Whatever may bethereasonwhether it wasthat Hitler thought hemight get away with what hehad got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently completehowever, one thing is certainhe missed the bus.
(Arthur) Neville Chamberlain— 1940 Speech at Central Hall, Westminster, 4 Apr.
We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness.
— 1941Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.2.
Sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century.
Pierre L van den Berghe— 'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed), Authors of their Own Lives (1990).
I know, if anyone does — all research workers know — how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley— Chapter XXI: "Aunt Judith Knits"
Could she not obtain from him the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy?Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another in the matter of an insult.
paul bourget— Ch. 7 "A Little Relative of Iago"
Jenny kissed me when we met,Jumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to getSweets into your list, put that in.Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,Say that health and wealth have missed me;Say I'm growing old, but addJenny kissed me.
leigh hunt— "Jenny Kissed Me", in The Monthly Chronicle (November 1838)
The ancient usual retreatTakes down the steps the scattering horde;Adam again has met defeat,Has missed connections with the Lord.But where the altar-candles dieWaits God, and in a corner praysThe last of heroes who will tryThe Gate again in seven days.
josephine jacobsen— "Non Sum Dignus" st. 4–5, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems, 1995, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801851165
I thought Jack Valenti was wrong about most of the tech-policy issues that he spoke about, but I'm going to miss that guy... One of the lingering regrets of my career is showing up a few minutes late to a Post boardroom luncheon with Valenti that had started with him denouncing a column I'd written about the MPAA's "technological totalitarianism." When I sat down, then-managing editor Steve Coll leaned over to summarize Valenti's opening statement as "he took your name in vain"; I felt like I'd missed the whole show.
jack valenti— Rob Pegoraro in
Is this sort of thing which has been thought about beneficial? So that if you're asking the question, for example, "Is it appropriate to think of making a copy of a person?" You have to ask not only, "What is the benefit to the people who are asking for this to be done?" But also, "What's the impact on the child that's going to be produced?" And that last bit I think often gets missed out.
ian wilmut— Interview at the Academy of Achievement (23 May 1998)
The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
william carlos williams— Interview with Stanley Koehler (April 1962), in The Paris Review : Writers at Work, 3rd series, Viking Penguin, p. 29 ISBN 0-14-00.4542-2
Nonsense prevails, modesty fails Grace and virtue turn into stupidity While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts They still think they're the gods of antiquity If something you missed didn't even exist It was just an ideal is it such a surprise?
elvis costello— All This Useless Beauty
And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.
Randall Jarrell— "Variations," lines 40-44
My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.
carl jung— p. 72 (Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963))
Because they [the ancient Greeks] feared infinite processes they missed the limit process. In approximating a circle by a polygon they were content to make the difference smaller than any given quantity, but something positive was always left over. Thus the process remained clear to the intuition; the limit process, on the other hand, would have involved the infinitely small.
— Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, 1972
Live for today. Multitudes of people have failed to live for today.... What they have had within their grasp today they have missed entirely, because only the future has intrigued them.
— William Allen White , in Forbes, Forbes Incorporated, 1953, p.42
Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
— William Carlos Williams, in an interview with Stanley Koehler (April 1962), in The Paris Review : Writers at Work, 3rd series, Viking Penguin, p. 29
An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge".
— Igor Aleksander (2001) in: New scientist. Vol. 169. p.56 cited in: Jacques Vallée (2003) The Heart of the Internet. p.8
Sir, you have tasted two whole worms; you have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the quad; you will leave Oxford by the next town drain. (Wasted two whole terms, missed all my History lectures, caught Lighting a fire, and by the next down train...respectively)
— Attributed to Spooner (Cohen & Cohen, [1960] 1979)
