Selected direction quotes

1. Conscience is a man's compass.

2. One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

3. Now that I'm out and I'm shouting in doorways Freed from a love more like murder I should be singing but in liberation Feel like a ship with no rudder.

4. Where would I be without my sense of direction.

5. A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.

6. The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

7. Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

8. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

9. The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

10. You are never to lose sight of nature; the instant you do, you are all abroad, at the mercy of every gust of fashion, without knowing or seeing the point to which you ought to steer.

11. What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

12. The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

13. The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

14. One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

15. Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.

16. In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.

17. Maybe I'm lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the wrong direction.

18. The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

19. As enunciated today, 'progress' is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

20. 'It would scarcely be destruction,' he replied gently. 'Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon. All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power-House, and then the age of miracles will begin.'

21. What other people label or might try to call failure, I have learned is just God's way of pointing you in a new direction.

22. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

23. He whom the sages have been seeking in all these places is in our own hearts; the voice that you heard was right, says Vedanta, but the direction you gave to the voice was wrong.

24. The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.

25. If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

26. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

27. Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

28. 'He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.'

29. Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

30. It's easy to direct while acting-there's one less person to argue with.

31. It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way

32. With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

33. I am free, that is why I'm lost.

34. If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up somewhere else.

35. Everyone that works on the show (on the TV side) has done serious time in commercials and movies and we tend to treat every episode of Good Eats like a little movie. I direct them just as I did commercials, heavy on composition.

36. A cripple in the way out-travels a footman or a post out of the way.

37. 'The question is: Are we going to go forward to tomorrow, or past to the back?'

38. 'You asking me the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I can't find it myself.' 'Give it up! Give it up!' said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

39. Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.

40. Many people flounder about in life because they have no purpose. Before it is possible to achieve anything, an objective must be set.

41. When taken, To be well shaken.

42. ...it is better to go on striking in the same direction than to move one's forces this way and that.

43. Take a little walk down Know You Role Boulevard, hang that right on Jabroni Drive, and then proceed to check your Aunt Jemima no-pancake-havin' ass di-rectly into the Smackdown Hotel!

44. To call Art: West of the Rockies, just pick up your phone and dial 'Art'; East of the Rockies, dial 'Bell'; South of the Rockies... well that would be Mexico, wouldn't it?

45. Sparks fly upward.

46. Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

47. It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.

48. Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask: 'Does this path have a heart?'

49. I actually hate comic book movies, like fucking hate them, they just bore me shitless and they're just dumb. But I thought what Chris Nolan did with Batman was actually really good, really well directed, and Christian Bale was really great in it.

50. If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

51. The alternation of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

52. One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

53. Sometimes the path you're on is not as important as the direction you're heading.

54. No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

55. The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.

56. North Pole, South Pole.