Nervous Quotes

• A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Confidence, Mistake, Women

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• The child's personality is a product of slow gradual growth. His nervous system matures by stages and natural sequences. He sits before he stands; he babbles before he talks; he fabricates before he tells the truth; he draws a circle before he draws a square; he is selfish before he is altruistic; he is dependent on others before he achieves dependence on self. All of his abilities, including his morals, are subject to laws of growth. The task of child care is not to force him into a predetermined pattern but to guide his growth.

  Arnold Gesell

  Baby, Children, Selfish

  Arnold Gesell, Frances Lillian Ilg (1951). “Infant and Child in the Culture of Today: The Guidance of Development in Home and Nursery School (From the Former Clinic of Child Development, School of Medicine at Yale University)”

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• Dying visions of angels and Christ and God and heaven are confined to credibly good men. Why do not bad men have such visions? They die of all sorts of diseases; they have nervous temperaments; they even have creeds and hopes about the future which they cling to with very great tenacity; why do not they rejoice in some such glorious illusions when they go out of the world?

  Enoch Fitch Burr

  Death, Angel, Men

  Enoch Fitch Burr (1871). “Ad Fidem; Or, Parish Evidences of the Bible”, p.305

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• Broadly speaking, nervous women may be divided into two classes - those who are really nervous, and those who imagine themselves to be so.

  Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

  Class, Two, May

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• There is still such a thing as subversive. Subversive makes hip people nervous. It's something new that scares you in a good way. I mean, subversive to me is a compliment. Subversive is something that influences people to do something against society that they haven't thought of before.

  John Waters

  Mean, People, Scare

  Source: edition.cnn.com

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• Being nervous isn't bad. It just means something important is happening.

  Michael Jordan

  Mean, Important, Happenings

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• Don't try to be what you're not. If you're nervous, be nervous. If you're shy, be shy. It's cute.

  Adriana Lima

  Cute, Beauty, Trying

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• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

  Bertrand Russell

  Success, Work, Stress

  Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 5

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• The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

  Shana Alexander

  Love, Life, Relationship

  Shana Alexander (1970). “The feminine eye”, McCall Pub. Co

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• I get nervous when I don't get nervous. If I'm nervous I know I'm going to have a good show.

  Beyonce Knowles

  Shows, Knows, Ifs

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• My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

  Timothy Leary

  Hippie, Games, People

  Quoted in East Village Other, 15 Apr. - 1 May 1966

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• I feel passionately about how I express myself. Language is the greatest motivating force. You can phrase something positively and inspire people to do their best, or negatively and make them feel worried, uncertain, and self-conscious. You can talk at a fast pace and people will get nervous, feel afraid to bring up extraneous thoughts. But those are the very thoughts that might be most important! They might represent that person's best thinking. If you're rushed, you're simply not going to get at that extra level of thinking.

  Frances Hesselbein

  Thinking, Self, People

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• The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specializations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics.

  William Bolitho

  Hands, Imagination, Police

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• God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.

  Alfred Korzybski

  Integrity, Forgiving, May

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• I get irritated, nervous, very tense or stressed, but never bored.

  Catherine Deneuve

  Bored, Stressed, Irritated

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• Sometimes when you're just thrown into something, you are more ready for it than when you have time to think it over and get nervous about it.

  Lara Flynn Boyle

  Thinking, Sometimes, Time To Think

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• When I got to match point in the final I was afraid I'd be a little nervous, but I just said, You have to stay focused, just think about what you have to do.

  Gabriela Sabatini

  Sports, Stay Strong, Thinking

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• I like ties but I prefer not to wear one when I'm nervous.

  Jamie Oliver

  Ties, Recycling

  "Naked Chef dressing down". siouxcityjournal.com. October 29, 2003.

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• If I don't train enough, of course I'm nervous.

  Haile Gebrselassie

  Enough, Courses, Train

  "Gebrselassie running into history". Interview with Brian Cazeneuve, www.si.com. March 24, 2010.

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• A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it.

  Art Buchwald

  Want, Breakdown, Frenchmen

  Art Buchwald (1977). “Down the Seine and up the Potomac with Art Buchwald”, Fawcett Books

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• I have been to hell and back. I had a very, very bad nervous breakdown.

  Andy Gibb

  Hell And Back, Breakdown, Has Beens

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• I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be when I started

  Todd Barry

  Would Be

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• I love to be nervous before a scene.

  Kim Basinger

  Scene

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• Only when you're nervous do you get nasty.

  Deborah Grey

  Nasty

  Deborah Grey (2004). “Never retreat, never explain, never apologize: my life, my politics”

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• In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.

  Carl Rogers

  Process, Congruence, Stimulus

  Carl Ransom Rogers (1995). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.353, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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