Spectator Quotes

“She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving - perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Philosophy is not a spectator sport.”
― Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide

“External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“You are either a player or a spectator! Players influence the game while spectators watch them to do it. Such is life!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Be the player in your own dream life. Don't be a spectator watching your dreams every day; Let them get going!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Either offend or represent, don’t be a spectator.”
― Pradeepa Pandiyan

“The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“… I am me, but am not
me: I have spent my entire life & all of its suffering
both as spectator & subject. a woman trapped eternally as a
child waiting for the holy father. I look pretty but feel so
young, standing on the curb sucking on the lemon of the
sun.”
― Lisa Marie Basile, APOCRYPHAL

“An author’s fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

“One major factor that will prevent your dreams from becoming nightmares is learning to vacate your spectators’ seat and then taking steps towards the players' bench! You've got to play to win!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“In a world full of spectators, be the player.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“I observed that when a footballer is about to make a threatening strike to score a goal, there comes a big shout from spectators at the field. He could either get detracted to miss the opportunity or motivated to make it happen. Such is life!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Love, reverence, and adoration, are multifaceted emotions. Similar to a painting by an artist, how we respond to a beautiful woman, nature, and the world that we encounter reveals the spectator and not life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Bellamy found simply living a task of amazing difficulty. It was as if ordinary human life were a mobile machine full of holes, crannies, spaces, apertures, fissures, cavities, lairs, into one of which Bellamy was required to (and indeed desired to) fit himself. The machine moved slowly, resembling a train, or sometimes a merry-go-round. But as soon as Bellamy got on (or got in), the machine would soon eject him, sending him spinning back to a place where he was once more forced to be a spectator. Perhaps, that was in some mysterious sense his place, his destiny. But Bellamy did not want to be a spectator, nor could he (having no money of his own) afford to be one. Moreover he had never really mastered the art, apparently so simple for others, of passing the time. His failure to find a métier, to find a task which was his task, caused him continuous anxiety, nor did it occur to him to emulate the majority of mankind who positively resigned themselves, seeing no alternative, to alien and unsatisfying work. At one time he had suffered from depression, and was nearer to despair than his friends realised.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“My life is the life of a spectator:
watching myself and
watching everyone.
This life of mine
does not bear resemblance to me.”
― Belle Townsend

“I, who was looking on, an eager and curious spectator - I, who was watching the working of this mournful tragedy - I, who like a wicked angel laughing at the evil men committed protected by secrecy (a secret is easily kept by the rich and powerful), I am in my turn bitten by the serpent whose tortuous course I was watching, and bitten to the heart.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Are you a spectator or a player? It's time to be a real player, a partner, and a life changer.”
― Farshad Asl

“God created everyone uniquely and for a purpose, and not to be on this earth as a passive spectator”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Worship has become a spectator-sports mentality to attract consumers with the light show, with the smoke machine, with the cool hip-worship guy to keep the crowd coming and the show going. This grieves the Spirit of God and we ought to weep over it as well.”
― Jonathan Hayashi

“Although they are entirely different, a ‘road’ and a ‘berm’ sit right alongside each other. The former is for the traveler while the latter is for the spectator. And because they sit in such close proximity to each other, there have been far too many times where I thought myself to be walking on the road when I was in fact sitting on the berm.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“…I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“It's time to stop being spectators. Do things. Join things. Make things happen. Make a contribution. Make a difference. Get out there. Don't keep calm and carry on. Get angry, and change this benighted world. Is there anything else than the masses who wait for others to do things?”
― Thomas Stark, The Book of Thought: Mind Matters

“He looks at the world as a spectator, he does not try to add to it or take away from it, he merely surrenders unresistingly to the movement of life.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

“This is not to say that before the invention of the camera men believed that everyone could see everything. But perspective organized the visual field as though that was indeed the ideal. Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera - and more particularly the movie camera - demonstrated that there was no centre.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“Your Life is your personal Movie: you're the Director, Producer, Promoter and Spectator. Action!”
― Sino Melo