Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Legacy Quotes, Kindness Quotes, Past Quotes

2. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Funny Quotes, Journey Quotes, Travel Quotes

3. “What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Quotes About Ocean

4. “The weak are meat the strong do eat.”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Strong Quotes

5. “You say you’re ‘depressed’ – all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective – it just means you’re human.”

— David Mitchell

6. “I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there.”

— David Mitchell

7. “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Quotes About Ocean

8. “I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.”

— David Mitchell

9. “Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths.”

— David Mitchell

10. “The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.”

— David Mitchell

11. “A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

12. “Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”

— David Mitchell

13. “A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”

— David Mitchell

14. “Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other’s favour. That’s what love is, isn’t it?”

— David Mitchell

15. “Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.”

— David Mitchell

16. “What is “poker”? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars.”

— David Mitchell

17. “Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”

— David Mitchell

18. “Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.”

— David Mitchell

19. “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.”

— David Mitchell

20. “If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.”

— David Mitchell

21. “Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

— David Mitchell

22. “In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”

— David Mitchell

23. “It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”

— David Mitchell

24. “By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

— David Mitchell

25. “Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I’m working for Nintendo.”

— David Mitchell

26. “Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.”

— David Mitchell

27. “If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”

— David Mitchell

29. “The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?”

— David Mitchell

30. “As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking for the door.”

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

31. “I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.”

— David Mitchell

32. “The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.”

— David Mitchell

33. “I remain thankful to God for all his mercies.”

— David Mitchell

34. “This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.”

— David Mitchell

35. “I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.”

— David Mitchell

36. “Reality is the page. Life is the word.”

— David Mitchell

37. “What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

— David Mitchell

38. “Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.”

— David Mitchell

39. “The body is the outermost layer of the mind.”

— David Mitchell

40. “Mediocrity is fine if you accept it.”

— David Mitchell

41. “Persuasion is not about force; it’s about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it.”

— David Mitchell

42. “I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.”

— David Mitchell

43. “You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.”

— David Mitchell

44. “Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.”

— David Mitchell

45. “Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?”

— David Mitchell

46. “I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.”

— David Mitchell

47. “Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.”

— David Mitchell

48. “To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.”

— David Mitchell

49. “We are both busy people, so let’s cut the small talk.”

— David Mitchell

50. “I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.”

— David Mitchell