Fall back is to move back suddenly from someone or something, often because you are frightened. Profoundly inspirational fall back quotes will brighten up your day and make you feel ready to take on anything.
Famous Fall Back Quotes
I reluctantly signed up for a journalism major, thinking I needed a fall-back way to make money should my career as a novelist fail to take off. As I started to try on journalism, including doing internships and working at the campus paper, I found I actually liked it. So I started to want to be a journalist. — Kevin Maney
I’m the type of person that tries to fall back asleep in the morning just to finish a dream. — Marilyn Monroe
You must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes, if you are not to fall back into the rut if inertia, the confusion of aim and the craven fear of being great. — Winston Churchill
If you’re suddenly doing something you don’t want to do for four years, just so you’ve got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don’t have that 16-year-old drive any more and you’ll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place. — Ewan McGregor
I think it’s always good to learn a craft from scratch the real way, so that you’ve learned it from the basis, the raw bones, and then you have that to fall back on. I personally wouldn’t want it any other way. — Naomi Campbell
My mum always told me, ‘Have something to fall back on’ and I never really listened. — Chuck Mosley
A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind is surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,” a voice shouts in my head: I AM FREE! — Aron Ralston
I had dropped out of school and was a runaway, so I didn’t have family to fall back on if I didn’t work. I didn’t have a lot of other options of making money other than modeling. — Carre Otis
There is nothing but nonviolence to fall back upon for retaining our freedom, even as we had to do for gaining it. — Mahatma Gandhi
Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fences, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our own hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them. — John Steinbeck
Oh, dear. She let her head fall back to the pillow. There it went. I’ve fallen in love with you now. Just now? Chuckling, he came to a sitting position, resting his forearm on one bent knee. Well, thank God for belated blessings. He ran a hand through his hair. It’s been coming on rather longer than that for me. What? She sat bolt upright. What can you mean? Since when? From the first, Amelia. From the very first. — Tessa Dare
Boys flying kites haul in their white winged birds; You can’t do that way when you’re flying words. Careful with fire, is good advice we know Careful with words, is ten times doubly so. Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead; But God Himself can’t kill them when they’re said. — Will Carleton
For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby? — Haniel Long
Most of us have participated in the trust exercise in which one person falls back and is caught by a peer. Even if the catch is made a hundred times in a row, the trust is broken forever if the friend lets you fall the next time as a joke. Even if he swears he is sorry and will never let you fall again, you can never fall back without a seed of doubt. — Rafe Esquith
The biggest start-up successes – from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg – were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed. — Eric Ries
I’d rather be the half of us, the least of you, the best of me; and I will be – I’ll be your prince, I’ll be your saint, I will go crashing through fences in your name; I will, I swear – I’ll be someone to fall back on. I’ll be the one who waits, and for as long as you let me, I will be the one you need – I’ll be someone to fall back on. — Aly Michalka
I would say it’s always been in me to want to have victorious songs. I sort of want my songs to have a feeling of victory, but through a lot of pain. Like, you’re 75 percent to the top of the mountain and sometimes you fall back to the bottom, but hopefully by the end of the record you’ll feel like there’s no mountain at all. — Aaron Bruno
I tattooed my body so I couldn’t fall back on anything. I purposely did that so I couldn’t get a normal job and live a normal life. I did it so I had to play music. — Travis Barker
Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner’s grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general’s map. — Julian Barnes
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. — H. L. Mencken
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth. — George Eliot
Iraq today does have a chance to shape its own future. They may not do that, or this generation may not do that. But maybe the next one will, I don’t know. They may try and fail, and stumble, get up and fall back. — Thomas Friedman
You need to feel good about yourself, the motivation has to come from within. You have nobody to fall back on except yourself. — Dana Hill
I had to overcome many things, many people telling me no. If you want it, and you believe in it, you have to do it. And I know it’s silly, and I know I’m kind of irrationally optimistic, but you have to be and you can’t really have another plan, because you’re going to fall back on it. — Crystal Reed
Don’t have a fall back, because if you do, you’ll fall back. — Mary-Louise Parker
I would suggest maintaining a life and a career outside the Industry. This is a fickle business and a lousy one to make a steady living in, so it’s important to have a good family, friends, job and education to fall back on. — Fred Savage
I’ve always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it’s becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy. — Ishmael Reed
I always feel like there is some dude out there with money that I could fall back on if I needed to. — Kirstie Alley
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God. — Charles Horton Cooley
It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, Economics is what economists do, and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers. — Kenneth E. Boulding
If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. …(they) express something real and existing in ourselves. — Mark Rothko
You are born with the yearning arrow, my Glynna, though you are not yet fully aware of it. It is not a happy thing to possess, for nothing on earth – no goal, no person how ever beloved – will answer it. It points to the sky and to the heavens and the stars and when it cannot reach them, it must fall back to pierce your heart. — Isobelle Carmody
As the inevitable discussion proceeds in the months ahead, this memo should provide both perspective and a reality check. President Bush’s approval numbers will again fall back to more realistic levels fairly quickly. All were quite successful on Election Day. — Matthew Dowd
A fine shiver coursed over my skin. Seth? Yeah? You were in my dream. One amber-colored eye opened. Please tell me we were naked. I rolled my eyes. You’re such a perv. He sighed mournfully as he wiggled closer. I’ll take that as a no. You’d be correct. Unable to fall back to sleep, I started chewing on my lip. So many worries surfaced at once that my brain spun. — J. Lynn
Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. — Camille Paglia
May it not also be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never has been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past. — Winston Churchill
Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn, leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of anecdotes. — Sylvia Townsend Warner
Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race. — John Dos Passos
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it. — Jose Ortega y Gasset
I didn’t really know exactly the point where I wanted to be an actor. But I know at this point, because I never went to college, I don’t really have anything to fall back on. — Rory Cochrane
Nothing suffers annihilation, but at dissolution there is a change, and things fall back to the essential element in which they were before. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
When you’re making art, there’s a lot of self-importance attached to that, but at the end of the day, you can always fall back on the fact that it’s just a play. It’s not like the Iraq War or something. We’re not causing anybody any harm, other than a couple hours of a wasted evening. — Glen Berger
And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside me. And i fall back into it. — Patrick Ness
Honestly, that is the most important thing to me: Can I continue to live up to my own expectations of myself – and not fall back into slacking? — Alice Walker
Electronics was something I could always fall back on when I needed food on the table. — Steve Jobs
Face the brutes. That is a lesson for all life-face the terrible, face it boldly. Like the monkeys, the hardships of life fall back when we cease to flee before them. — Swami Vivekananda
I have now lived long enough to know that, whatever our situation, our troubles melt and disappear like frost in the morning sun when we dwell upon our blessings rather than our disappointments. No matter how pessimistic one’s view may become of the times and the seasons, we can always fall back on special friendship, on faithful, personal love, and on simple, true dealings in our own personal lives. — James E. Faust
Oh, that’s typical of you modern young men; you’ve nibbled at science and it’s made you ill, because you’ve not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You’d like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we’re only just beginning to understand it, and it’ll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won’t have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism…Yes, it’s the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you’re all inverted Werthers. — Emile Zola
Don’t depend on acting as your sole source of income. Work nights, so you can have your days off to attend auditions. Have something to fall back on. That’s what my mother taught me, and it’s critical in Hollywood. — Michael Clarke Duncan
Ironically, there is a history of black/Irish communion here in the states; Irish and African American brothers and sisters have often found common cause in fighting the bigotry both communities faced earlier in the 20th century. However, white skin privilege among the Irish separated them from blacks, who had no such advantage to fall back upon. The solution is to fight bigotry and racism wherever they appear, and to root out the forces of oppression as conscientiously as possible. — Michael Eric Dyson
Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I ‘d have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on. A package that’s been opened once doesn’t have the same appeal. — Jeannette Walls
It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source, out of that separation the desire arises to fall back into the whole, to become one with it. — Rajneesh
Usually, when special effects get in the way, it’s because the story isn’t strong enough. If you don’t start with a strong screenplay, it’s easy to fall back on special effects, thinking it’s going to carry you. But it never works. It’s just tiresome. — Ridley Scott
There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul. — Stephane Mallarme
We do need to rethink privacy. I think we need to fall back on (former Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter’s definition of privacy which is, Privacy is the right to be left alone. — Paul Saffo
I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground. — Henry David Thoreau
Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, the question should be, what isn’t political? Everything you do is political, even if it’s abstract. You’re making a political statement even if it’s unwittingly. I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn’t know the real reason they’re doing it. They’re just kind of going along with it intuitively. — Eric Drooker
There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on–a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. — Graham Swift
Careful with fire is good advice we know. Careful with words is ten times doubly so. — William Carleton
I had to fall back and rethink and get into the studio and listen to real r&b music. This is what I do and this is what I need to do. — Tony Sunshine
After World War II the Republicans – the Wall Street crowd – were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in ’46 that we’d fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation. — Oliver Stone
When child actors act well they’re just reacting to situations, and they’re acting very real because their life experience is so short; there’s no history to fall back on. — Mariel Hemingway
Sometimes, two people have to fall apart to realize how much they need to fall back together — Colleen Hoover
As your captain, I’m going to push you to not fall back on defense, but to play offense, and to play our match — the Gospel, together. — Pope Francis
An acting career usually has about a shelf life of ten years before people get sick of seeing you. It’s a good thing to have a job to fall back on and I really do enjoy directing. — George Clooney
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. — Bertrand Russell
If you wanted to pursue some kind of artistic pursuit and you had another career, then you would definitely fall back on it because it would take so long. I never believed I could do two things at once. The jobs I had were minimum wage jobs that you wouldn’t want to pursue for too long, or that couldn’t really take over your life. — Steve Toltz
Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself. — Charles de Gaulle
Right now I’m just thinking about school and trying to get those grades and keep them up! In case I become a Norma Desmond when I grow up, I can have something to fall back on! — Anna Chlumsky
Remember that for every technique you think you can fall back on, there is a counter for it, or there are times when it cannot be used. When real battle comes, you must remember that some things will not be applicable. Don’t think that any one technique is quintessential. — Masaaki Hatsumi
The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t and you lose. — Woody Allen
This world’s a tough place to live in and you have to have something to fall back on. — David Ragan
I have a fall-back fund for the quiet months. I am a single working parent and it gets lonely when things are insecure. — Kate Thornton
I’m not into that whole Satanic thing. It’s just something to fall back on if you don’t have much imagination. Singing you fiftieth song about having lunch with Satan–I’m not into it. It’s silly. — Kirk Hammett
He started to smile. “Are you waving the white flag?” “Not so fast. I’m saying we can take things slow. See if it blows up in our faces. I ’m not saying declare eternal love for each other while I fall back with my legs open. — Jeaniene Frost
Courage! Do not fall back; in a little the place will be yours. Watch! When the wind blows my banner against the bulwark, you shall take it. — Joan of Arc
Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is – or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live. — Jostein Gaarder
The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves. — Leon Trotsky
We were built to fall apart and fall back together. — Taylor Swift
Government cannot do it all. As we work hard to break welfare dependency and get young people ready for the labour market, we need businesses to give them a chance and not just fall back on labour from abroad. — Iain Duncan Smith
I always wanted to be an actor, but in Edmonton, Alberta, that’s not a success-oriented career. So I said, ‘I’ll get my (teaching) degree and then I’ll see what happens, but I’ll always have that to fall back on.’ So if anybody were to look at me and say, ‘Oh, you’re an actor,’ I could always say, ‘Hey man, I’m a teacher!’ — Nathan Fillion
When love first happens, the individuals are giving each other energy unconsciously and both people feel buoyant and elated. That’s the incredible high we call being ‘in love.’ Unfortunately, once they expect this feeling to come from another person, they cut themselves off from the energy in the universe and begin to rely even more on the energy from each other – only now there doesn’t seem to be enough. — James Redfield
We have a choice. We can shape our future, or let events shape it for us. And if we want to succeed, we can’t fall back on the stale debates and old divides that won’t move us forward. — Barack Obama
I think when I came into marriage — especially when you’ve had divorced parents like myself… You’d want to try even harder to make it work and you don’t want to fall back into a pattern that you’ve seen happen in your own family. I desperately want it to work; I desperately love my husband and I wanted to share everything together. And I thought that we were a very good team. — Princess Diana
Because I’m on the phone, Mom! Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that? Ahmadinejad. Oh, my goodness! What is he saying? That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin’s going too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going. Don’t be so fresh, young man! Gotta go, he says to me. Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell. Fall back, solider. Over and out. — Jennifer Donnelly
It’s very easy to fall back unto my old ways when I’m working a lot. It’s important for me to continue to find solitude and peace in nature and escape the city and the industry as much as possible. That’s where I reconnect and remind myself what I learned in that time in the woods when I was isolated and I recharge myself. If I don’t have that, it would be really easy for me to fall apart again. — Skylar Grey
At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure. — Robert Grudin
The depressed fall back exhausted from every undertaking. — Mason Cooley
Anxiety was not an emotion I could ever remember feeling when I went out in New York, and I wondered why tonight felt so different. Maybe it was because I no longer had a boyfriend or fiance. I suddenly recognized that there was safety in having someone, as well as a lack of pressure to shine. Ironically, this had cultivated a certain free-spiritedness that had, in turn, allowed me to be the life of the party and hoard the affection of additional men….But that had all changed. I didn’t have a boyfriend, a perfect figure, or alcohol-induced outrageousness to fall back on. — Emily Giffin
It’s only when you’re alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources. — Paul Theroux
It’s nice to have a little bit of art to fall back on. — Paul McCartney
Could have called back just to say som’ I’m fall back in the bass drum — Nicki Minaj
Globalization – and I think we share this conviction – is that globalization needs to be shaped politically, it needs to be given a human face, but we cannot allow to fall back into plagued globalization times. — Angela Merkel
I actually quit music and I thought maybe I chose the wrong career. But, I isolated myself in a cabin in the woods for a while and that’s where I fell back in love with music. Just being isolated out there, eliminating all these opinions that I endured during my time in LA and the music industry, all the rejection, it was really hard on me and my creativity. So by isolating myself in the wilderness, I was able to fall back in love with music. It was always ingrained in me, always in my blood, but I just lost it for a minute. — Skylar Grey
