Absorbing Quotes - Page 8

• In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Book, Reading, Names

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). “The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays”, p.172, Cooper Square Press

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• I remember the days of my youth when everything was new and bright; when the mind was always questing, searching, absorbing; when the pain of love was so acute it could suffocate, and the days when joy was delirious.

  Jennifer Worth

  Time, Pain, Joy

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• Life without absorbing occupation is hell; joy consists in forgetting life.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Happiness, Joy, Occupation

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and taking on a specific richness... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use.

  Peter Zumthor

  Thinking, Age, Scratches

  Peter Zumthor (1998). “Peter Zumthor”

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• After Birth is a fast-talking, opinionated, moody, funny, and slightly desperate account of the attempt to recover from having a baby. It is a romp through dangerous waters, in which passages of hilarity are shadowed by the dark nights of earliest motherhood, those months so tremulous with both new love and the despairing loss of one's identity-to read it is an absorbing, entertaining, and thought-provoking experience.

  Lydia Davis

  Baby, Loss, Dark

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• Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.

  Black Elk

  Inspirational, Honesty, Native American

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• The essence of forgiveness is absorbing pain instead of giving it.

  Timothy Keller

  Pain, Essence, Giving

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• An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

  Toni Morrison

  Fall, Angel, Godly

  "Tar Baby". Book by Toni Morrison, 1981.

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• Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

  Henry Adams

  Water, Mind, Calm

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 16 (1907)

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• The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. . . . Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware . . . still clinging to things that no longer exist.

  Eric Hoffer

  Views, Names, People

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• Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There.

  Wallace Stevens

  Stars, Power, Moon

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• They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Wings, Mind, Links

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• We're going to line up some professionals - counselors. The reality is just setting in for all of us. We didn't have the benefit of looking from the outside in. They're still absorbing everything that did happen. There will finally be some realization of what happened - as it's been described to us, the worst disaster in our country's history.

  Rick Dickson

  Country, Reality, Benefits

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• In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.

  Os Guinness

  Christian, Heart, Practice

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• There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Purpose, Fiction, Certain

  Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Levine, Susan Levine (1976). “The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition”, p.308, University of Illinois Press

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• And all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom; wherefore make this your first and last and constant and all-absorbing aim, to exceed, if possible, not only us but all your ancestors in virtue; and know that to excel you in virtue only brings us shame, but that to be excelled by you is a source of happiness to us.

  Plato

  Plato, Justice, Lasts

  Plato (2015). “The Complete Plato”, p.166, Booklassic

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• There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

  Edward Hoagland

  Summer, Cities, Age

  Edward Hoagland (1995). “The Tugman's Passage”

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• Most people are just trying to get through the day. Be committed to learn to get from the day. Don't just get through it; get from it. Learn from it. Let the day teach you. Join the university of life. What a difference that will make in your future. Commit yourself to learning. Commit yourself to absorbing. Be like a sponge. Get it. Don't miss it.

  Jim Rohn

  Learning, Differences, People

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• I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Writing, Dark, Light

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• My view... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.

  John Grierson

  Loss, Views, Would Be

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• The man with a cross no longer controls his destiny; he lost control when he picked up his cross. That cross immediately became to him an all-absorbing interest, an overwhelming interference. No matter what he may desire to do, there is but one thing he can do; that is, move on toward the place of crucifixion.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Moving, Destiny, Men

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• The best that Gauss has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a certain extent a similar pleasure may be found by absorbing ourselves in questions of pure geometry.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, May, Pleasure

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• For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities...The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not in studying.

  Daniel Goleman

  Learning, Anxiety, Challenges

  Daniel Goleman (2012). “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”, p.156, Bantam

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• Absorbing. . . . Scrupulously reported . . . illuminates today’s Middle East. . . . The ‘least interventionist of any modern president,’ the father of the Eisenhower Doctrine that still defines US policy in the Middle East . . . in 1956 battled demons in bodies personal and politic and in the desert – and prevailed. Nichols’ book, written lean enough to allow the facts to speak for themselves, makes for exciting history.

  Carlo Wolff

  Father, Book, President

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• The short story ... is the most democratic of all the arts; anyone may tell a story, and if it is an absorbing one someone will listen.

  Hallie Burnett

  Art, Stories, May

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