Birth Quotes - Page 36

• I am fifty-two years of age. I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, and a few people might be constrained to say that I was reasonably responsible. In the land of my birth I cannot vote...

  Desmond Tutu

  Years, Land, Racism

  The Guardian, April 8, 1984.

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• Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Expression, Ideas, Differences

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• Misfortune is the root of good fortune; good fortune gives birth to misfortune.

  Laozi

  Roots, Giving, Fortune

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• It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.

  James Mackintosh

  Freedom, Responsibility, Rights

  Sir James Mackintosh (1835). “History of the Revolution in England in 1688: Comprising a View of the Reign of James II. from His Accession, to the Enterprise of the Prince of Orange”, p.24

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• You must be respectful and assenting, but without being servile and abject. You must be frank, but without indiscretion, and close, without being costive. You must keep up dignity of character, without the least pride of birth, or rank. You must be gay, within all the bounds of decency and respect; and grave, without the affectation of wisdom, which does not become the age of twenty. You must be essentially secret, without being dark and mysterious. You must be firm, and even bold, but with great seeming modesty.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Character, Gay, Dark

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• Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth; that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Mistake, Mean, Thinking

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.56, Oxford University Press

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• Lady ---- is safely delivered of a son, to the great joy of that noble family. The expression, of a woman's having brought her husband a son, seems to be a proper and cautious one; for it is never said, from whence.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Husband, Son, Expression

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.325, Oxford University Press

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• Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living--something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Pain, Writing, Giving

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• That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Knowledge, Eye, Dark

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.8238, Delphi Classics

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• The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.

  Mary Blakely

  Mother, War, Writing

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• But the closer we study their lives, and the better we know their deeds, the more profound is our admiration and the greater our reverence for the Pilgrim fathers. Between the drafting of their immortal charter of liberty in the cabin of the Mayflower and the fruition of their principles in the power and majesty of the republic of the United States of to-day is but a span in the records of the word, and yet it is the most important and beneficent chapter in history. To be able to claim descent from them, either by birth or adoption, is to glory in kinship with God's nobility.

  Chauncey Depew

  Father, Profound, Adoption

  Chauncey Mitchell Depew (1910). “Club and society addresses”

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• In an economy, an act, a habit, an institution, or a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause - it is seen. The others unfold in succession - they are not seen. Now this difference is enormous, for it is often true that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Law, Differences, Giving

  "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen". Book by Frédéric Bastiat, 1850.

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• Yet if I told you you are born of God-that you are pure Gods and Goddesses at birth-pure love-you would reject me.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Inspirational, Religious, Love You

  Neale Donald Walsch (1996). “Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue”, p.71, Penguin

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• [Keeping kosher was] the symbol of an initiation, like the insignia of a secret brotherhood, that set her apart and gave her freedom and dignity. Every law whose yoke she accepted willingly seemed to add to her freedom: she herself had chosen . . . To enter that brotherhood. Her Judaism was no longer a stigma, a meaningless accident of birth from which she could escape . . . It had become a distinction, the essence of her self-hood, what she was, what she wanted to be, not merely what she happened to be.

  Jessie Sampter

  Women, Self, Law

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• One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.

  William H. Gass

  Simple, Water, Eruption

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• A family reunion is an effective form of birth control.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Birth Control, Family Reunion, Genealogy

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• Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Echoes, Ignorant, Mind

  "Memoirs and Essays, Washington Allston". As quoted in "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations", p. 256-259, 1922.

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• I'll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth--that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence--for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of marriage.

  Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

  Daughter, Heart, Thinking

  Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (1881). “Marriage [by S.E. Ferrier]. Edinb. ed”

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• To each man at his birth nature has given some fault.

  Propertius

  Men, Faults, Given

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• The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a higher caste, not ennobled by birth, however, but through deliberate self-initiation.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Artist, Self, People

  "Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms" by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, Pennsylvania University Press, 1968.

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• To be rich be diligent; move on
  Like heav'ns great movers that enrich the earth;
  Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone;
  And make the spring straight bury all her birth.
  Rich are the diligent who can command
  Time--nature's stock.

  William Davenant

  Spring, Moving, Sloth

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• All slander must still be strangled in its birth, or time will soon conspire to make it strong enough to overcome the truth.

  William Davenant

  Strong, Overcoming, Enough

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• I've learned to judge of men by their own deeds;
  I do not make the accident of birth
  The standard of their merit.

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Men, Judging, Deeds

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• Beginnings play their prized part in every finished human accomplishment, for beginnings mean the birth of added progress.

  Ignacy Jan Paderewski

  Mean, Play, Accomplishment

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• Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I .

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Ideas, Mind, Irony

  "Journals and Papers". Book by Søren Kierkegaard, 1967.

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