Circles Quotes - Page 39

• To the human mind there is something almost illogical in the assertion that God became a man. It is like speaking about a square circle. Yet this is what Christmas says - and we take refuge from our bewilderment not in explanation but in adoration.

  Ralph P. Martin

  Men, Squares, Mind

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• Some folks ask me what the transition was like from NASCAR reporter to political reporter. It's easy. In one, you try to explain to your readers the significance of grown-ups getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to go around in circles indefinitely, always turning left. In the other, you get to interview racecar drivers.

  Mary Katharine Ham

  Political, Trying, Transition

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• No people are true Christians who do not think constantly of how they can lift their brother and sister, how they can assist their friends, how they can enlighten mankind, how they can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which they live.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Christian, Brother, Thinking

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• I found that I wanted to be best friends with almost all the women I interviewed because they had been through something. They were closing in on the circle of their journey and they had a kind of wisdom that comes from their long life.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Journey, Long

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• ...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

  Karl Marx

  Simple, Class, Democracy

  Karl Marx (2008). “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, p.9, Cosimo, Inc.

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• If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Reason Why, Conservative, Found

  Leo Tolstoy (2006). “Anna Karenina”, p.37, Penguin UK

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• Each one of us is bound to make the little circle in which he or she lives better and happier. Bound to see that out of that small circle the widest good may flow.

  Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

  Community, May, Littles

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• When we have no goal, or when our vision of the goal is obscured, we may lose our sense of purpose. Even when we've prepared ourselves well and have an aptitude for a given activity, poorly directed efforts can rob us of vital energy. We can spend a great deal of our time, money, and other resources running around in circles. Unless we create specific goals that match our purpose in life and unless we keep a clear vision of these goals, we may eventually falter and fail.

  John Templeton

  Running, Goal, Effort

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• I have often said that a person who wishes to begin a good life should be like one who draws a circle. Let him or her get the center in the right place and keep it so and the circumference will be good.

  Meister Eckhart

  Good Life, Wish, Goodness

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• We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel.

  Pope John Paul II

  Christian, Thinking, Community

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• I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions. It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.

  Agnes Smedley

  Leader, Asking, Littles

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• We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

  Friedrich Schiller

  Cutting, Men, Choices

  Friedrich Schiller (2012). “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, p.25, Courier Corporation

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• Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.

  Honore de Balzac

  Problem, Reason, Scientist

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• December drops no weak, relenting tear, By our fond summer sympathies ensnared; Nor from the perfect circle of the year Can even winter's crystal gems be spared.

  Christopher Pearse Cranch

  Summer, Winter, Years

  Christopher Pearse Cranch (1875). “The Bird and the Bell: With Other Poems”, p.191

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• Suddenly all the sky is hid As with the shutting of a lid, One by one great drops are falling Doubtful and slow, Down the pane they are crookedly crawling, And the wind breathes low; Slowly the circles widen on the river, Widen and mingle, one and all; Here and there the slenderer flowers shiver, Struck by an icy rain-drop’s fall.

  James Russell Lowell

  Rain, Flower, Fall

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “The poetical works of James Russell Lowell”, p.7

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• The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Airports, Neurotic

  Mignon McLaughlin (2014). “Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin”, p.59, BookBaby

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• We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink; our hearts might dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons. Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image.

  Elif Safak

  Running, Mean, Heart

  "The politics of fiction". TED Talk, www.ted.com. July 2010.

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• Thus, from the first divine contract, and the pure region where truth abides, a continuous chain of mercies and light extends to humanity, through every epoch, and will be prolonged to the end of time, until it returns to the abode from which it descends, taking with it all the peaceful souls it shall have collected in its course; that we may know that it was Love which opened, directed and closed the circle of all things.

  Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

  Light, Soul, Peaceful

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• After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.

  Jacques Barzun

  Men, Space, Europe

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• I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.

  John Steinbeck

  Dog, Night, Needs

  John Steinbeck, Thomas Fensch (1988). “Conversations with John Steinbeck”, p.31, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• One of the most dangerously vicious circles menacing the continued existence of all mankind arises through that grim striving for the highest possible position within the ranked order, in other words, the reckless pursuit of power which combines with an insatiable greed of neurotic proportions that the results of acquired power confer.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Power, Order, Greed

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• In most circles, the idea of economic planning has been in disrepute most of the time and, particularly in America, has almost carried connotations of intellectual and moral perversion and even political subversion.

  Gunnar Myrdal

  Ideas, America, Political

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• Tolerance enlarges the circle of our acquaintances.

  Elsa Triolet

  Tolerance, Acquaintance

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• Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  Sleep, Eye, Curves

  Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

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• There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.

  James Hollis

  Midlife, Debate, Crisis

  James Hollis (2005). “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up”, p.29, Penguin

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