Cost Quotes - Page 35

• It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Solitude, Trying, Alive

  "The Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers" by Andrew Solomon, www.newyorker.com. March 11, 2015.

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• Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.

  Jack Kerouac

  Writing, Mad, Joy

  Jack Kerouac (1991). “On the road”, Penguin USA

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• The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.

  Pope John Paul II

  Real, Lust, Desire

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• Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Mom, Dream, Dad

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• Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.

  John Henry Newman

  Sacrifice, Break Through, Accomplished

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• perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

  Barack Obama

  Mother, Museums, Average

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• Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.

  Ian Caldwell

  Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason (2005). “The rule of four”, Egully.com

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• If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.

  Tom Peters

  Book, Ideas, All Time

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• But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

  Michael Crichton

  Teaching, Animal, Dna

  Michael Crichton (1996). “The lost world”

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• If we have not struggled/as hard as we can/at our strongest/how will we sense/the shape of our losses/or know what sustains/us longest or name/what change costs us,/saying how strange/it is that one sector/of the self can step in/for another in trouble,/how loss activates/a latent double, how/we can feed/as upon nectar/upon need?

  Kay Ryan

  Loss, Self, Names

  Kay Ryan (2007). “Say Uncle: Poems”, p.54, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There are always rebels and radicals, I suppose,' McCleethy allows. 'Those who live on the fringes of society. But what do they contribute to the society itself? They reap its rewards without experiencing its costs. No. I submit that loyal, hardworking citizens who push aside their own selfish desires for the good of the whole are the backbone of the world. What if we all decided to run off and live freely without thought or care for society's rules? Our civilization would crumble. There is a joy in duty and a security in knowing one's place...It is the only way.

  Libba Bray

  Running, Selfish, Civilization

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• WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches

  Paul Farmer

  Believe, Sacrifice, Thinking

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• That's beautiful,' Valkyrie said, looking at it. Isn't it? This necklace has cost two very fine men their lives. At times, I wear it in tribute to their sacrifice. Other times, I wear it because it goes with this skirt.

  Derek Landy

  Beautiful, Sacrifice, Men

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• I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.

  Christopher Barzak

  Mother, Giving Up, Real

  Christopher Barzak (2008). “The Love We Share Without Knowing”, p.73, Bantam

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• But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Life, Eye, Men

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• He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Pain, Flower, Heart

  Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.268, Pan Macmillan

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• Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Pride, Hunger And Thirst, Cold

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.56, Cambridge University Press

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• Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].

  Alan Lightman

  Past, Men, Way To Live

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• Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.

  Nick Hornby

  Christmas, Real, Reading

  Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

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• Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.

  Bruno Schulz

  Men, Self, Genius

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  War, Impact, Iraq

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• At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

  Jean Cocteau

  Childhood, Quality, Adults

  Jean Cocteau (1966). “The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

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• Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Rights, Blood, Liberty

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Starship Troopers”, p.96, Penguin

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• Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Grief, Fall, People

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• Ourchestra: So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly. So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose. So we haven't any cymbals- We'll just slap our hands together, And though there may be orchestras That sound a little better With their fancy shiny instruments That cost an awful lot- Hey, we're making music twice as good By playing what we've got!

  Shel Silverstein

  Hands, Play, Together

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