Desert Quotes - Page 29

• For the spear was a desert physician, That cured not a few of ambition, And drave not a few to perdition, With medicine bitter and strong.

  James Elroy Flecker

  Strong, Ambition, Medicine

  James Elroy Flecker, James Hogg (1976). “The Leysin Version of James Elroy Flecker's Hassan”

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• There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden a 'natural way'. You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes gardeners.

  Henry Mitchell

  Nature, Pride, Garden

  Henry Mitchell (2003). “The Essential Earthman: Henry Mitchell on Gardening”, p.3, Indiana University Press

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• In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.

  Elias Canetti

  Book, Reading, Would Be

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• Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Money, Men, Years

  Thomas Carlyle (1843). “Past and Present”, p.109

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• Very few persons, comparatively, know how to Desire with sufficient intensity. They do not know what it is to feel and manifest that intense, eager, longing, craving, insistent, demanding, ravenous Desire which is akin to the persistent, insistent, ardent, overwhelming desire of the drowning man for a breath of air; of the shipwrecked or desert-lost man for a drink of water; of the famished man for bread and meat.

  Robert Collier

  Men, Overwhelming Desire, Air

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• Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, Cities, Intellectual

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• And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.

  Andrew Marvell

  Time, Lying, Eternity

  "To His Coy Mistress" l. 21 (1681)

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• So the British, of all ages, still walk the course. On trips to Florida or the American desert, they still marvel, or shudder, at the fleets of electric carts going off in the morning like the first assault wave at the Battle of El Alamein. It is unlikely, for some time, that a Briton will come across in his native land such a scorecard as Henry Longhurst rescued from a California club and cherished till the day he died. The last on its list of local rules printed the firm warning "A Player on Foot Has No Standing on the Course."

  Alistair Cooke

  Morning, Golf, Player

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• For there is a great difference in delivery of the mathematics , which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy , which is the most immersed. And howsoever contention hath been moved , touching a uniformity of method in multiformity of matter, yet we see how that opinion, besides the weakness of it, hath been of ill desert towards learning, as that which taketh the way to reduce learning to certain empty and barren generalities; being but the very husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method.

  Francis Bacon

  Learning, Knowledge, Science

  "Collected Works of Francis Bacon".

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• Am I willing to give up what I have in order to be what I am not yet? Am I willing to let my ideas of myself, of man be changed? Am I able to follow the spirit of love into the desert? To empty myself even of my concept of emptiness?

  Mary Caroline Richards

  Giving Up, Hero, Men

  Mary Caroline Richards (2011). “Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person”, p.141, Wesleyan University Press

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• The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

  Clarence Day

  Art, Ideas, Wish

  Clarence Day, Jr. (2004). “This Simian World”, p.23, 1st World Publishing

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• Nature never deserts the wise and pure; no plot so narrow, be but nature there; no waste so vacant, but may well employ each faculty of sense, and keep the heart awake to love and beauty.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Wise, Nature, Heart

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1836). “Letters, Conversations and Recollections”, p.35

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• On 17th July there came to us at Potsdam the eagerly-awaited news of the trial of the atomic bomb in the [New] Mexican desert. Success beyond all dreams crowded this sombre, magnificent venture of our American allies. The detailed reports ... could leave no doubt in the minds of the very few who were informed, that we were in the presence of a new factor in human affairs, and possessed of powers which were irresistible.

  Winston Churchill

  Success, Dream, Science

  "Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963" by Robert Rhodes James, Vol. 1, p. 7210, 1974.

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• Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Wise, Attitude, Cat

  Charles Baudelaire, “Les Chats (Cats)”

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• It seems that, after nineteen centuries of extraordinary glorification, the small Host for which so many cathedrals have sprung up, the small Host that has rested in millions of breasts and that has found a tabernacle and worshippers even in the desert - it seems that the triumphant Host of Lourdes and the Eucharistic Congresses of Chicago and Carthage remains as unknown, as secret as when it appeared for the first time in a room in Jerusalem. Light is in the world as in the days of St. John the Baptist, and the world does not know it

  Francois Mauriac

  Light, Sprung Up, Secret

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• The oil industry is a stunning example of how science, technology, and mass production can divert an entire group of companies from their main task. ... No oil company gets as excited about the customers in its own backyard as about the oil in the Sahara Desert. ... But the truth is, it seems to me, that the industry begins with the needs of the customer for its products. From that primal position its definition moves steadily back stream to areas of progressively lesser importance until it finally comes to rest at the search for oil.

  Theodore Levitt

  Moving, Science, Technology

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• Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Rights, Differences

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• Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert.

  Robert Breault

  Love, Mirages, Love Is

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• When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Age, Vices, Ice Age

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• It is the character of a brave and resolute man not to be ruffled by adversity and not to desert his post.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Motivation, Character, Adversity

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• Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, What Matters, Glasses

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson (1904). “The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”

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• Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope.

  Henry Vollam Morton

  Men, Islands, Giving

  Henry Vollam Morton (1930). “The Heart of London”, London : Methuen

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• Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces.

  Merrill McPeak

  Military, War, Air

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• They are again in the dirt in the desert.

  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

  Funny, Military, Dirt

  "Iraq says Baghdad will be coalition's graveyard", www.cnn.com. March 27, 2003.

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• Going out across the desert I remember the feelings that you have, wondering if you're going to make it out alive. Right now I wonder what that was all about. What was the point of all of that? I don't think there's any appetite from the American people to go back and do our work twice.

  Scott Perry

  Military, Thinking, Iraq

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