Desert Quotes - Page 32

• If you live for your children, they may be smitten down and leave you desolate, or, what is far worse, they may desert you and leave you worse than childless in a cold and unfeeling world.

  Matthew Simpson

  Children, World, May

  Matthew Simpson (1885). “Sermons”

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• As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self. Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.

  Gabriel Zaid

  Writing, Opportunity, Self

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• The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Nature, Flower, Men

  Joseph Wood Krutch (1995). “The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch”

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• The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans.

  Frank Waters

  Ocean, Sage, Tides

  Frank Waters (1999). “Mountain Dialogues”, Swallow Press

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• Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.

  C. L. R. James

  Country, Kings, Long

  C L R James (2001). “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution”, p.180, Penguin UK

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• God is light, we are told, and Hell is outer darkness. But look at a desert mountain stripped bare by the sun, and you learn only geography. Watch darkness claim it, and for a moment you may grasp why God had to create Satan—or man to create both.

  Colin Fletcher

  Men, Light, Darkness

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• What is this you write- 'Come home? Surely now, in our terrible dearth of workers, it is not the time for any one to desert his post. Send us only our first twenty men and I may be tempted to come to help you to find the second twenty.

  Alexander Murdoch Mackay

  Home, Writing, Men

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• God never deserts a man, unless He is deserted by that man first. For even if a man shall have committed grievous sins once, twice, and a third time, God still looks for him, "so that he may be converted and live."

  Caesarius of Arles

  Men, Saint, Looks

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• No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth to both the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggles, the poor are not wrong in believing.

  John Stuart Mill

  Believe, Struggle, Law

  John Stuart Mill (2016). “Socialism: Mill's Works”, p.5, VM eBooks

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• Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert.

  Gilbert Parker

  Stars, Distance, Eye

  Gilbert Parker “The Complete Works of Gilbert Parker”, Library of Alexandria

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• Capt. Renault: What on Earth brought you to Casablanca? Rick Blaine: My health, I came to Casablanca for the waters. Capt. Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert! Rick Blaine: I was misinformed.

  Humphrey Bogart

  Water, Healthy, Earth

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• Madame Nature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense. She has, doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak. She rewards each organism according to its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die and disappear.

  Charles Kingsley

  Wise, Nature, Stupid

  Charles Kingsley (2008). “Scientific Lectures and Essays”, p.3, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Green grass grows where dry desert ends.

  Og Mandino

  Dry, Green, Grass

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• But whate'er you are That in this desert inaccessible, Under the shade of melancholy boughs, Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; If you have ever looked on better days, If ever been where bells knoll'd to church, If ever sat at any good man's feast, If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be. . . .

  William Shakespeare

  Time, Strong, Men

  William Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler (1861). “The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: Adapted for Family Reading”, p.185

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• Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

  Max Beerbohm

  Time, Men, Islands

  Max Beerbohm (2017). “Zuleika Dobson”, p.12, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.

  Louis L'Amour

  Country, Time, Party

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• ... deprived of pain, and also deprived of danger, able to do what it wants, [Nature] does not need us, nor understands our deserts, and it cannot be angry.

  Lucretius

  Pain, Spring, Doe

  Titus Lucretius Carus, Lucretius, C. H. Sisson (2003). “De Rerum Natura”, p.16, Psychology Press

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• Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.

  Larry Harvey

  Real, Struggle, Community

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• If you choose not to live self-responsibly, you count on others to make up your default. No one abjures self-responsibility on a desert island.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Responsibility, Islands, Self

  Nathaniel Branden (1998). “Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality”, p.164, Simon and Schuster

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• As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.

  Plutarch

  Lying, World, Maps

  Parallel Lives "Aemilius Paulus" sec. 5

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• I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like a desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly.

  Tim Winton

  Nature, Sea, Doe

  Tim Winton (2012). “Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir”, p.33, Pan Macmillan

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• The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

  Tim Winton

  Spiritual, Nature, Sea

  Tim Winton (2012). “Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir”, p.18, Pan Macmillan

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• I want to take you to a place of pure magic... It's the place athletes call the "zone". Buddhists call "satori" and ravers call "trance". I call it the Silver Desert. It's a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It's a place of pure rhythm.

  Gabrielle Roth

  Buddhist, Athlete, Dark

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• Spirit vibrated into matter; hence, both Spirit and matter exist. Matter, however, does not exist in the way that it appears to us. It exists as we see it owing to the delusive force of maya, which makes the indivisible Spirit seem finite and divisible to all appearances. Matter has existence in the same delusive way as does a mirage in the desert.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Doe, Mirages, Owing

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• The man who has his ideals, no matter how thoroughly he may be persuaded to desert them, survives well only so long as he is true to those ideals.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Men, Long, May

  L. Ron Hubbard (1976). “Scientology, a New Slant on Life”, p.242, Bridge Publications, Inc.

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