Devouring Quotes - Page 3

Ambition is a devouring fire, who can poise it? It is a wind, who can fathom it? It is an abyss, who is able to recount the sources and issues thereof?

Nicolas Caussin

Ambition, Fire, Wind

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Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live regist'red upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
Th' endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.

William Shakespeare

Book, Grace, Honor

'Love's Labour's Lost' (1595) act 1, sc. 1, l. 1

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Awaken your heart to kindness and mercy for the people and love and tenderness for them. Never, never act with them like a predatory beast which seeks to be satiated by devouring them, for the people fall into two categories: they are either your brethren in faith or your kindred in creation.

Ali ibn Abi Talib

Kindness, Fall, Heart

"Nahj al-Balagha". "Nahj al-Balagha" by Ali ibn Abi Talib. Letter 53: An order to Malik Al-Ashtar,

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This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Morning, Faithful, Soul

Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”, New York, Farrar

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In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known.

Joanne Harris

Dream, Temptation, Chocolate

Joanne Harris (2000). “Chocolat”, p.188, Penguin

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Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can't see how.

Peter Sellers

Party, Should Have, Feet

"Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers". Book by Ed Sikov, p. 168, 1999.

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When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

Mark Haddon

Becoming, Literature, Caught

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...one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national character

Mikhail Bakunin

Character, Passion, Political Opinions

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[P]ride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself. When that loathsome perversion of love has borne its fruit, it has another, more meaningful and weightier name. We call it hatred.

Georges Bernanos

Meaningful, Names, Hatred

Georges Bernanos (1999). “The Impostor”, p.156, U of Nebraska Press

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For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

David Nicholls

Children, Book, Parent

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In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despitethe fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.

Irving Kristol

Children, Successful, Political

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Precisely because the State has the monopoly of coercion it can be allowed the monopoly only of coercion. Only if the modern State can be held within a strictly limited agency of duties and powers can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.

Henry Hazlitt

Agency, Coercion, Birth

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The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.

Philippa Gregory

Brother, Uncles, Father

Philippa Gregory (2009). “The White Queen”, Simon and Schuster

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Desperate? So what? I'm desperate, too!" Fenoglio snapped at her. "My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here," he said holding them out to her, "don't want to write anymore! I'm afraid of words Meggie! 'Once they were like honey, now they're poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn't love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I'm it's creator!

Cornelia Funke

Crush, Writing, Hands

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I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it.

William P. Young

Punishment, People, Joy

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Do you know, I always imagine that the subway trains are dragons,' Rose said to Bear as they clung to his coat for support in the swaying car. 'Tearing back and forth across the city in their underground caves, devouring people and spitting them out at random destinations.

Regina Doman

Dragons, Cities, People

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The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.

Tennessee Williams

Venus, Goddess, Organisms

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It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.

Stephen King

Thinking, Darkness, Pouring

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I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Soul, Brain, Mind

Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.144, Bloomsbury Publishing

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She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her.

Francesca Lia Block

Sleep, Climbing, Boots

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Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

Justin Cronin

Rain, Men, Light

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Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

Roberto Bolano

Past, Two, Rivers

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Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.

Bahá'u'lláh

Religious, Fire, Hatred

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I was very strict on that point. No devouring classmates." Jeremy rolled his eyes. "Other parents warn their kids not to talk to strangers. I had to warn mine not to eat them.

Kelley Armstrong

Kids, Eye, Parent

Kelley Armstrong (2009). “Stolen”, p.89, Vintage Canada

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Among the cancers devouring the American body politic, one of the most virulent involves liberals who play the race card as carelessly as children playing 52 Pickup.

Deroy Murdock

Children, Cancer, Race

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