Flotsam Quotes

• Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

  Marcel Proust

  Mind, Great Minds, Masterpiece

  Marcel Proust (1958). “By Way of Sainte-Beuve: (Contre Sainte-Beuve)”

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• I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Learning, Knowledge, Men

  Martin Luther King's Acceptance Speech, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1964.

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  I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Faith, Peace

  "50 years after receiving Nobel Prize, do Martin Luther King's peace prophecies still resonate?", www.foxnews.com. October 12, 2014.

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• We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.

  Gillian Flynn

  Style, Different, Culture

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• I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

  Martin Luther

  Change, War, Reality

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• Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

  Robert MacNeil

  Rivers, Growing, Language

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• Most of these - most people's stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography.

  Bruce Springsteen

  People, Geography, Stage

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I'm surrounded by good people. That's the measure of a good life. All the rest is flotsam.

  Roger Daltrey

  Good Life, People, Good People

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• Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads; ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant general the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

  Martin Gardner

  Queens, Kings, Teaching

  "Adventures Of a Mathematician" by Martin Gardner, www.nytimes.com. May 9, 1976.

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• You take the flotsam," I tell her, "I'll take the jetsam." You always get the jetsam,"she says pretending to pout. "Do you ever think if poeple heard our conversations they'd lock us up?" All the time.

  Wendy Mass

  Thinking, Locks, Pretending

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• The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences.

  Rheta Grimsley Johnson

  Sports, Writing, Sea

  Rheta Grimsley Johnson (2010). “Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: A Memoir”, p.190, NewSouth Books

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• I refuse to accept the view . . . that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Kings, Unconditional Love

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr.: "I Have a Dream" and Other Great Writings”, p.116, Beacon Press

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• Do you ever think if people heard our conversations they'd lock us up?" All the time.

  Wendy Mass

  Funny, Thinking, People

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• Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him....In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.

  Albert Einstein

  Hate, Confused, Ambition

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• Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Change, Thinking, One Day

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• Surely there is no greater garden for human-nature study than the flotsam and jetsam of the hospital.

  Mabel Osgood Wright

  Garden, Study, Human Nature

  Mabel Osgood Wright (1901). “The garden of a commuter's wife”

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• It's a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction.

  Antoine Predock

  America, Venice, Energy

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• There are tons of things in your home and life that you don't use, need, or even particularly want. They just came into your life as impulsive flotsam and jetsam and never found a good exit. Whether you're aware of it or not, this clutter creates indecision and distractions.

  Tim Ferriss

  Home, Exit, Needs

  "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich". Book by Timothy Ferriss, 2007.

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• And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Dream, Stars, Men

  Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”

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• When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils - then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more your believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Believe, Evil, Drunk

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• The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

  Brennan Manning

  Christian, Loss, Thinking

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• The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.

  Frank Gehry

  Thinking, Years, Political

  "New Again: Frank Gehry". Interview with Angela Ledgerwood and Ross Miller, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 19, 2012.

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• Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.

  Julian Assange

  Sea, Bridges, Support

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• I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop.

  Alexandra Sokoloff

  Ambition, Character, Eye

  "Collecting Character". www.screenwritingtricks.com. March 27, 2009.

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