Passages Quotes - Page 26

• Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Passion, Order

  4 Copy quote

• RESPIRATOR, n. An apparatus fitted over the nose and mouth of an inhabitant of London, whereby to filter the visible universe in its passage to the lungs.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Filters, Noses, Mouths

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.183, 谷月社

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What harm cause not those huge draughts or pictures which wanton youth with chalk or coals draw in each passage, wall or stairs of our great houses, whence a cruel contempt of our natural store is bred in them?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Wall, House, Graffiti

  16 Copy quote

• Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.

  Ralph Ellison

  Growing Up, Attitude, Our Society

  4 Copy quote

• Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Book, People, Mind

  7 Copy quote

• I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)

  Helene Hanff

  Reading, Long, Wish

  4 Copy quote

• I read Christopher McDougall's book 'Born to Run.' If running were a religion, this would be its bible. I actually scribbled my favorite passages on my arm to read during the race.

  Jennifer Carpenter

  Running, Book, Race

  4 Copy quote

• I don't expect that because I was successful in one field that I will then get a ride of passage into another.

  Agyness Deyn

  Successful, Fields

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the simplest ways to get an idea of one trillion dollars is to consider the amount in terms of the passage of time. One million seconds is equal to roughly eleven days and twelve hours, and one billion seconds is thirty-two years. One trillion seconds equals thirty-two thousand years.

  Geoff Davis

  Years, Ideas, Two

  6 Copy quote

• Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.

  H. L. Mencken

  Law, Government, Years

  11 Copy quote

• The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.

  Eric Hoffer

  Communism, Crime, Consideration

  4 Copy quote

• Our Keystone legislation received strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Although it didn't receive the 60 votes necessary for passage, 56 senators - a majority - voted in favor of the bill. Despite President Obama's actively lobbying against the bill, we still won the support of 11 Democrats.

  John Hoeven

  Strong, Support, President

  7 Copy quote

• I think everyone starts in the mailroom at some point! It's a right of passage. Your boss has to throw something at you and order you around for at least two years.

  Michael B. Jordan

  Thinking, Order, Years

  "Michael B. Jordan, ‘Fruitvale’ Star, Reveals His Early Tap Dancing Roots". Interview with Sasha Bronner, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 23, 2013.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's a rite of passage for the everyman, to a higher ground.

  Bob Seger

  Philosophy, Higher Ground, Everyman

  Song: Rite Of Passage

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.

  Andre Maurois

  Writing, Maturity, Expectations

  4 Copy quote

• For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

  Alan Lightman

  Intelligent, Air, Giving

  12 Copy quote

• At a turbulent public meeting once I lost my temper and said some harsh and sarcastic things. The proposal I was supporting was promptly defeated. My father who was there, said nothing, but that night, on my pillow I found a marked passage from Aristotle: Anybody can become angry--that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way -- that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

  Arthur Gordon Webster

  Sarcastic, Father, Night

  10 Copy quote

• Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.

  Gary Saul Morson

  Opportunity, Different, Thrill

  16 Copy quote

• White means the strength of fragility and the fragility of the passage of time.

  Martin Margiela

  Mean, White, Fragility

  46 Copy quote

• We speak of memorizing as getting something 'by heart,' which really means 'by head.' But getting a poem or prose passage truly 'by heart' implies getting it by mind and memory and understanding and delight.

  John Hollander

  Memories, Heart, Mean

  7 Copy quote

• My agency in promoting the passage of the National Banking Act was the greatest mistake of my life. It has built up a monopoly which affects every interest in the country

  Salmon P. Chase

  Country, Mistake, Agency

  52 Copy quote

• I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Country, Thinking, Serious

  4 Copy quote

• I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Book, Two, Want

  4 Copy quote

• An accurate charting of American women's progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.

  Susan Faludi

  Curves, Rights, Goal

  Susan Faludi (1991). “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Herschel and Humboldt] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two. I copied out from Humboldt long passages about Teneriffe and read them aloud on one of [my walking excursions].

  Charles Darwin

  Book, Humble, Science

  Charles Darwin (1902). “Charles Darwin: His Life in an Autobiographical Chapter and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters”, p.46, Library of Alexandria

  6 Copy quote

  Show source