Periods Quotes - Page 7

• The girl of the period sets up to be natural, and is only rude; mistakes insolence for innocence; says everything that comes first to her lips, and thinks she is gay when she is only giddy.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Girl, Mistake, Gay

  Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) (1881). “Wit and Wisdom”

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• The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Art, Simple, Needs

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• Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Long, Perfect, Would Be

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• There is a period of life when we go back as we advance.
  [Fr., Il est un terme de la vie au-dela duquel en retrograde en avancant.]

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Progress, Retrograde

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• Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
  [Fr., Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospere et s'aigrit dans l'adversite.]

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Adversity, Sleep, Wake Up

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• There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.

  William Hazlitt

  Cutting, Years, Age

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• All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.

  Honore de Balzac

  Energy, Illusion, Wretchedness

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• What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?

  Honore de Balzac

  Powerful, Government, Order

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• Every year, in the deep midwinter, there descends upon this world a terrible fortnight. ... every shop is a choked mass of humanity ... nerves are jangled and frayed, purses emptied to no purposes, all amusements and all occupations suspended in favor of frightful businesses with brown paper, string, letters, cards, stamps, and crammed post offices. This period is doubtless a foretaste of whatever purgatory lies in store for human creatures.

  Rose Macaulay

  Christmas, Lying, Years

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• Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.

  Rose Macaulay

  Time, Flower, Past

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Told by an Idiot”, p.66, A&C Black

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• The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

  Anais Nin

  Diaries, Want, Evening

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• Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.

  Joseph Addison

  Moon

  Joseph Addison (1811). “The Works of the Right Honorable Joseph Addison”, p.206

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• The only way to find out if you can write is to set aside a certain period every day and try. Save enough money to give yourself six months to be a full-time writer. Work every day and the pages will pile up.

  Judith Krantz

  Writing, Giving, Trying

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• For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Growth, Age, Doe

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• The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Pain, Doubt, Growth

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• Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.

  William Shenstone

  Writing, Musical, Style

  William Shenstone, Samuel Johnson, Robert Dodsley (1807). “Essays on men and manners; with aphorisms, criticisms, impromptus, fragments, etc”, p.116

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• Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort. Do not talk to him about the interests and rights of the human race; that little private business of his for the moment absorbs all his thoughts, and he hopes that public disturbances can be put off to some other time.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Rights, Race, Selfishness

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• It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.

  George Washington

  Justice, People, Giving

  George Washington, John Jay, Jared Sparks (1850). “Washington's Farewell Address to the People of the United States of America”, p.38, New York : J. Wiley

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• I was a poet too; but modern taste
  Is so refined and delicate and chaste,
  That verse, whatever fire the fancy warms,
  Without a creamy smoothness has no charms.
  Thus, all success depending on an ear,
  And thinking I might purchase it too dear,
  If sentiment were sacrific'd to sound,
  And truth cut short to make a period round,
  I judg'd a man of sense could scarce do worse
  Than caper in the morris-dance of verse.

  William Cowper

  Cutting, Men, Thinking

  William Cowper (1830). “Poems ... With a sketch of his life and a vindication of his religious principles and character. Third edition, corrected and enlarged. [With a portrait.]”, p.14

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• You cannot live in Los Angeles for any period of time without eventually trying to write a screenplay. It's like a flu bug that you catch ... Even the plumber has a screenplay in his truck.

  Gilda Radner

  Writing, Trying, Hollywood

  Gilda Radner (2015). “It's Always Something”, p.18, Simon and Schuster

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• God is decreeing to begin some newand great period in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself. What does he then but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?

  John Milton

  Church, Doe, Firsts

  'Areopagitica' (1644) p. 31

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• One of the great disappointments of our time has been that the United States, a beacon of hope during the freedom struggles of the Asian peoples, succumbed to the views and greater colonial experience of nations grown to power in an earlier period.

  Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

  Disappointment, Struggle, Views

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• The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

  Doris Lessing

  Literature, Exciting, Critics

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• As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.

  Margaret Mead

  Family, Long, People

  Margaret Mead (1965). “Family”

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• We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.

  Anne Tyler

  House, Waiting, Teens

  Anne Tyler (2012). “Celestial Navigation”, p.58, Random House

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