Perpetual Quotes - Page 25

• To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization.

  Jeremy Seabrook

  Fun, Civilization, People

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• Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

  Sylvia Plath

  Country, Forever, Mind

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.145, Anchor

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• Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

  Joseph Addison

  Clouds, Break Through, Serenity

  'The Spectator' no. 381, 17 May 1712

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• The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound.

  Maureen Duffy

  Love, Pain, Heart

  Maureen Duffy (1969). “Wounds”

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• It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their masters is one of perpetual boredom.

  Robley Wilson

  Cat, Animal, Boredom

  Robley Wilson (1978). “Living alone: fictions”, Fiction Intl

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• To the mind which looks not to general results in the economy of Nature, the earth may seem to present a scene of perpetual warfare, and incessant carnage: but the more enlarged view, while it regards individuals in their conjoint relations to the general benefit of their own species, and that of other species with which they are associated in the great family of Nature, resolves each apparent case of individual evil, into an example of subserviency to universal good.

  William Buckland

  Life, Nature, Science

  William Buckland (2003). “The Evolution Debate, 1813-1870: Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology”, p.112, Psychology Press

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• The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

  Margot Asquith

  Kings, Ideas, People

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• That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Struggle, Competition, States

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). “The Signature of All Things”, p.444, A&C Black

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• The double law of attraction and radiation or of sympathy and antipathy, of fixedness and movement, which is the principle of Creation, and the perpetual cause of life.

  Albert Pike

  Sympathy, Law Of Attraction, Principles

  Albert Pike “Morals and Dogma : Scottish Rite in Freemasonry”, Lulu.com

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• Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

  Jean Piaget

  Inspirational, Educational, One Day

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• For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.

  Ron Suskind

  Thinking, Sometimes, Upbeat

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• If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, but the perpetual human predicament is that the answer soon poses its own problems.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Answers, Problem, Predicaments

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• It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.

  Camille Paglia

  Letting Go, Attitude, Reading

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua ; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Powerful, Fighting, Europe

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Patrick Riley (1988). “Leibniz: Political Writings”, p.183, Cambridge University Press

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• Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.

  Ben Nicholson

  Religious, Ideas, Painting

  Ben Nicholson (2002). “Ben Nicholson”

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• As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

  Herbert Spencer

  Fall, Self, Long

  "The Principles of Ethics" by Herbert Spencer, (Ch. 10), 1897.

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• The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Desire, Habit

  Isaiah Berlin (1978). “Karl Marx: His Life and Environment”, p.93, Oxford University Press

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• Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice. If they knew its charms, the dignity that accompanies it, how much a free man feels like a king, the perpetual inner light that is produced by decorous self-awareness and realization, perhaps there would be no greater friends of freedom than those who are its worst enemies.

  Jose Marti

  Kings, Men, Worst Enemy

  "Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos" edited by Carlos Ripoll, 1994.

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• I Have often thought if the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagances, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both. The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.

  Joseph Addison

  Wise, Men, Vanity

  Joseph Addison (1858). “Works, Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition: Withletters and Other Pieces Not Found in Any Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.530

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• Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Wise, Brave

  William Faulkner (1951). “Absalom, Absalom!”

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• The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.

  Georges Bernanos

  Mean, Emotional, Animal

  Georges Bernanos (1999). “The Impostor”, p.152, U of Nebraska Press

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• The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Emptiness, States, Very Good

  Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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• Sinners, hear and consider, if you wilfully condemn your souls to bestiality, God will condemn them to perpetual misery.

  Richard Baxter

  Soul, Misery, Gods Will

  Richard Baxter, William Orme (1830). “The practical works of Richard Baxter: with a life of the author and a critical examination of his writings by William Orme”, p.169

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• [S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, War, Fighting

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• Now to rivulets from the mountains Point the rods of fortune-tellers; Youth perpetual dwells in fountains, Not in flasks, and casks, and cellars.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Drinking, Mountain, Youth

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849). “The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Complete in One Volume”, p.110

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