Perpetual Quotes - Page 7

• The thing one resents about winter is its inactivity; the perpetual sameness of ice-armored hills and snow-blanketed woods. Great things, of course, may be going on underneath; but nature wears a mask, is icily non-committal.

  Anne Bosworth Greene

  Winter, Ice, Snow

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• whatever San Francisco is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never happens.

  Inez Haynes Irwin

  Taken, California, San Francisco

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• The human body is a machine that winds up its own springs: it is a living image of the perpetual motion.

  Julien Offray de La Mettrie

  Spring, Wind, Machines

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• Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It's important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They're open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn't like perpetual novelty.

  W. Brian Arthur

  Important, Negative, Asking

  "Coming from Your Inner Self". www.presencing.org. April 16, 1999.

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• Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Men, Mirrors

  Paul Auster (2007). “The Invention of Solitude”, p.148, Penguin

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• In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Doubt, Gold, Causes

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• Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice-that's what it is-they are all full of malice, malice!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Past, Worry, Wickedness

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky (2006). “The Idiot: Easyread Large Edition”, p.542, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

  Michel Foucault

  Justice, Criminals, Today

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.19, Vintage

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• The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.

  Rick Yancey

  Summer, Spring, Rain

  Rick Yancey (2014). “The Infinite Sea: The Second Book of the 5th Wave”, p.11, Penguin

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• These, then, are the four kinds of royalty. First the monarchy of the heroic ages; this was exercised over voluntary subjects, but limited to certain functions; the king was a general and a judge, and had the control of religion The second is that of the barbarians, which is a hereditary despotic government in accordance with law. A third is the power of the so-called Aesynmete or Dictator; this is an elective tyranny. The fourth is the Lacedaemonian, which is in fact a generalship, hereditary and perpetual.

  Aristotle

  Kings, Government, Law

  Aristotle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Aristotle (Illustrated)”, p.3028, Delphi Classics

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• The division of the Roman world between the sons of Theodosius marks the final establishment of the empire of the East, which, from the reign of Arcadius to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, subsisted one thousand and fifty-eight years in a state of premature and perpetual decay.

  Edward Gibbon

  Son, Eight, Years

  Edward Gibbon (2000). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II: A.D. 395 to A.D. 1185 (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.304, Modern Library

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• But the desire of obtaining the advantages, and of escaping the burthens, of political society, is a perpetual and inexhaustible source of discord; nor can it reasonably be presumed that the restoration of British freedom was exempt from tumult and faction. The pre-eminence of birth and fortune must have been frequently violated by bold and popular citizens; and the haughty nobles, who complained that they were become the subjects of their own servants, would sometimes regret the reign of an arbitrary monarch.

  Edward Gibbon

  Regret, Escaping, History

  Edward Gibbon (1840). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.100

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• At that time the archiepiscopal throne of Alexandria was filled by Theophilus, the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue; a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.

  Edward Gibbon

  Men, Blood, Hands

  Edward Gibbon (2015). “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire V3: the History Focus”, p.48, 谷月社

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• It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals; but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity.

  Edward Gibbon

  Sex, Rome, Numbers

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.187

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• How I regret now that my perpetual emotional dependence on the man I love has killed all my other talents - my energy too: and I had such a lot of that once.

  Sophia Tolstaya

  Regret, Sacrifice, Men

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• It doesn't take much to produce a good merchant of cash-and-carry love: just courage, an infinite capacity for perpetual suspicion, stamina on a 24-hour-a-day basis, the deathless conviction that the customer is always wrong, a fair knowledge of first and second aid, do-it-yourself gynecology, judo - and a tremendous sense of humor.

  Sally Stanford

  Gynecology, Cash, Firsts

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• The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.

  Thomas Malthus

  Mean, Men, Race

  Thomas Robert Malthus (1798). “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Imporvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers”, p.346, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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• the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct.

  Melanie Klein

  Life And Death, Anxiety, Instinct

  Melanie Klein (2002). “Envy and Gratitude”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.

  Edward Gibbon

  Passion, Independent, Vigor

  Edward Gibbon (1796). “Miscellaneous Works of Edw. Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself”, p.194

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• Study detains the mind by the perpetual occurrence of something new, which may gratefully strike the imagination.

  Isaac Watts

  Imagination, Mind, May

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• Darling -- I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn't it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.

  Rachel Carson

  Crazy, Heart, World

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• Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Grief, Passion, Heart

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• The enormous influence of novelty--the way in which it quickens observations, sharpens sensations, and exalts sentiment--is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous.

  John Ruskin

  Taken, Trying, Matter

  John Ruskin (1850). “Modern Painters: pt. 4. Of many things”, p.299

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• The whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge--conscious, rather of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him.

  John Ruskin

  Children, Ocean, Ignorance

  John Ruskin (1907). “The stones of Venice”

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• An envious man waxeth lean with the fatness of his neighbors. Envy is the daughter of pride, the author of murder and revenge, the beginner of secret sedition and the perpetual tormentor of virtue. Envy is the filthy slime of the soul; a venom, a poison, or quicksilver which consumeth the flesh and drieth up the marrow of the bones.

  Socrates

  Daughter, Revenge, Pride

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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