Proportion Quotes - Page 7

• It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a Free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.

  George Washington

  4th Of July, Patriotic, Government

  George Washington (1948). “Basic Writings of George Washington”

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• One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

  Max Weber

  Responsibility, Passion, Feelings

  Max Weber (2009). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.115, Routledge

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• The greatest fear that haunts this city is a suitcase bomb, nuclear or germ. Many people carry small gas masks. The masses here seem to be resigned to the inevitable, believing an attack of major proportions will happen.

  David Wilkerson

  Believe, Greatest Fear, Cities

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• Genius is that in which the soul of a race bums at its brightest, revealing and preserving its vision; works of art are great and significant in proportion to the clarity and fulness with which they incarnate this vision.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Art, Race, Soul

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• The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

  Carter G. Woodson

  Alternatives, Rising, Spheres

  Carter G. Woodson (2006). “The Mis-Education of the Negro”, p.107, Book Tree

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• It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return.

  George MacDonald

  Spring, Two, Giving

  "Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women". Book by George MacDonald, 1858.

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• The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. ‘Yes, I see, dear; it’s about half-way between,’ Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.

  E. M. Forster

  Aunt, Years, Secret

  E. M. Forster (2014). “Great Novels of E. M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End”, p.861, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Ideas, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.48, Library of America

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• But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,-- Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.

  William Shakespeare

  Dog, Glasses, Breathing

  'Richard III' (1591) act 1, sc. 1, l. 9

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• My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.

  Henry James

  Jealous, Ideas, Doubt

  "Pictures and Other Passages from Henry James".

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• At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

  Jodi Picoult

  Eye, Light, Oxygen

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• Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Secret, Kind, Misanthropy

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• I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Character, Details, Facts

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• I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

  Anais Nin

  Ordinary World, Want, Disregard

  Diary entries, March 25, 1933.

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• There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Justice, Needs

  FaceBook post by Marilynne Robinson from Feb 14, 2014

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• So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.

  Pablo Neruda

  Sweet, House, Arcane

  Pablo Neruda (1961). “Selected Poems”, p.235, Grove Press

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• If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

  Douglas Adams

  Philosophical, Thought Provoking, Size

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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• The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?

  Henrik Ibsen

  Freedom, Lying, Intelligent

  Henrik Ibsen, James McFarlane (1999). “An Enemy of the People ; The Wild Duck ; Rosmersholm”, p.76, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

  Edith Wharton

  Vanity, Self, Missing

  Edith Wharton (2012). “The House of Mirth”, p.16, Courier Corporation

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• We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Photography, Wall, Men

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• Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

  E. M. Forster

  Taken, Heart, Eye

  E. M. Forster (2016). “Howards End: England Literature”, p.86, 谷月社

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• Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

  Kevin Brockmeier

  Love Is, Water, Littles

  Kevin Brockmeier (2011). “The Brief History of the Dead”, p.67, Hachette UK

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• The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.

  Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

  Dream, Exercise, Mind

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• If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Loneliness, Fall, Being Alone

  Leonardo (da Vinci) (1957). “Notebooks”

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• One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

  May Sarton

  Reality, Odds, Doe

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.56, Open Road Media

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