Prove Quotes - Page 34

• If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.

  Pablo Neruda

  Moving, Sadness, Silence

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• Then there came a faraway, booming voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the center of the bowl and down the great sides to the ground and then bounced toward her eagerly. 'You see I am fate,' it shouted, 'and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Fate, Voice

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• So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Dream, Memories, Loss

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Against the Day”, p.179, Penguin

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• Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane. A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.

  Bess Streeter Aldrich

  Couple, Believe, Boys

  Bess Streeter Aldrich (1924). “Mother Mason”, p.34, U of Nebraska Press

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• When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Powerful, Being True, Ought

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• It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right.

  Daniel Handler

  Persons, Proven Wrong, Proven

  "The Reptile Room". Book by Daniel Handler, 1999.

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• He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Men, Brain, Use

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• The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

  Wendell Berry

  Experts, Dimes, Use

  Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.55, Counterpoint Press

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• But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?

  Leo Tolstoy

  Thinking, Evil, People

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• . . . the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Thinking, Needs, Way

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2012). “Whose Body?”, p.46, Courier Corporation

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• and half of learning to play is learning what not to play and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove she crawls out on a limb and begins to build her home and it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not alone up up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple but god's work isn't done by god it's done by people

  Ani DiFranco

  Integrity, Moving, Home

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• O, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable

  William Shakespeare

  Moon, Circles, Fickle

  'Romeo And Juliet' (1595) act 2, sc. 2, l. 107

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• The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.

  Nick Hornby

  Waiting, Lists, Fiction

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• If you give orders and explain nothing, you might get obedience, but you'll get no creativity. If you tell them your purpose, then when your original plan is shown to be faulty, they'll find another way to achieve your goal. Explaining to your men doesn't weaken their respect for you, it proves your respect for them.

  Orson Scott Card

  Creativity, Men, Order

  Orson Scott Card (2009). “Shadow of the Giant”, p.303, Macmillan

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• I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

  Andre Gide

  Distance, Eye, Past

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• Steve [Jobs] proves that it's OK to be an asshole... He just has a different OS.

  Guy Kawasaki

  Jobs, Different

  "The Art of the Start". Book by Guy Kawasaki, 2004.

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• Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

  Anais Nin

  Illumination, Space, Tree

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• I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

  Jane Austen

  Song, Book, Men

  'Persuasion' (1818) ch. 23 (Anne Eliot)

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• There are two men in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observations, experimentation and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in the hope – the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force that is within him cannot die.

  Louis Pasteur

  Children, Believe, Men

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• I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.

  Robert Browning

  Faith, Doubt, Shows

  Robert Browning, John Woolford, Daniel Karlin (1991). “The Poems of Browning: 1847-1861”, p.192, Pearson Education

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• Life's a forge - Yes, and hammer and anvil, too. You'll be roasted, smelted, and pounded, and you'll scarce know what's happening to you. But stand proudly to it. Metal's worthless till it is shaped and tempered. More labor than luck. Face the pounding, don't fear the proving; and you'll stand well against any hammer and anvil.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Luck, Hammers, Anvils

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• This book will prove the following ten facts: 1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there. 2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch. 3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity. 4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight. 5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast. 6. An Englishman's home is his castle. 7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male. 8. One black eye deserves another. 9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm. 10. It pays to increase your word power.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Book, Home, Eye

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• That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.

  Neal Stephenson

  Nice, Believe, Proof

  Neal Stephenson (2010). “Anathem”, p.229, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• They [parents] can resist the impulse to "prove" their love by showering children with things they do not need and give them precisous time and attention instead.

  Hillary Clinton

  Children, Giving, Parent

  Hillary Rodham Clinton (2012). “It Takes a Village”, p.253, Simon and Schuster

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• To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Religious, Reason, Humans

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