Retreat Quotes - Page 12

• If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.

  Alister E. McGrath

  Order, Imagination, Focus

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• After I've done the salesman bit, I like to be quiet and retreat, because that's whereI write from. I'm a sort of quiet little person.

  Kate Bush

  Writing, Done, Littles

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• I believe, and always have, that America must engage - not retreat - in the world.

  Chuck Hagel

  Believe, America, World

  Chuck Hagel's opening remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee, www.nytimes.com. January 31, 2013.

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• The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

  Siri Hustvedt

  Book, Reading, Doors

  Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men”, p.71, Hachette UK

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• When pride retreats from a man, humility begins to dwell in him, and the more pride is diminished, so much more does humility grow. The one gives way to the other as to its opposite. Darkness departs and light appears. Pride is darkness, but humility is light.

  Tikhon of Zadonsk

  Humility, Pride, Men

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• I look at decisions like - it's like an Indiana Jones movie. The guy comes to a rope ladder, and he's being chased. There's uncertainty on the other side, but he knows when he gets to the other side, he's going to take his machete and cut the rope ladder behind him. He has no retreat.

  Mark Burnett

  Cutting, Guy, Decision

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• Presumably, as a Martial artist, I do not fight for gain or loss, am not concerned with strength or weakness, and neither advance a step nor retreat a step. The enemy does not see me. I do not see the enemy. Penetrating to a place where heaven and earth have not yet divided, where yin and yang have not yet arrived, I quickly and necessarily gain effect.

  Takuan Soho

  Fighting, Loss, Artist

  Takuan Sōhō (1986). “The unfettered mind: writings of the Zen master to the sword master”, Kodansha Amer Inc

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• There's no cure, except the retreat into love,
  For the suffering of subtly afflicted hearts.

  Rumi

  Love, Heart, Suffering

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• These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. The British regulars who made the retreat from Mons, beginning August 24, 1914.

  A. E. Housman

  Fall, August, Heaven

  1922 Last Poems, no.37,'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries'.

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• Dear Night! this world's defeat; The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb; The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat Which none disturb! Christ's progress, and His prayer-time; The hours to which high Heaven cloth chime.

  Henry Vaughan

  Prayer, Night, Heaven

  'The Night' l. 25 from 'Silex Scintillans' (1650-5)

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• Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Brooklyn, Kind

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• Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.

  Ian Hamilton Finlay

  Garden, Certain

  Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay (2012). “Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections”, p.263, Univ of California Press

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• As the tide of feminism that crested two decades ago recedes and the old advance-and-retreat games of courtship return, "Pride & Prejudice" speaks wistfully to the moment. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are tantalizing early prototypes for a Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy ideal of lovers as brainy, passionate sparring partners. That the world teems with fantasies of Mr. Darcy and his ilk there is no doubt. How many of his type are to be found outside the pages of a novel, however, is another matter.

  Stephen Holden

  Pride, Games, Two

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• For an individual as well as a society, there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. To fight in a battle and live in glory is one mode. To beat a retreat, to surrender and to live the life of a captive is also a mode of survival.

  B. R. Ambedkar

  Inspirational, Life, Fighting

  Dr B.R. Ambedkar (2014). “Annihilation of Caste”, p.77, Ssoft Group, INDIA

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• Never keep a line of retreat: it is a wretched invention.

  Fridtjof Nansen

  Lines, Invention, Wretched

  Quoted in Listener, 14 Dec. 1939 See Calonne 1; Santayana 14; Trollope 3

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• The difficult thing about practice isn't learning to sit for an hour, or sit for a weekend, or go on a three-month retreat, as hard as those things are. The difficult thing is to pay attention to what is happening right here and now.

  Larry Rosenberg

  Weekend, Practice, Pay

  Larry Rosenberg (2004). “Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation”, p.91, Shambhala Publications

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• We meditate alone but live our lives with other people; a gap is inevitable. If our path is to lead to less suffering, nd much of our suffering is with other people, then perhaps we need to reexamine our sole commitment to these individual practices... As our individual pracitce deepens, it may yiled true ease. But whether we practice meditation in seclusion or independently alongside other meditators at a meditation group or retreat, individual meditation approaches the confusion and pain of our relational lives only indirectly.

  Greg Kramer

  Pain, Commitment, Practice

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• Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat, it's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go!

  Brad Pitt

  Letting Go, Weekend, Nihilism

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• We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Real, Solitude, Liberty

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.177, Stanford University Press

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• I want to retreat back to living off the land and just being in nature, experiencing life in the most pure, natural way possible.

  Willow Smith

  Land, Want, Way

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• As strenuous challenge or contemplative retreat, the parks and other units of the national lands offer welcome respite from the world, a safety valve for body and spirit.

  T. H. Watkins

  Nature, Land, Safety

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• Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of peopleMaybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

  Jandy Nelson

  Falling In Love, Grieving, Self

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• The modern technological world appears overwhelming to many people. It drives some to pessimism and despair. It makes others doubt the future of mankind unless we retreat to simpler lives and even to the ways of our ancestors. What these people fail to realize is that we cannot go back to those ways and those days. Furthermore, for all our difficulties, life today is far better for more people and the possibilities for the future can be brighter than ever if we develop not only new knowledge, but a greater faith and confidence in the human mind and spirit.

  Glenn T. Seaborg

  People, Mind, Doubt

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• Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Air, Water, Joy

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.68, Penguin

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• Your little army, derided for its want of arms, derided for its lack of all the essential material of war, has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and now it flies, inglorious in retreat before our victorious columns. We have taught them a lesson in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia.

  Jefferson Davis

  War, Army, Virginia

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