Ruins Quotes - Page 5

[During difficult times and after mistakes and failures it is helpful to remember ...] Oftentimes calamity turns to our advantage and great ruins make way for greater glories.

Seneca the Younger

Mistake, Way, Anticipation

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It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery. These may, perhaps, succeed for once, and borrow for awhile, from hope, a gay and flourishing appearance. But time betrays their weakness, and they fall into ruin of themselves. For, as in structures of every kind, the lower parts should have the greatest firmness--so the grounds and principles of actions should be just and true.

Demosthenes

Fall, Gay, Should Have

Demosthenes (1756). “All the orations of Demosthenes, pronounced to excite the Athenians against Philip King of Macedon: Translated into English; digested and connected, so as to form a regular history of the progress of the Macedonian power: with notes historical and critical. By Thomas Leland, ...”, p.26

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He that will do no good offices after a disappointment must stand still, and do just nothing at all. The plough goes on after a barren year; and while the ashes are yet warm, we raise a new house upon the ruins of a former.

Seneca the Younger

Disappointment, Years, Office

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State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all.

Benito Mussolini

Party, Mean, Hands

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Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

Chuck Palahniuk

Dark, Standing, Right Now

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Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Mary Ann Shaffer

Book, Reading, Enjoy

Annie Barrows, Mary Ann Shaffer (2011). “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.53, Dial Press

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I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.

Peter Kropotkin

Mean, Political, Vengeance

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It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Arundhati Roy

Life, Dream, Stories

FaceBook post by Arundhati Roy from Apr 26, 2017

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Possibility, infinity, beauty -- none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin?

Haven Kimmel

Phantoms, Infinity, Possibility

Haven Kimmel (2002). “The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel”, p.35, Anchor

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Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

Reading, Men, Voice

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...you can't let something that'll probably never happen ruin your life. You're only helping to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy

Raymond Khoury

Self, Helping, Prophecy

Raymond Khoury (2006). “The Last Templar”, p.273, Penguin

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I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.

W. Somerset Maugham

Men, Thinking, Ideas

W. Somerset Maugham (2013). “The Essential W. Somerset Maugham Collection”, p.2031, eBookIt.com

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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

Thomas Merton

Wisdom, Artist, Saint

Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

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Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

Arundhati Roy

House, Events, Ordinary

Arundhati Roy (2002). “The God of Small Things”, p.32, Penguin Books India

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Even this nation (the US) will be on the very verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground, and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin, this people will be the staff upon which the nation shall lean, and they shall bear the Constitution away from the very verge of destruction.

Joseph Smith, Jr.

Freedom, People, Crumbling

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With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

Graham Greene

Hate, Nests, Schemes

Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height

Gustave Flaubert

Dark, Night, Sea Breeze

Gustave Flaubert (1991). “Early Writings”, p.56, U of Nebraska Press

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But maybe she should turn the other way while I get dressed. Wouldn't want to ruin her for other men. - Dean

Jeff Mariotte

Men, Want, Way

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I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

Gustave Flaubert

Brother, Horse, Angel

Gustave Flaubert (1991). “Early Writings”, p.147, U of Nebraska Press

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Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.

Kiran Desai

Names, Black, Employment

Kiran Desai (2007). “The Inheritance of Loss”, p.112, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Richard Siken

Light, And Love, Body

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Since Love has made ruins of my heart The sun must come and illumine them. Such generosity has broken me with shame.

Rumi

Spiritual, Heart, Generosity

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I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.

Dick Francis

Self, Next, Enough

Dick Francis (1981). “Whip hand: Trial run ; Twice shy”

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But we had with us, to keep and to care for, more than five hundred bruised bodies of men- men made in the image of God, marred by the hand of man and must we say in the name of God? And where is the reckoning for such things? And who is answerable? One might almost shrink from the sound of his own voice, which had launched into the palpitating air words of order- do we call it? - fraught with such ruin. Was it God's command we heard or His forgiveness we must forever implore?

Joshua Chamberlain

Men, Air, Hands

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The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

Jonathan Franzen

Animal, Opportunity, Atmosphere

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