Semblance Quotes - Page 5

• Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.

  Albert Payson Terhune

  Dog, Memories, Animal

  Terhune, Albert Payson (2014). “A Book of Famous Dogs”, p.79, Read Books Ltd

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• Thy soul is by vile fear assailed, which oft so overcasts a man, that he recoils from noblest resolution, like a beast at some false semblance in the twilight gloom.

  Dante Alighieri

  Twilight, Men, Soul

  Dante Alighieri (1998). “Inferno”, p.8, Wordsworth Editions

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• Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life.

  R. A. Salvatore

  Girl, Children, Emotional

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• The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Strong, Loss, Men

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• Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.

  Nick Hornby

  Self, Lasts, Firsts

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• You don't look so hot, Adrien." "Yeah, well I'm having a bad heart day." His upper lip curled in a semblance of a smile. "Tell me about it.

  Josh Lanyon

  Heart, Hot, Looks

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• In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Dream, Reality, Brain

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.49, Google Publishing

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• Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dream, People, Fiction

  Neil Gaiman, Various (2010). “The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House”, p.9, DC

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• Please, by all the blessed saints and their bladders, tell me you two didn’t…Have you lost all semblance of intelligence? (Syn)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Blessed, Two, Saint

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2009). “Born of Night: The League: Nemesis Rising”, p.305, St. Martin's Paperbacks

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• Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels. If you stand back far enough it looks good. Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original. Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope. And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth.

  Vera Nazarian

  Color, Law, Justice

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• When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

  Paul Hawken

  Optimistic, Odds, Order

  "Paul Hawken: programming a new operating system for civilization" by James Epstein-Reeves and Ellen Weinreb, www.theguardian.com. September 23, 2013.

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• All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object. Among them all, man alone is more than an object. Though, like objects, he has form and semblance, He is not limited to form. He is more. He can attain to formlessness. When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond "this" and "that," where is the comparison with another object? Where is the conflict? What can stand in his way? He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place. He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret. His nature sinks to its root in the One. His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao.

  Zhuangzi

  Men, Color, Roots

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• There is nothing more pitiable than a soulless, sapless, shriveled church, seeking to thrive in a worldly atmosphere, rooted in barren professions, bearing no fruit, and maintaining only the semblance of existence; such a church cannot long survive.

  George C. Lorimer

  Long, Atmosphere, Church

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 147), 1895.

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• The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Power, Men

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• On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Night, Garden, Heaven

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• VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth)

  Richard Donner

  Appearance

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• Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective --the unconscious objective of a disunited people --has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type.

  Constance Rourke

  Art, Humor, Civilization

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• Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Fall, Party, Struggle

  Rosa Luxemburg (1961). “The Russian Revolution, and Leninism Or Marxism?”, p.71, University of Michigan Press

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• Somethings get easier. You get more confident in your abilities and you learn what kind of stories sell and what don't. But your standards kept going up with your skills, the business aspect of writing grows more complicated, and it becomes really hard to maintain any semblance of a balanced life the longer you're at this. No matter what level you're at, writing is always difficult.

  Lori Wilde

  Writing, Skills, Stories

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• If one fails to develop goals that give meaning to one’s existence, if one does not use the mind to it’s fullest, then good feelings fulfill just a fraction of the potential we possess. True happiness involves the pursuit of worthy goals. Without dreams, without risks, only a trivial semblance of living can be achieved.

  Dan Buettner

  Dream, Giving, Goal

  Dan Buettner (2010). “Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way”, p.16, National Geographic Books

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• The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Memories, Men, Order

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• I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Book, Knitting, Littles

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• The one infinite is perfect , in simplicity , of itself, absolutely, nor can aught be greater or better, This is the one Whole, God , universal Nature , occupying all space, of whom naught but infinity can give the perfect image or semblance.

  Giordano Bruno

  Space, Giving, Perfect

  Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno (1968). “Giordano Bruno; his life and thought: With annotated translation of his work, On the infinite universe and worlds”, Greenwood Pub Group

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• It was many years ago that I got out of a crewtruck in the national forest and ran toward a large glowing object hovering in the darkening Arizona sky. But when I made that fateful choice to leavethe truck, I was leaving behind more than just my six fellow workmen. I was leaving behind forever all semblance of a normal life, running headlong toward an experience so overwhelmingly mind-rending in its effects, so devastating in itsaftermath, that my life would never—could never  — be the same again.

  Travis Walton

  Running, Glowing, Years

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• Progress is always the product of fresh thinking, and much of it thinking which to practical men bears the semblance of dreaming.

  Robert Gordon Sproul

  Dream, Men, Thinking

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