Strain Quotes - Page 16

• People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.

  Aleister Crowley

  Pain, Exercise, Thinking

  Aleister Crowley (2010). “The Diary of a Drug Fiend”, p.7, Weiser Books

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• To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Eye, Profound, Might

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs”, p.198, Vintage

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• It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula.

  Joe Meno

  Moving, Heart, Dark

  Joe Meno (2006). “The Boy Detective Fails”, p.114, Akashic Books

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• Soaring prescription drug costs have placed a tremendous strain on family budgets. They have also imposed a heavy burden on employers - both public and private - who are struggling to provide affordable health insurance coverage to their workers.

  Susan Collins

  Struggle, Drug, Cost

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• Living in the modern age, death for virtue is the wage. So it seems in darker hours. Evil wins, kindness cowers. Ruled by violence and vice we all stand upon thin ice. Are we brave or are we mice, here upon such thin, thin ice? Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?

  Dean Koontz

  Kindness, Winning, Knowing

  Dean Koontz, “Dragon Tears”

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• I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.

  Mary Karr

  Effort, Trying, World

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• Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Heart, Blow, Reality

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• The Sun, the stars and the seasons as they pass, some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear.

  Horace

  Stars, Science, Sun

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• Other anatomical changes associated with long-duration space flight are definitely negative: the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn't have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one's exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium. Without gravity, we don't need muscle and bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also so inherently bad for the human body, long-term.

  Chris Hadfield

  Fun, Heart, Space Flight

  Chris Hadfield (2013). “An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth”, p.137, Pan Macmillan

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• Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.

  Alfie Kohn

  Children, Order, Feet

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• Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Life, Order, Games

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• There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

  Thornton Wilder

  Stars, Lying, Journey

  Thornton Wilder (2007). “Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater”

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• And do so, love, yet when they have devised
  What strainèd touches rhetoric can lend,
  Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathized
  In true plain words by thy true-telling friend;
  And their gross painting might be better used
  Where cheeks need blood; in thee it is abused.

  William Shakespeare

  Blood, Might, Needs

  William Shakespeare (2015). “The Sonnets and Narrative Poems”, p.101, Everyman's Library

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• The multitude always strains after rarities and exceptions, and thinks little of the gifts of nature; so that, when prophecy is talked of, ordinary knowledge is not supposed to be included. Nevertheless it has as much right as any other to be called Divine.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Thinking, Littles, Ordinary

  "Theological-Political Treatise". Book by Baruch Spinoza, Ch. 1, Of Prophecy, 1670.

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• The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.

  Winston Churchill

  Morning, Sleep, Night

  Sir Winston Churchill (1951). “A Roving Commission”

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• Americans don't like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And really, why strain yourself when so many wonderful names already exist in the world?The entrance to the town of Moscow is shown in the photograph. That's right, an absolutely authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province.There's another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow.

  Ilya Ilf

  Stupid, Ohio, Names

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• It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Horse, Class

  Isak Dinesen (2001). “Out of Africa”, p.81, Penguin UK

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• In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

  Edward Lawrie Tatum

  Mutants, Mutation, Culture

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• Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain - they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter.

  N.D. Wilson

  Laughter, Hands, Bones

  N. D. Wilson (2013). “Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent”, p.84, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Patience has the meaning of testing-a thing drawn out and tested, drawn out to the last strand in a strain without breaking, and ending in sheer joy. The strain on a violin string when stretched to the uttermost gives it its strength; and the stronger the strain, the finer is the sound of our life for God, and He never strains more than we are able to bear.

  Oswald Chambers

  God, Patience, Giving

  Oswald Chambers (2013). “Joy and Peace: A Holy Condition”, p.84, Discovery House

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• The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

  Anna Kamienska

  Air, Light, Effort

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• Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

  Aldous Huxley

  Results

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

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• Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now!

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Inspiring, Spiritual, Eye

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• It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Talking, Piano

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• Those who cannot hear an angry shout may strain to hear a whisper.

  Leonard Nimoy

  Inspirational, May, Angry

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