Strain Quotes - Page 7

• Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, - passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man's capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Music, Night, Men

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.159, Courier Corporation

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• I strain to hear, but my old ears, for all their obscene hugeness, pick up nothing but snippets.

  Sara Gruen

  Ears, Obscene, Picks

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• Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

  Paul Berg

  Technology, Ideas, Impact

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• APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. "The Mad Philosopher," 1697

  Ambrose Bierce

  Wine, Yield, Mad

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2356, Delphi Classics

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• For I am bound with fleshly bands,
  Joy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;
  I strain my heart, I stretch my hands,
  And catch at hope.

  Christina Rossetti

  Hope, Lying, Heart

  Christina Rossetti (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Christina Rossetti (Illustrated)”, p.453, Delphi Classics

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• That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.

  Albert Einstein

  Business, Mistake, Men

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.15, Open Road Media

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• There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

  Donald Barthelme

  Strong, Here And There, Fiction

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• There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

  Bayard Rustin

  Strong, Rights, Movement

  Bayard Rustin (2003). “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin”, p.196, Simon and Schuster

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• There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

  Donna Tartt

  America, Intellectual, Bigs

  "A talent to tantalise" by Katharine Viner, www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2002.

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• The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Essence, Politics, Corporations

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• If you and I shall, like the believing shepherds, watch and long for His appearing, one day we, too, shall hear a music grander and sweeter even than the song of angels, when the great Composer shall transpose all the strains of earth from the minor into the major, when the wail of nature shall give way to the glad harmony of the everlasting jubilee.

  Abbott Eliot Kittredge

  Song, Believe, Angel

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 555, 1895.

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• When I was a little bit younger The strain I was under could make me cry. Now I'm a little bit older, A little bit bolder, Never so shy

  Zooey Deschanel

  Shy, Littles, Cry

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• My dad's side of the family ... they're a real bizarre bunch, going back to the original colonies. That side's got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can't remember when there was a sober grandfather.

  Sam Shepard

  Dad, Real, Grandfather

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• The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.

  Maria Mitchell

  Soul, Nerves, World

  Maria Mitchell (1896). “Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals”

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• Life is love, heartache and strain,
  Yet the strength to overcome it all keeps me sane.

  O.C.

  Rap, Heartache, Hip Hop

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• Every man may be observed to have a certain strain of lamentation, some peculiar theme of complaint on which he dwells in his moments of dejection.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Peculiar, May

  Alexander Pope, William Lisle Bowles, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Chalmers, Gilbert Wakefield (1806). “The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. in Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton: Illustrations, and Critical and Explanatory Remarks, by Johnson, Wakefield, A. Chalmers ... and Others; to which are Added, Now First Published, Some Original Letters, with Additional Observations, and Memoirs of the Life of the Author”, p.74

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• Women who bring up children by themselves do it heroically, they do it against all odds, men who don't feel responsible for being part of their child's life create real strains on that family.

  Jeb Bush

  Life, Children, Real

  "Jeb Bush: 'I'm not in favor of shaming women'" by Betsy Klein, www.cnn.com. June 17, 2015.

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• The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions.

  Lawren Harris

  Art, Stress, Perfect

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• The foolish ofttimes teach the wise: I strain too much this string of life, belike, Meaning to make such music as shall save. Mine eyes are dim now that they see the truth, My strength is waned now that my need is most; Would that I had such help as man must have, For I shall die, whose life was all men's hope.

  Edwin Arnold

  Wise, Eye, Men

  Edwin Arnold (2016). “The Light of Asia, or the Great Renunciation (Mahâbhinishkramana): Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (as Told in Verse by an Indian Buddhist)”, p.80, Routledge

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• But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain. The wond'ring forests soon should dance again; The moving mountains hear the powerful call. And headlong streams hand listening in their fall!

  Alexander Pope

  Powerful, Moving, Fall

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• Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows.

  Alexander Pope

  Blow, Zephyr

  Alexander Pope (1717). “Works of Mister Alexander Pope”, p.95

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• The artist envies what the arties gains, The bard the rival bard's successful strains.

  Hesiod

  Successful, Artist, Envy

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• The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed; they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy.

  Peggy Noonan

  Funeral, Faces, Nervous

  Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)

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• I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.

  William Irwin Thompson

  Pain, Thinking, Order

  "Change". Booklet by Katherine Hunt, issuu.com. March 28, 2012.

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• The dying swan, when years her temples pierce, In music-strains breathes out her life and verse, And, chanting her own dirge, tides on her wat'ry hearse.

  Phineas Fletcher

  Swans, Years, Dying

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