Succession Quotes - Page 8

• If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.

  Raymond Williams

  Tears, Emotion, Release

  "Reading and Criticism". Book by Raymond Williams, 1950.

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• We are taught all this [the motion of the earth on its axis and around the sun] by the order of succession, in which those phenomena (various planetary happenings) follow each other, and by the harmony of the world, if we will only, as the saying goes, look at the matter with both eyes.

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Eye, Axes, Order

  "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Book 1)". Book by Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543.

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• I try not to play two days in succession. I usually try to space it so I have a day in between.

  Darrell Royal

  Sports, Play, Two

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• For the rich men without scruple drew the estate into their own hands, excluding the rightful heirs from their succession; and all the wealth being centred upon the few, the generality were poor and miserable. Honourable pursuits, for which there was no longer leisure, were neglected; the state was filled with sordid business, and with hatred and envy of the rich.

  Plutarch

  Men, Hands, Envy

  Plutarch (2000). “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Volume II: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.450, Modern Library

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• Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Men, Civilization, Generations

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• Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

  Aaron Hill

  Self, Shadow, Needs

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• [To Parliament, when it urged her to marry and settle the succession:] You attend to your own duties and I'll perform mine.

  Elizabeth I

  Settling, Parliament, Duty

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• No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.

  Han Suyin

  Blow, Events, Generations

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• Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Long, Lines, Ancestry

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• Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.

  George Sand

  Heart, Affliction, Life Is

  George Sand (2009). “Letters of George Sand”, p.316, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The ancient practice of allowing land to remain fallow for a season is now exploded, and a succession of different crops found preferable. The case is similar with regard to the understanding, which is more relieved by change of study than by total inactivity.

  William Benton Clulow

  Land, Practice, Understanding

  William Benton Clulow (1843). “Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion”, p.84

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• Everything in the world may be endured, except only a succession of prosperous days.
  [Ger., Alles in der Welt lasst sich ertragen,
  Nur nicht eine Reihe von schonen Tagen.]

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  World, May, Prosperity

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• ... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.

  Richard Dawkins

  Luck, Needs, Thousand

  Richard Dawkins (1995). “River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• The succession of individuals, connected by reproduction and belonging to a species, makes it possible for the specific form itself to last for ages. In the end, however, the species is temporary; it has no "eternal life." After existing for a certain period, it either dies or is converted by modification into other forms.

  Ernst Haeckel

  Life, Science, Age

  Ernst Haeckel (1904). “Wonders of life”

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• I went about the job in a direct way. I took the hatchet in both my hands and vigorously beat the fish on the head with the hammerhead (I still didn’t have the stomach to use the sharp edge). The dorado did the most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold, and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.

  Yann Martel

  Jobs, Blue, Hands

  Yann Martel (2015). “Life of Pi - CANCELED”, p.194, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Long, Just One, Misunderstanding

  P. G. Wodehouse (2011). “A Damsel in Distress”, p.196, The Floating Press

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• Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Soul, Feelings, Mind

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1988). “Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: With Supplementary Essays and Poems from the Twentieth Century”, p.76, Orchises Press

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• He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

  Robert Cormier

  Night, Thinking, Long

  Robert Cormier (2013). “The Chocolate War”, p.63, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Dream, Inspiration, Ambition

  Swami Vivekananda (196?). “Swami Vivekananda on Himself”

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• The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.

  David Nicholls

  Rose, Empty

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• But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

  Sylvia Plath

  Thinking, Two, Special

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.34, Anchor

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• He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

  Victor Hugo

  Apples, Tree, Fruit

  Victor Hugo (2010). “The Works of Victor Hugo”, p.446, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one's person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred - shockingly - with the handle of a fork.

  Jasper Fforde

  Eight, Tea, Pillars

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• Before I met No I thought that violence meant shouting and hitting and war and blood. Now I know that there can also be violence in silence and that it’s sometimes invisible to the naked eye. There’s violence in the time that conceals wounds, the relentless succession of days, the impossibility of turning back the clock. Violence is what escapes us. It’s silent and hidden. Violence is what remains inexplicable, what stays forever opaque.

  Delphine de Vigan

  War, Eye, Blood

  Delphine de Vigan (2010). “No and Me”, p.156, A&C Black

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• A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stories, Elements, Might

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