Towers Quotes - Page 23

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

W. H. Auden

Men, Average, Ivory Tower

W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press

7 Copy quote

Show source
Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Morning, Stars, Autumn

Fyodor Dostoevsky (2002). “The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue”, p.362, Macmillan

8 Copy quote

Show source
He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.

Peter Ackroyd

Children, Animal, Climbing

4 Copy quote
In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.

Chuck Palahniuk

Clothes, Rocks, Car

"Fight Club". www.imdb.com. 1999.

7 Copy quote

Show source
...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Spiritual, Wall, Lying

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.140, Cosimo, Inc.

5 Copy quote

Show source
Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Travel, New York, Home

7 Copy quote
But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it.

Sophocles

Dark, Destiny, Might

17 Copy quote
Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.

Dorothy Parker

Dirty, Mean, Ivory

7 Copy quote
Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry.

Charles Dickens

Weed, Nature, Wall

Charles Dickens (2016). “Charles Dickens: The Complete Christmas Novels & Tales (Illustrated): 30 Classics in One Volume: A Christmas Carol, The Battle of Life, The Chimes, Oliver Twist, Tom Tiddler's Ground, The Holly-Tree, Doctor Marigold, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations and more”, p.3653, e-artnow

11 Copy quote

Show source
Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate.

Norman Mailer

Country, America, People

4 Copy quote
Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.

Michel de Montaigne

Wisdom, Philosophical, Two

Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.449, Stanford University Press

4 Copy quote

Show source
As for mathematicians themselves: don't expect too much help. Most of them are too far removed in their ivory towers to take up such challenges. And anyway, they are not competent. After all, they are just mathematicians-what we need is paramathematicians, like you... It is you who can be the welding force, between mathematicians and stories, in order to achieve the synthesis.

Apostolos Doxiadis

Science, Order, Ivory Tower

21 Copy quote
The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

Gerard De Nerval

Ivory Tower, Poet, Higher

7 Copy quote
At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.

Charles Dickens

Tombstone, Wind, Iron

Charles Dickens (1868). “Charles Dickens's works. Charles Dickens ed. [18 vols. of a 21 vol. set. Wanting A child's history of England; Christmas stories; The mystery of Edwin Drood].”, p.234

4 Copy quote

Show source
Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower, that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation.

Ellis Marsalis, Jr.

Light, Water, Jazz Improvisation

4 Copy quote
I grew up looking at the Sunset Strip, literally. The things that I remember are the Rainbow Room, the Roxy, the Bizarries, Tower, I grew up my whole life going there, Filthy McNasty's and I said, I need these things and now fill it in with other iconic buildings.

Adam Shankman

Sunset, Rainbow, Needs

Source: collider.com

4 Copy quote

Show source
If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

Luigi Pirandello

Ivory Tower, Laughing, Approval

12 Copy quote
My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Beautiful, Angel, Opposites

6 Copy quote
Before Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people-all because our leaders lost contact with the truth.

Richard North Patterson

Country, Blow, Interrogation Techniques

Richard North Patterson (2012). “The Devil's Light: A Novel”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

4 Copy quote

Show source
I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power.

Mark Rippetoe

Brother, Chicago, Safe

16 Copy quote
It would be as easy for the United States to build a tower to remove the sun, as to remove polygamy, or the Church and Kingdom of God.

Heber C. Kimball

Church, Kingdoms, Sun

13 Copy quote
Sometimes when I'm watching television and something, an image, will come on that has to do with 9/11 or some of these families telling their stories, or children talking about drawing
pictures of airplanes flying into towers, you know, I find myself still choking up.

Ann Richards

Children, Airplane, Talking

10 Copy quote
In the hollow tree, in the old gray tower,
The spectral Owl doth dwell;
Dull, hated, despised, in the sunshine hour,
But at the dusk--he's abroad and well!
Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him--
All mock him outright, by day:
But at night, when the woods grow still and dim,
The boldest will shrink away!
O, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl,
Then, then, is the reign of the Horned Owl!

Bryan Procter

Fall, Sunshine, Night

6 Copy quote
Aside from the posters, wherever there was room, there were books. Stacks and stacks of books. Books crammed into mismatched shelves and towers of books up to the ceiling. I liked my books.

Megan Crane

Book, Ceilings, Rooms

4 Copy quote
The day I was born, my house burnt down; the day I left home, the Twin Towers burnt down; and I lived in a jungle in India at 15.

Neon Hitch

Home, House, Down And

"Discovery: Neon Hitch" by Kristin Studeman, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 28, 2012.

5 Copy quote

Show source

You May Also Like Quotes On:

Dark Tower

Fawlty Towers

Eiffel Tower

Two Towers

Twin Towers