Wave Quotes - Page 23

• Look, we live in a celebrity culture and sometimes you get caught in the wave and the buzz and a lot of it's flattering but, you know, one of the things that I try to remind people of is, is that I was in politics as a state senator operating in obscurity for many years. Before that I was a community organizer working in low income communities in Chicago and nobody knew my name then. And so, having involved myself in public service for a pretty long time without getting too much attention, hopefully I can keep some of the attention that I'm getting now in perspective.

  Barack Obama

  Names, Years, Perspective

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• Our life is like th' unstable wave, Our bloom of youth decays. Our joys are brief as lightning flash In summer's cloudy days, Our riches fleet as swift as thought; Faith in the One Supreme Alone will bear us o'er the gulfs Of Being's stormy stream.

  Bhartrhari

  Summer, God, Joy

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• The immortal mind, superior to his fate, amid the outrage of external things, firm as the solid base of this great world, rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds! Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on! Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky! Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene, the unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck; and ever stronger as the storms advance, firm through the closing ruin holds is way, when nature calls him to the destin'd goal.

  Mark Akenside

  Fate, Blow, Fire

  Mark Akenside, “The Pleasures Of Imagination: Book The Second”

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• All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.

  John Muir

  Heart, Volcanoes, Earthquakes

  John Muir, Peter Browning (1988). “John Muir, in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations”, p.66, Great West Books

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• You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

  Martin Buber

  Thinking, Swim, Venture

  Martin Buber (2003). “Between Man and Man”, p.148, Routledge

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• On Leven's banks, while free to rove, And tune the rural pipe to love, I envied not the happiest swain That ever trod the Arcadian plain. Pure stream! in whose transparent wave My youthful limbs I wont to lave; No torrents stain thy limpid source, No rocks impede thy dimpling course, That sweetly warbles o'er its bed, With white, round, polish'd pebbles spread.

  Tobias Smollett

  Rocks, White, Bed

  Tobias Smollett (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Tobias Smollett (Illustrated)”, p.2159, Delphi Classics

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• Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Sea, Religion, May

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 53e), 1980.

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• Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion.

  Geneen Roth

  Meditation, Mind, Desire

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• The heart of God through his creation stirs, We thrill to feel it, trembling as the flowers That die to live again, his messengers, To keep faith firm in these sad souls of ours. The waves of Time may devastate our lives, The frosts of age may check our failing breath, They shall not touch the spirit that survives Triumphant over doubt and pain and death.

  Celia Thaxter

  Pain, Flower, Heart

  Celia Thaxter (1872). “Poems”, p.31

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• Across the narrow beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered drift-wood, bleached and dry, The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I.

  Celia Thaxter

  Running, Beach, Hands

  Celia Thaxter (1874). “Poems”, p.32

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• We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?

  Jimmy Wales

  New York, Cities, Cheerful

  "Jimmy Wales: Digital Champion of Free Speech" by Juliette Garside, www.theguardian.com. August 03, 2014.

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• If the ocean was pure mind and I was a wave, I would be in terror if Itried to distinguish myself fromthe water that produced me.What is a wave without water, and what is a mind without God?

  Hugh Prather

  Ocean, Water, Mind

  Hugh Prather (1982). “The Quiet Answer”, Main Street Books

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• So do your duty, boys, and join with prideServe your country in her suicideFind the flags so you can wave goodbyeBut just before the end even treason might be worth a tryThis country is too young to dieI declare the war is overIt's over, it's over.

  Phil Ochs

  Country, War, Boys

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• Do people who wave at trains Wave at the driver, or at the train itself? Or, do people who wave at trains Wave at the passengers? Those hurtling strangers, The unidentifiable flying faces?

  Roger McGough

  People, Flying, Faces

  1982 'Waving At Trains'.

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• Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.

  Hugh Walpole

  Running, Country, Book

  Hugh Walpole (1985). “The Herries Chronicles”

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• When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you're left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.

  Harold Pinter

  Fall, Moon, Night

  Harold Pinter (1993). “Party Time ; And, The New World Order: Two Plays”, p.27, Grove Press

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• A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Girl, Numbers, Towers

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.9, Penguin

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• Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

  Edward Hirsch

  Poetry, Essentials, Needs

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• Oh, my soul! why art thou so often disquieted within thee? How is it that thou hast so little faith? Wilt thou never learn that Jesus has even the least of His little boats always under His watchful eye, and all the winds and the waves obey Him?

  Theodore L. Cuyler

  Jesus, Art, Eye

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 236, 1895.

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• Röntgen has familiarized us with an order of vibrations of extreme minuteness compared with the smallest waves with which we have hitherto been acquainted, and of dimensions comparable with the distances between the centers of the atoms of which the material universe is built up; and there is no reason to suppose that we have here reached the limit of frequency.

  Wilhelm Rontgen

  Distance, Order, Atoms

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• When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

  Alan Lightman

  Heart, People, Brain

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Dance for Two: Essays”, p.42, Pantheon

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• Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen Or the golden-haired sons of kings, Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves, Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail

  Kathleen Raine

  Kings, Son, Dark

  Kathleen Raine (1989). “Selected Poems”, p.74, SteinerBooks

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• Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

  William Empson

  Men, Sea, Iron

  William Empson (1984). “Collected poems”, Chatto & Windus

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• The older I get, the more obvious it is that you're not really in control of your life, you're a part of a larger wave, no matter who you are.

  Ethan Hawke

  Control Of Your Life, Matter, Obvious

  "Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez and Director Courtney Solomon Talk GETAWAY, Surviving the Stunts, Filming in Bulgaria, Horror in Action and Casting the Voice". Interview, collider.com. August 31, 2013.

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• I think there's some generational difference between some of the older members of the press and this younger president [Bill Clinton]. I think the older members are not quite on the same wave length, and in general. I think it's been very devastating to the president.

  David Gergen

  Thinking, Differences, President

  "David Gergen and Mark Shields on Bill Clinton's 100 Days". "PBS Newshour" with Jim Lehrer, www.pbs.org. April 29, 1993.

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