West Quotes - Page 25

• And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under-world. He would only follow.

  Alexander Smith

  Morning, Taken, Dark

  Alexander Smith (1914). “Dreamthorp”

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• And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

  Stephen King

  Uncles, Heart, Autumn

  Stephen King (2008). “'Salem's Lot”, p.201, Anchor

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• Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.

  Huston Smith

  Spiritual, Teacher, Brilliant

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• It is true that water will flow indifferently to east and west, but will it flow equally well up and down? Human nature is disposed toward goodness, just as water tends to flow downwards. There is no water but flows downwards, and no man but shows his tendency to be good. Now, by striking water hard, you may splash it higher than your forehead, and by damming it, you may make it go uphill. But, is that the nature of water? It is external force that causes it to do so. Likewise, if a man is made to do what is not good, his nature is being similarly forced.

  Mencius

  Men, Water, East

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• The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.

  Gore Vidal

  Family, Suffering, Together

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• Even the West has known the architecture of empty space, whose object, for thousands of years, has been less to construct divine houses, than to create sacred places, to seize upon mystery and to immerse man in it-whether by raising the cyclopean pedestal that surrounds him with stars, or by hollowing out the sanctuary that wraps him in haunted night.

  Andre Malraux

  Stars, Night, Men

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• The West has made people too time-conscious, not knowing where they are going but speeding to get there because time is short.

  Rajneesh

  Knowing, People, Haste

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• Because of Christianity the West has missed many things, and one of them is meditation, the rarest flowering of a human being, because they have made it equivalent to contemplation. Contemplation is thinking. Meditation is no-thinking.

  Rajneesh

  Thinking, Meditation, Christianity

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• A basic ingredient in the manufacture of perfume, the attar-a heavy, pale-yellow oil stored in small metal drums-had been put up as collateral by Bulgaria, in lieu of gold, at the Moscow Narodny Bank, a Communist finance house for East-West trade.

  S. J. Perelman

  Pale Yellow, Oil, House

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• It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

  Jacques Barzun

  Creative, Shadow, Wave

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• Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Revolution, Illusion, Consideration

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• Beneath everything else, North and West, there ran a profound, unvoiced, almost subconscious conviction that the [American] nation was going to go on growing-in size, in power, in everything a man could think of-and in that belief there was a might and a fury that would take form instantly at the moment of shock.

  Bruce Catton

  Destiny, Men, Thinking

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• Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting
  Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along,
  Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter
  Chill as a dull face frowning on a song.
  Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feathered bosom
  Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend
  Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset
  Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.

  George Meredith

  Song, Laughter, Sunset

  George Meredith, George Macaulay Trevelyan (1912). “The poetical works of George Meredith: with some notes”

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• To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

  Simone Weil

  Science, Men, Names

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• In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.

  Lin Yutang

  Insane, Asylums, Madness

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

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• My high school was nothing like West Beverly High, let me tell you. I grew up in Fredericktown, Ohio.

  Luke Perry

  School, Ohio, Grew Up

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• If General Haig is so smart, why did he finish 214th (out of 310) in his graduating class at West Point? Does that mean there are 213 generals his age who are smarter than he is?

  Calvin Trillin

  Military, Smart, Mean

  Calvin Trillin (1987). “Uncivil liberties”, Penguin Group USA

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• In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.

  Duane Michals

  People, East, Looks

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• Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

  John Lahr

  Dream, Car, Age

  "Turf Wars". www.newyorker.com. March 30, 2009.

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• I loved the audacity of that American principle which says. When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West!

  Jonathan Raban

  Junk, Principles, Audacity

  Jonathan Raban (1981). “Old Glory, an American Voyage”, Simon & Schuster

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• British physician, West African Countries and Peoples Man's place is higher than the sky. Respect for man is the underlying spirit of civilization.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Country, Men, Sky

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• The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.

  Vaclav Havel

  Rights, Ideas, Democracy

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• Liberals want to set up social welfare committees to help whites and West Indians love each other in Birmingham. But all such efforts are doomed to failure. For the strong the weak are just too much of a temptation; and in all fairness it seems to me quite wicked for black people to have tempted the powerful with so much powerless-ness for so long. The obvious answer is to redress this imbalance in power.

  Lewis Nkosi

  Strong, Powerful, Long

  Lewis Nkosi (1983). “Home and exile and other selections”, Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd

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• In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, and east to west in between.

  Leslie Charteris

  Country, America, Jersey

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• I didn't actually know what the protesters in the West really wanted. It was fantastic here, so much freedom, and that was what they were calling musty, middle-class, and fascistic, a bleak period. Bleak was what the GDR was, and it alone had adopted, almost unchanged, Nazi Germany's methods of intimidation and ideas about propaganda and the use of force.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Class, Ideas

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