Quotes by Writers - Page 81

In those days," continued Ishvar, "it seemed to me that that was all one could expect in life. A harsh road strewn with sharp stones and, if you were lucky, a little grain.""And later?""Later I discovered there were different types of roads. And a different way of walking on each.
Rohinton Mistry
...I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters,...
Daniel Defoe
Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was justa man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But hisdiscourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neitherdisgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but onthe contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged tomore orderly, contented, hopeful lives.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Certainly all virtues are very dear to God, but humility pleases Him above all the others, and it seems that He can refuse it nothing.
Francis de Sales
Humility consists in not esteeming ourselves above other men, and in not seeking to be esteemed above them.
Francis de Sales
Let us make our way through these low valleys of the humble and little virtues. We shall see in them the roses amid the thorns, charity that shows its beauty among interior and exterior afflictions, the lilies of purity.
Francis de Sales
A man who can own pearls does not bother about shells, and those who aspire to virtue do not trouble themselves over honors.
Francis de Sales
If after all your efforts you cannot succeed, you could not please our Lord more than by sacrificing to Him your will, and remaining in tranquility, humility, and devotion, entirely conformed and submissive to His divine will and good pleasure.
Francis de Sales
The King of Glory does not reward His servants according to the dignity of their office, but according to the humility and love with which they have exercised it.
Francis de Sales
Little deeds that proceed from charity please God and have their place among meritorious acts.
Francis de Sales
There is too wide a gap, for most of us, between what we say and what we mean. Between our words and our thoughts. The first thing the Prophet Isaiah said when he saw the living and exalted God was, “Woe is me, I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah was one of the most godly men who ever walked the earth. But seeing God, he sees also, abrupt and stark and grief-making, his own duplicity. Then God does what only God can do: he sears his lips clean (Isaiah 6:6-7). And herein lies our hope: truly seeing God, we truly see ourselves, in all our woe-begotten duplicity; but crying out to God, we are truly and greatly helped.
Mark Buchanan
Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
William Zinsser
Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.
Rebecca Goldstein
He wrote as a young man that God's noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.
John Adams
We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.
Samuel Johnson
Something greater than me was happening. And yet, it was happening to me.
Dick Van Dyke
A blush of breeze rose from the grass. Jacob felt as if an angel's wing had beat against his cheek. He touched his cheek slowly. He felt embarrassed by the thought."That I should think an angel came to me."He wept. And, again, the brush of breeze against his cheek.
Noah Benshea
Humility is the displacement of self by the enthronement of God.
Andrew Murray
Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue. And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil.
Andrew Murray
Humility is simply the disposition which prepares the soul for living on trust.
Andrew Murray
Humility is the only soil in which the graces root; the lack of humility is the sufficient explanation of every defect and failure. Humility is not so much a grace or virtue along with others; it is the root of all, because it alone takes the right attitude before God, and allows Him as God to do all.
Andrew Murray
Stand by; for I am holier than you!" What a parody on holiness! Jesus the Holy One is the humble One: the holiest will ever be the humblest. There is none holy but God: we have as much of holiness as we have of God.
Andrew Murray
when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, ofhell.
Andrew Murray
Ironic that those most holy are least likely to see themselves that way.
Mark Buchanan
Our humility before God has no value, except that it prepares us to reveal the humility of Jesus to our fellow men.
Andrew Murray
The highest glory of the creature is in being only a vessel, to receive and enjoy and show forth the glory of God. It can do this only as it is willing to be nothing in itself, that God may be all. Water always fills first the lowest places. The lower, the emptier a man lies before God, the speedier and the fuller will be the inflow of the diving glory.
Andrew Murray
Here is the path to the higher life: down, lower down! Just as water always seeks and fills the lowest place, so the moment God finds men abased and empty, His glory and power flow in to exalt and to bless.
Andrew Murray
It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.
Publilius Syrus
Pride must die in you, or nothing of heaven can live in you.
Andrew Murray
Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all.
Andrew Murray
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
I honestly don't think you do, at least not completely. Look, you will always hold a special place in my heart, but I can’t keep competing for a battle that’s already won.
Rebecca Gober
You have someone in your life whom you honor and revere so much that every hurt on them is inflicted on you as well. And the closer they are to you, the greater the pain.
Masashi Kishimoto
Julia had no trouble believing that, but she suspected his challenging demeanor was his way of keeping people at a distance. Sadly it was a strategy she understood all too well.Trusting by nature, she'd learned the hard way that when you let someone too close, they discovered all kinds of things about you. That kind of intimate knowledge gave them the chance to hurt you so deeply, it took all your strength just to put one foot in front of the other.
Mia Ross
The feeling of being hurt, is the proof that you are in love.
Ahmed Ayub
Things that don't matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.
Banana Yoshimoto
Oh tell me again how you are saving me.Oh tell me again how you are leaving me.Take care, sweetheart. Play fair, sweetheart.Living different lives in empty beds.
Renee Ruin
Love is at the root of a positive attitude.
Mark Andrew Poe
A spider is hardly an excuse to abuse a book.
Rebecca Chastain
If we want know the meaning of existence, we must open a book: over there, in the darkest chapter, there’s a sentence written especially for us.
Pietro Citati
Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway!...You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.
Robert Walser
It was cliche, he knew, but he meant it classic.
S.E. Hinton
A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.
Samuel Johnson
Stay gold Ponyboy. Stay gold.--Johnny quoting Robert Frost
S.E. Hinton
My body lies within the strings and myths of reality with a purpose of evolution and adapted by gravity but for my conscious's matrix is without any doubt has adapted to other's consciousness and that is how we all adapt to survival.
Ahmed Aziz Ahmed
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.
George Saunders
They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled, bitter, unwittingly vindictive.
Olaf Stapledon
The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.
Daniel C. Dennett
The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as “How did everything begin?” “What are we all here for?” “What is the point of living?
Sir Peter Medawar
Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men.
Loren Eiseley
The red lipstick? It's supposed to signal fertility and readiness to mate. Just like the swollen red butt of a baboon. That tight-fitting little dress that shows off your curves? From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, big breasts represent a healthy mate who can feed a lot of offspring. That's why men are programmed to like big tits. When you show off your curves, what you're really doing is advertising to the whole world: "Look at me! I'm a healthy female! I'd be a perfect mate! Come mount me!
Oliver Markus
We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
Loren Eiseley
If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?
Milton Berle
The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy.
Robert Sheaffer
Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...
José Saramago
Men are punished by their sins, not for them.
Elbert Hubbard
She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
A.S. Byatt