Direction Quotes - page 66
The road in this direction leads through the roughest mountain passes; and, in some places, it winds so close along the borders of precipices, that by a single misstep an animal might be precipitated several hundred feet. Mules, however, are very surefooted; and will often clamber along the most craggy cliffs with nearly as much security as the goat.
Josiah Gregg
[Sociocultural] explanations are vulnerable to a number of criticisms. To begin with, it is unclear to what extent current social influences actually point in the direction these explanations presuppose. According to one study, by four years of age, girls tend to assume that boys are academically inferior, and by seven, boys assume the same thing. Similarly, teachers tend to view their female students as superior at maths and reading, even when aptitude tests indicate that the boys are doing better. Popular culture often mirrors these trends, with girls depicted as academically superior to boys (consider, for instance, Bart and Lisa from The Simpsons, and Ron and Hermione from the Harry Potter series.
Steve Stewart-Williams
...no legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the multitude: Because there it admits of no control, no regulation; no steady direction whatsoever. The people are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible.
Edmund Burke
The Texans now advanced along the Santa Fé road, beyond the sand hills south of the Arkansas, when they discovered that a party of Mexicans had passed towards the river. They soon came upon them, and a skirmish ensuing, eighteen Mexicans were killed, and as many wounded, five of whom afterwards died. The Texans suffered no injury, though the Mexicans were a hundred in number. The rest were all taken prisoners except two, who escaped and bore the news to Gen. Armijo, encamped with a large force at the Cold Spring, 140 miles beyond. As soon as the General received notice of the defeat of his vanguard, he broke up his camp most precipitately, and retreated to Santa Fé. A gentleman of the caravan which passed shortly afterward, informed me that spurs, lariats and other scraps of equipage, were found scattered in every direction about Armijo's camp - left by his troops in the hurly-burly of their precipitate retreat.
Josiah Gregg
One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene....
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is...
Wallace Stevens
Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne.
H. P. Lovecraft
Now, can one die every day to everything that one knows - except, of course, the technological knowledge, the direction where your home is, and so on; that is, to end, psychologically, every day, so that the mind remains fresh, young and innocent? That is death. And to come upon that there must be no shadow of fear. To give up without argument, without any resistance. That is dying. Have you ever tried it? To give up without a murmur, without restraint, without resistance, the thing that gives you most pleasure (the things that are painful, of course, one wants to give up in any case). Actually to let go. Try it. Then, if you do it, you will see that the mind becomes extraordinarily alert, alive and sensitive, free and unburdened. Old age then takes on quite a different meaning, not something to be dreaded.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
[G]uesses about the fashions of the future are generally quite wide of the mark, because they are founded on a very obvious fallacy. They always imply that public taste will continue to progress in its present direction; which is, in truth, the only thing we know that it will not do. A thing that wanders away in great winding curves may end anywhere; but to turn each curve into a straight line striking out into the void will be wrong in any case.
G. K. Chesterton
It's equally astonishing that the birds are able to measure its relative strength with such accuracy that they can trace it back to its source simply by sensing in which direction it becomes marginally stronger. But a turkey vulture is exceptionally well-equipped among birds, with wide-open nostrils and extremely well-developed sense organs within them.
David Attenborough
We, therefore, having directed our inquiry toward a cause that is manifest, sensible, and comprehended by all men, do know that the earth rotates on its own poles, proved by many magnetical demonstrations to exist. For not in virtue only of its stability and its fixed permanent position does the earth posses poles and verticity; it might have had another direction, as eastward or westward, or toward any other quarter. By the wonderful wisdom of the Creator, therefore, forces were implanted in the earth, forces primarily animate, to the end the globe might, with steadfastness, take direction, and that the poles might be opposite, so that on them, as at the extremities of an axis, the movement of diurnal rotation might be performed.
William Gilbert (astronomer)
Framed by a tiny cutout in the fortified bunker, this particular piece of no-man's land is tinted a blood-reddish orange by the setting summer sun. It's hot as hell, and it's about to get hotter. When the sun goes down, the guns start blazing. And all that separates the men at their triggers is a grassy patch of land the size of a soccer field that is heavily mined. If you're a Ukrainian soldier here, you don't need binoculars to observe the enemy -- you just look in his direction.
Mike Jones
I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction - toward anarchy, poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.
Hunter S. Thompson
Through the skill and devotion to duty of their armed forces of all branches in the Midway area our citizens can now rejoice that a momentous victory is in the making.
It was on a Sunday just six months ago that the Japanese made their peace‑time attack on our fleet and army activities on Oahu. At that time they created heavy damage, it is true, but their act aroused the grim determination of our citizenry to avenge such treachery, and it raised, not lowered, the morale of our fighting men.
Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged. Vengeance will not be complete until Japanese sea power has been reduced to impotence. We have made substantial progress in that direction. Perhaps we will be forgiven if we claim we are about midway to our objective!
Chester W. Nimitz
Other than that, how was Kiril Island, Ensign Vorkosigan?” inquired the Count. "You didn't vid home much, your mother noticed.”
"I was busy. Lessee. The climate was ferocious, the terrain was lethal, a third of the population including my immediate superior was dead drunk most of the time. The average IQ equalled the mean temperature in degrees cee, there wasn't a woman for five hundred kilometers in any direction, and the base commander was a homicidal psychotic. Other than that, it was lovely.
Lois McMaster Bujold
I like that saying of Thoreau's that "in wildness is the preservation of the world.” Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking that wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers were out on the edge, seeking that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight with things. The things were owned by all the same people and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness.
Ken Kesey
And it's completely not necessary for anyone to make mistake because everyone's Self is Total Knowledge, Veda. Veda is Total Knowledge, and Veda is the nature of the Self, and bliss is the nature of the Self. And even in the outside world everyone wants to move in the direction of greater joy.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past.
E. H. Carr
We have introduced the monetary factor not by necessity but by choice. Its advantages are obvious. Self-financed commodity units are not only interest free, but free also from dependence upon credit conditions. They are a step-desirable, it seems to us-in the direction of a goods economy as distinct from a money economy; but this step is taken without violence by merely identifying basic goods with money. It guarantees unfailing purchasing power where it is most needed-among the countless producers of raw commodities.
Benjamin Graham
Graham strongly felt that market prices could be considerably out of line with values. The reason for this discrepancy he took to be psychological. ...[T]he overall level of the market could go to extremes in either direction, as optimism or pessimism holds sway. ...[F]avored stocks would sell at unduly high prices, while unpopular stocks would sell at unduly low prices.
Benjamin Graham
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
Robert Sapolsky
