Vast Quotes - page 55
A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat - a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am that I am, thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello's saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place - and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles's previous hours and places - seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appallimg ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren's triumphant throat.
John Fowles
Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time ago - no man can recall how far back - the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice. Now their propaganda is everywhere triumphant, and year by year we see an increase in the rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the cult. The ground is covered with stately temples of various designs, all of which I am told are consecrated to Bootstrap-lifting.
Upton Sinclair
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
Willa Cather
He cried out through the letter of Dr. Markland, that a young mother lacerated by unskillful surgery in the birth of her babe, but recovering from a subsequent successful operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly, cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was no redress!
And because he called a spade a spade, because he named that organ by its own name, so given in Webster's dictionary and in every medical journal in the country, because of this Moses Harman walks to and fro in his cell tonight. He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains for us now to carry on the battle, and lift the standard where they struck him down, to scatter broadcast the knowledge of this crime of society against a man and the reason for it; to inquire into this vast system of licensed crime, its cause and its effect, broadly upon the race.
Voltairine de Cleyre
«She is able to oscillate between classical allusions to the holy books and the works of great poets like Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Borges, Artaud and Celan, and then she comes to terms with the Beat Generation, with Ferlinghetti, Corso, with the philosophy of the existentialists. With immediate acceptances, repulses, with vast ignitions and immense fires, with echoes of jazz and pop music» (Dante Maffia about Fatti deprecabili/Deprecable Facts)
Caterina Davinio
All these things we have to do in the midst of other nations who are striving by our side, envying our Empire, occupying our markets, encroaching upon our sphere, and whose efforts, unless we are wide-awake and united and enterprising, will end in diminishing still further our means of supporting our vast industrial population.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Woody Allen later wrote in a letter: "My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel, he was well on his way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the play or book. In the midst of the conversation, as I'm now trying to recall, I did say that 80 percent of success is showing up." - 1989 August 13, New York Times, On Language: The Elysian Fields by William Safire.
Woody Allen
Helen Thomas
I think American policy is pro‐Israel. If you take a vote in Congress, maybe you might get five people vote against any further aid to Israel or to continue its occupation. But that's about it. They control- They have vast power.
Paul Jay
Who's they?
Helen Thomas
The Zionists.
Helen Thomas
From the Hindu perspective, each soul is divine. All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality.
George Harrison
In that photo ("Pale Blue Dot"), the inner meaning of four centuries of astronomical research is suddenly available to all of us at a glance. It is scientific data and art equally, because it has the power to reach into our souls and alter our consciousness. It is like a great book or movie, or any major work of art. It can pierce our denial and allow us to feel something of reality-even a reality that some of us have long resisted. A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter-to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness. There is no running away from the inner meaning of this scientific achievement.
Ann Druyan
But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people. Wallace was hailed by vast throngs when he resigned from Truman's cabinet in protest against the war-mongering of the then Secretary of State James Byrnes, now the Negro-hating governor of South Carolina. We know how Truman betrayed the American people in their hopes for peace, how he betrayed the Negro people in their thirst for equal rights, how he tore up the Bill of Rights and subjected the whole American people to a reign of FBI-terrorization.
Paul Robeson
About all these things physics can tell us nothing. The idea of natural selection, which, as we shall see, is uaully called in to account for this vast creative surge, is already looking increasingly inadequate to explain evolution. The main trouble is, I think, best explained in the analogy of coffee. Natural selection is only a filter, and filters do not provide the taste of coffee that pours through them. Similarly, the range of evolutionary alternatives between which selection takes place has to be already in matter. How it comes to be present there is the real mystery about creation.
Mary Midgley
During these travels he's starting to train me in a most interesting way. We'd be sitting somewhere and I'd say,
"Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I ..."
And he'd say, "Don't think about the past. Just be here now."
Silence.
And I'd say, "How long do you think we're going to be on this trip?"
And he'd say, "Don't think about the future. Just be here now."
I'd say, "You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting ..."
"Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean."
Ram Dass
Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It's like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said "Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment - nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing.
Roberto Bolaño
As far as the economic content of the common European home is concerned, we regard as a realistic prospect - though not a close one - the emergence of a vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Urals where Eastern and Western parts would be strongly interlocked. In this sense, the Soviet Union's transition to a more open economy is essential; and not only for ourselves, for a higher economic effectiveness and for meeting consumer demands. Such a transition will increase East-West economic interdependence and, thus, will tell favorably on the entire spectrum of European relations.
Mikhail Gorbachev
It has been observed that missiles and projectiles describe a curved path of some sort; however no one has pointed out the fact that this path is a parabola. But this and other facts, not few in number or less worth knowing, I have succeeded in proving; and what I consider more important, there have been opened up to this vast and most excellent science, of which my work is merely the beginning, ways and means by which other minds more acute than mine will explore its remote corners.
Galileo Galilei
I'm not disparaging suicides when I call them weak, I'm pointing out that anybody who would consider doing a thing like that needs help. I don't think a normal, mentally healthy person commits suicide. Of course, there are exceptions; people who are terminally ill are a different issue. But in the vast majority of cases, suicide is a tragedy that does unbelievable damage to the family and friends the suicide leaves behind. You don't want to encourage people to do such a thing.
Jesse Ventura
The new and wonderful results of the late Dr. Boole's mathematical system of Logic appear to develop themselves as most plain and evident consequences of the self-same process of substitution, when applied to the Primary Laws of Thought. Should my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen.
William Stanley Jevons
As I passed through England and the United States, and again when I crossed the boundary of the Dominion, there was one idea impressing itself upon my mind at every step, indelibly written upon the face of two vast countries, and that was the greatness and importance of the distinction reserved for the Anglo-Saxon race-(cheers)-that proud, persistent, self-asserting and resolute stock which no change of climate or condition can alter, and which is infallibly bound to be the predominant force in the future history and civilisation of the world. (Cheers.)
Joseph Chamberlain
