Desert Quotes - page 24
If you wish to see the blessings which "God has prepared for those who love Him" (I COR 2:9), then take up your abode in the desert of the renunciation of your own will, and flee the world. What world? The world of the lust of the eyes, of your fallen self (I JN 2:16), the presumptuousness of your own thoughts, the deceit of things you can see.
Niketas Stethatos
Madam President, on Saturday evening, a great loss echoed throughout our country. Six decades of patriotic service came to an end. We have suspected for some time that we would bid farewell to our colleague, the senior Senator from Arizona, John McCain. John took full advantage of the months since his diagnosis. His hard work continued, but happy reminiscing, fond farewells, final reflections, and time with family actually came to the fore. I was privileged to spend a small share of that time with John. We sat on his back porch in Sedona under the desert sky, replaying old times. John did things his way these last months. For his colleagues here, the time confirmed a sad but obvious truth: The Senate won't be the same without John McCain. I think it is fair to say that the passion John brought to his work was unsurpassed in this body. In more than 30 years as a Senator, he never failed to marshal a razor-sharp wit, a big heart, and, of course, a fiery spirit.
John McCain
But to Stern at that moment it wasn't a hand grenade at all but a no longer distant cloud high above the Temple of the Moon, a driftin memory in the desert of dim pillars and fountains and waterways, mysterious places where myrrh grew, the ruins of his youth.
Blinding light then in the mirror behind the bar, sudden death merging the stars and windstorms of his life with darkness in the failure of his seeking, bright blinding light in the night sky at last and Stern's once vast vision of a homeland for all the peoples of his heritage gone as if he had never lived, shattered as if he had never suffered, his futile devotion ended on a clear Cairo night during the uncertain campaigns of 1942 when the eternal disguise he wore to his last clandestine meeting, his face, was ripped way and thrown against a mirror in the half-light of an Arab bar, there to stare at a now immobile landscape fixed to witness his death forever.
Edward Whittemore
Socialism means the community in bonds. If you establish a Socialist community it means the most comprehensive, universal, and pervasive tyranny that this country has ever seen, the flaw that enters into everything in all the relations of life. It is like the sand of the desert. It gets into your food, your clothes, your machinery, the very air you breathe. They are all gritty with regulations, orders, decrees, rules. That is what Socialism means. You cannot trust liberty to Socialism. The only hope of liberty is in Liberalism, for Liberalism alone believes in it.
David Lloyd George
It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say. I have sometimes heard painters say that they paint 'for themselves': but I think they would soon have painted their fill if they lived on a desert island. The primary purpose of all art forms, whether it's music, literature, or the visual arts, is to say something to the outside world; in other words, to make a personal thought, a striking idea, an inner emotion perceptible to other people's senses in such a way that there is no uncertainty about the maker's intentions.
M. C. Escher
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences-for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect-if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!
Robert Louis Stevenson
And I will tell you, because I was six feet from the TV set, that no one-no one-saw a tit. There was no titty to be seen. I know that's a fact, because I'm a guy that, if there's a titty, I'm the first one to look. And if you actually thought that you saw a titty, then... you were desperate to see one. Much like someone crossing a desert might see the mirage of water.
Lewis Black
[on the creation myth] This is a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert, in order to distract them from the fact that they did not have air conditioning. I would love to have the faith to believe that it took place in seven days, but... I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing. Just ask any Catholic priest.
Lewis Black
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
Sri Aurobindo
I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years later, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them.
William Saroyan
How can anyone have a true sense of the Hebrew race without crossing this terrifying desert, without experiencing it? For three interminable days we crossed it on our camels. Your throat sizzles from thirst, your head reels, your mind spins about as serpent-like you follow the sleek tortuous ravine. When a race is forged for two score years in this kiln, how can such a race die? I rejoiced at seeing the terrible stones where the Hebrews' virtues were born: their perseverance, will power, obstinacy, endurance, and above all, a God flesh of their flesh, flame of their flame, to whom they cried, "Feed us! Kill our enemies! Lead us to the Promised Land!"
To this desert the Jews owe their continued survival and the fact that by means of their virtues and vices they dominate the world. Today, in the unstable period of wrath, vengeance, and violence through which we are passing, the Jews are of necessity once again the chosen people of the terrible God of Exodus from the land of bondage.
Nikos Kazantzakis
The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal. He feels himself mysteriously inspired or possessed. The craftsman, on the other hand, is content to use the traditional materials and techniques. The more self-possessed he is, the better craftsman he will be. What pleases him is skill of execution. He is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value. If a certain kind of political commitment is fashionable, he may be committed; but out of fashion, not conviction. The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity.
John Fowles
Henry Kissinger: If Saudi Arabia does not lift the boycott, America will come and bomb the oilfields.
King Faisal:You are the ones who can't live without oil. You know, we come from the desert, and our ancestors lived on dates and milk and we can easily go back and live like that again.
Faisal of Saudi Arabia
