Nights Quotes - page 22
What is our death but a nights sleep For as through sleep all weariness and faintness pass away and cease, and the powers of the spirit come back again, so that in the morning we arise fresh and strong and joyous so at the Last Day we shall rise again as if we had only slept a night, and shall be fresh and strong.
Martin Luther
When your soul is pricked by compunction and gradually changed, it becomes a fountain flowing with rivers of tears and compunction. ... If any one of you ever happens to communicate with tears, whether you weep before the Liturgy or in the course of the divine Liturgy, or at the very time that you receive the divine Gifts, and does not desire to do this for the rest of his days and nights, it will avail him nothing to have wept merely once. It is not this alone that at once purifies us and makes us worthy; it is daily compunction that does not cease until death.
Symeon the New Theologian
There is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set. ... Its astounding complication was completely out of proportion with what I was expecting. Here is the curious thing: the first night I saw the set, it was just wild. The second night, I became used to it. After a few nights, I became familiar with it. It was as if somehow I had seen it before. Of course I hadn't. No one had seen it. No one had described it. The fact that a certain aspect of its mathematical nature remains mysterious, despite hundreds of brilliant people working on it, is the icing on the cake to me.
Benoît Mandelbrot
Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She'd seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She'd seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.
Daniel Abraham
Mr Grier: "OK! Let's get started with today's English lesson, eh? Today we are going to learn some 'Canadian' English. Let's start with some Canadian expressions popular right now, eh? Repeat after me:
'Neverwinter Nights will be released when it is complete.'
'Neverwinter Nights will be released this winter.'
'In Canada it's always winter.'
'Neverwinter Nights will be released soon, we promise!'"
Megatokyo
Your mouth is a revolver, firing bullets in the sky (Mh-mh-mh-mh)
Your love is like a soldier, loyal 'till you die (Mh-mh-mh-mh)
And I've been looking at the stars for a long, long time
I've been putting out fires all my life
Everybody wants a flame, they don't want to get burnt
And today is our turnDays like these lead to
Nights like this lead to
Love like ours
You light the spark in my bonfire heart
People like us, we don't
Need that much, just some
One that starts, starts the spark in our bonfire hearts.
James Blunt
The rich in all societies may be thrown into two classes. The first is of those who are powerful as well as rich, and conduct the operations of the vast political machine. The other is of those who employ their riches wholly in the acquisition of pleasure. As to the first sort, their continual care and anxiety, their toilsome days and sleepless nights, are next to proverbial. These circumstances are sufficient almost to level their condition to that of the unhappy majority; but there are other circumstances which place them in a far lower condition. Not only their understandings labour continually, which is the severest labour, but their hearts are torn by the worst, most troublesome, and insatiable of all passions, by avarice, by ambition, by fear and jealousy. No part of the mind has rest. Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things almost unknown in high stations.
Edmund Burke
Scientists and technicians should concentrate their energies on their professional work. When we say that at least five-sixths of their work time should be left free for professional work, this is meant as the minimum requirement. It would be better still if more time were made available. If someone works seven days and seven nights a week to meet the needs of science or production, it shows his lofty and selfless devotion to the cause of socialism. We should commend, encourage and learn from such people. It has been demonstrated countless times that only those who devote themselves heart and soul to their work, who constantly strive for perfection and fear neither hardship nor disappointment can reach the pinnacles of science. We cannot demand that scientists and technicians, or at any rate, the overwhelming majority of them, study stacks of books on political theory, join in numerous social activities and attend many meetings not related to their work.
Deng Xiaoping
The Abbey was on Robertson, just below Santa Monica, on the edge of Boys' Town. Low brick buildings housed cafes, clothing stores, coffee houses and watch repair shops that rubbed elbows with gay clubs and sex shops. These establishments catered to hordes of the beautiful young gay men who lived in the big apartment complexes that lined the side streets or who drove in from all over Southern California on weekend nights. I seldom ventured there, because it reminded me of San Francisco in the '70s, when I was a boy just coming out and how out of place I'd felt among the big-muscled boys who cruised each other with cold assessment. Twenty years later, only the faces and the clothes had changed; the air was still charged with the brutal calculation of lust. And beneath that was the claustrophobia of a ghetto, of fearful people looking out at the world from behind invisible fences.
Michael Nava
Then there are those who think that their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses.
Alan Lightman
I hate to talk smack about anyone in the band or whatever, but, y'know, Eddie, you know, he's still doing a bit of drinking and everything. There were nights where it was kind of like a rollercoaster, up or down, and myself, I would have liked to have seen him totally clean up if we were gonna take this further.
Eddie Van Halen
Isolated here in the North, planted long ago by a Roman pilgrim, a chestnut grew, strong and solitary, by the colonnade of rounded double arches at the entrance to the cloister of Mariabronn: a noble, vigorous tree, the sweep of its foliage drooping tenderly, facing the winds in bold and quiet assurance; so tardy in spring that when all glowed green around it and even the cloister nut trees wore their russet, it awaited the shortest nights to thrust forth, through little tufts of leaves, the dim exotic rays of its blossom, and in October, after wine and harvests had long been gathered, let drop the prickly fruits from its yellowing crown... The lovely tree, aloof and tender, shadowed the entrance to the cloister, a delicate, shuddering guest from a warmer clime, secretly akin to the slender double columns of the gateway, the pillars and mouldings of the window arches, loved by all Latins and Italians, gaped at, as a stranger, by the inhabitants. Ch. I.
Hermann Hesse
Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.
Thomas Pynchon
My plan of study is traced for this coming year... I am hoping to develop it shortly in the most successful manner... I think that I have already told you that I am on the verge of mysteries, and that the veil which covers them is getting thinner and thinner. The nights seem to me too long, yet I do not complain... I am often scolded by Mme. Pasteur, but I console her by telling her that I shall lead her to fame.
Louis Pasteur
