Bent Quotes - page 7

What was important, now, with her eyes bent upon him, and the shadow of a branch trembling across her breast, was the immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon's knife. (Mervyn Peake)
Her [an anorexic's] natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left. View quote
Marion Woodman
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart. View quote
Rabindranath Tagore
As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. View quote
Thorstein Veblen
The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. View quote
Margaret Thatcher
American officials have bent over backwards to show how sensitive they are to Muslim culture. It didn't seem very effective. They seem to be worried about winning the respect of other people. View quote
Tucker Carlson
Can you help me? I'm bent, I'm so scared that I'll never get put back together. View quote
Rob Thomas
People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws. View quote
Charles Bukowski
He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood. View quote
Rainer Maria Rilke
Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste. View quote
Thomas Edward Brown
My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours. (Stefan Zweig)
With head upraised, and look intent, And eye and ear attentive bent, And locks flung back, and lips apart, Like monument of Grecian art, In listening mood, she seemed to stand, The guardian Naiad of the strand. View quote
Walter Scott
In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards. View quote
Walt Whitman
Men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can be stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first be satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that work of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is drawn from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the romantic artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome either kind, so long as it is good enough. View quote
John Galsworthy
The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are. View quote
Plato
These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. ... Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Even a faithful mistress can be bent by constant threats. View quote
Propertius
The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are. View quote
Socrates
It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Marke all Mathematicall heades, which be onely and wholy bent to those sciences, how solitarie they be themselues, how vnfit to liue with others, & how vnapte to serue in the world. View quote
Roger Ascham
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room. View quote
Randall Jarrell
That muche is my bowe bent to shoote at these marks, And kyll feare, when the sky falth we shall haue larks. View quote
John Heywood