Tail Quotes - page 12

[Women] Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr. Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped. (Virginia Woolf)
I Saw the Man. His figure reached from earth to heaven and was clad in a purple mantle. He stood deep in foliage and flowers and his head, on which was the head-band of an initiate, seemed to disappear mysteriously in infinity. Before him on a cube-shaped altar were four symbols of magic - the sceptre, the cup, the sword and the pentacle. His right hand pointed to heaven, his left to earth. Under his mantle he wore a white tunic girded with a serpent swallowing its tail. His face was luminous and serene, and, when his eyes met mine, I felt that he saw most intimate recesses of my soul. I saw myself reflected in him as in a mirror and in his eyes I seemed to look upon myself. And I heard a voice saying: -"Look, this is the Great Magician!
P. D. Ouspensky
O thou sophist, Man! Reason by reason proved unreasonable Continues reasoning still! Confronted close, What is this reason? Like the peacock's tail, Just useful for a flourish, nothing more; And when 'tis down, the world goes on the same.
Alfred Austin
Sam, who had it all-a crackling curve and a fastball with a tail on it-had a two hitter going into the seventh. Then Clemente tied into a fastball and belted it into what is almost considered never never land. [...] Clemente clobbered it through the wind and beyond the 397-foot marker in left-center. [...] Only the fourth ball hit over the left field fence, it put Clemente back into a tie with McCovey for the RBI leadership. Each has 23.
Roberto Clemente
I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine geas which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common geas of what seems expected.
James Branch Cabell
Yet sometimes vegetables and animals are, by certain epithets or circumstances, extended to other significations; as a Tree, when called the tree of life or of knowledge; and a Beast, when called the old serpent, or worshiped. When a Beast or Man is put for a kingdom, his parts and qualities are put for the analogous parts and qualities of the kingdom; as the head of a Beast, for the great men who precede and govern; the tail for the inferior people, who follow and are governed; the heads, if more than one, for the number of capital parts, or dynasties, or dominions in the kingdom, whether collateral or successive, with respect to the civil government; the horns on any head, for the number of kingdoms in that head, with respect to military power...
Isaac Newton