Leaf Quotes - page 11
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The leaves in autumn do not change color from the blighting touch of frost, but from the process of natural decay. They fall when the fruit is ripened, and their work is done. And their splendid coloring is but their graceful and beautiful surrender of life when they have finished their summer offering of service to God and man. And one of the great lessons the fall of the leaf teaches is this : Do your work well, and then be ready to depart when God shall call.
Tryon Edwards
Two words of such a book, though possessing no peculiar signification, if met with in the dullest sentence, are enough: they call up, what has been finely termed, the "lightning of the mind." We feel an instantaneous kindness and reverence towards an author (together with a high opinion of his discrimination) who cites as it were the very language of our dreams-the secret converse of our own invisible spirit. We are almost startled at its being made public, and fancy that we have been at some time overheard reading. He is forthwith admitted a member of our heart's privy council. His hard words and bad reasoning are forgiven: we shut our ears to his angular periods-remembering only that his habits and desires, his sympathies, perceptions and enjoyments, are under the same master-key as our own-that he has struck into the same path, drank at the same brook, mused upon the same bank, and plucked almost the same leaf with ourselves.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
Love is all around you like the air and is the very breath of your being. But you cannot know it, feel its unfeeling touch, until you pause in your busy-ness, are still and poised and empty of your wanting and desiring. When at rest the air is easily offended and will flee even from the fanning of a leaf, as love flees from the first thought. But when the air or love moves of its own accord it is a hurricane that drives all before it.
Barry Long
In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the whitewash'd palings, Stands the lilacbush tallgrowing with heartshaped leaves of rich green, with many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicatecolor'd blossoms and heartshaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break.
Walt Whitman
I agree with Aristotle as regards all other living beings and à fortiori as regards plants and all the rest of earthly creatures. For I do not believe that it is through Divine Providence that a certain leaf drops, nor do I hold that when a certain spider catches a certain fly, that this is a direct result of a special decree and will of God in that moment; it is not by a particular Divine decree that the spittle of a certain person moved, fell on a certain gnat in a certain place, and killed it; nor is it by the direct will of God that a certain fish catches and swallows a certain worm on the surface of the water. In all these cases the action is... entirely due to chance, as taught by Aristotle.
Maimonides
His great object was to obtain the glitter and sparkle of nature after a shower; and for this purpose, passing by the oak and elm, our two first trees, he took the white poplar and the ash - the one for the leaf, the other for the bark. This I had from himself, and it is a key to his pictures. A French paysagiste [landscape-painter] once came from Paris to request him to show him his method of painting. Constable said he should have been most happy to meet his wishes, but that unfortunately he had no method, and got his pictures up he did not know how. This I had from Mr. Field, who was present.
John Constable
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
G. K. Chesterton
What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons - horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?"
This is what children ask. But then children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex. The new men entering life today are as naked and fearless as children; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, ask "Why?" and "What next?" Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment with an excellent toilet and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
O evanescent temples built of man
To deities he honoured and dethroned!
Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine
To crown the head that men have ceased to honour.
Beneath the coronal of leaf and lichen
The mocking smile upon the lips derides
Pan's lost dominion; but the pointed ears
Are keen and prick'd with old remember'd sounds.
All my breast aches with longing for the past!
Thou God of stone, I have a craving in me
For knowledge of thee as thou wert in old
Enchanted twilights in Arcadia.
Eleanor Farjeon
The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.
Jesus Christ
The politicians to a man agree, that it is free from particular reflections, but that the satire on general societies of men is too severe. Not but we now and then meet with people of greater perspicuity, who are in search for particular applications in every leaf; and it is highly probable we shall have keys published to give light into Gulliver's design. Lord -- is the person who least approves it, blaming it as a design of evil consequence to depreciate human nature . The duchess dowager of Marlborough is in raptures at it; she says she can dream of nothing else since she read it: she declares, that she has now found out, that her whole life has been lost in caressing the worst part of mankind, and treating the best as her foes: and that if she knew Gulliver, though he had been the worst enemy she ever had; she should give up her present acquaintance for his friendship.
John Gay
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.
Robert M. Pirsig
Blasphemy is what an old mistake says of a newly discovered truth.
Blasphemy is what a withered last year's leaf says to a this year's bud.
Blasphemy is the bulwark of religious prejudice.
Blasphemy is the breastplate of the heartless.
And let me say now, that the crime of blasphemy, as set out in this statute, is impossible. No man can blaspheme a book. No man can commit blasphemy by telling his honest thought. No man can blaspheme a God, or a Holy Ghost, or a Son of God. The Infinite cannot be blasphemed.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips - lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathising with the paper, my angel turns over another leaf. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book - and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to praise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.
Herman Melville
