Stirring Quotes - page 3
To fight for the right, to abhor the imperfect, the unjust, or the mean, to swerve neither to the right hand nor to the left, to care nothing for flattery or applause or odium or abuse-it is so easy to have any of them in India-never to let your enthusiasm be soured or your courage grow dim, but to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of His ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty, where it did not before exist-that is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in India. It is good enough for his watchword while he is here, for his epitaph when he is gone. I have worked for no other aim. Let India be my judge.
George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion.
Jules Verne
Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out any element of what might appear to be self-assertion or egoism; good manners is to be like everyone else. So the male of the species becomes accustomed to suppress any stirring of impatience or originality. Shaw once said you can't learn to skate without making a fool of yourself; the British middle-class attitude seems to be that, in that case, you hadn't better skate at all. The result seems to be considerably more oppressive than being brought up in a Jewish ghetto or a west side slum.
Colin Wilson
Nothing helped; I was fading helplessly away with open eyes, staring straight at the ceiling. Finally I stuck my forefinger in my mouth and took to sucking on it. Something began stirring in my brain, some thought in there scrambling to get out, a stark-staring mad idea: what if I gave a bite? And without a moment's hesitation I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my teeth together. I jumped up. I was finally awake.
Knut Hamsun
The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.
Samuel Beckett
In the newspapers there is insulting and stirring up hatred. Those irresponsible daubers!
The people are on the streets -- rampaging and protesting. The magnates are sitting at the green table and calmly finish their game.
Old Europe is dying.
Well, it's a crazy world! Thrift, Horatio!
As if by a mysterious power one feels compelled to go out onto the streets. The thoughts wander outside to the stage which is portraying a drama of world history -- not an edifying one, but still a drama. It gives the earnest observer a lot to think about.
Joseph Goebbels
The Ground of Rinebrant of Rine: Take half an ounce of Expoltum burnt of Amber, one ounce of Virgin's was, half an ounce of Mastick, then take the Mastick and Expoltum, and beat them severally very fine in a Mortar; this being done, take a new earthen pot and set upon it a charcoal-fire, then shake into it the Mastick and Expoltum by degrees, stirring the Wax about till they be thoroughly mingled, then pour it forth into fair water and make a ball of it, and use it as before mentioned, but be sure you do not heat the plate too hot when you lay the ground upon it, this is the only way of Rinebrant.
Rembrandt
In this age of space flight, when we use the modern tools of science to advance into new regions of human activity, the Bible ... this grandiose, stirring history of the gradual revelation and unfolding of the moral law ... remains in every way an up-to-date book. Our knowledge and use of the laws of nature that enable us to fly to the Moon also enable us to destroy our home planet with the atom bomb. Science itself does not address the question whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or for evil. The guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral law of God. It is no longer enough that we pray that God may be with us on our side. We must learn again that we may be on God's side.
Wernher von Braun
