Whirling Quotes
I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.
Olaf Stapledon
All the elements will be seen mixed together in a great whirling mass, now borne towards the centre of the world, now towards the sky; and now furiously rushing from the South towards the frozen North, and sometimes from the East towards the West, and then again from this hemisphere to the other.
Leonardo da Vinci
The main difficulty in using either lazo or bolas, is to ride so well, as to be able at full speed, and while suddenly turning about, to whirl them so steadily round the head, as to take aim: on foot any person would soon learn the art. One day, as I was amusing myself by galloping and whirling the balls round my head, by accident the free one struck a bush; and its revolving motion being thus destroyed, it immediately fell to the ground, and like magic caught one hind leg of my horse; the other ball was then jerked out of my hand, and the horse fairly secured. Luckily he was an old practised animal, and knew what it meant; otherwise he would probably have kicked till he had thrown himself down. The Gauchos roared with laughter; they cried they had seen every sort of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.
Charles Darwin
![This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting Carra painted ca 1910-1911, ed.].. ..by Umberto Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan [the first version, Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris exhibition in 1912. (Carlo Carrà)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/95/carlo-carr-bubbling-exhibition-423395.webp)
If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?...
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective - who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled - can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. ... The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache ... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Stanley Kubrick
Not that I rise against thee, Poetry,
Mother of Beauty, of ideal Life!
But I must pity him condemned to dwell
Within the limits of these whirling worlds
In dying agonies, or yet to be,
Doomed to sad memories, or prophecies,
Perchance remorse, or vague presentiments,-
Who gives himself to thee! for everywhere
Thou ruinest wholly those who consecrate
Themselves, with all they are, to thee alone,
Who solely live the voices of thy glory!
Zygmunt Krasiński
I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tiny particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us.
Václav Havel
Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.
George William Russell
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
T. S. Eliot
He was never in one spot for more than half a second, all my punches were aimed and timed properly but they always wound up hitting empty air. He'd jump in and out, slamming me with a left and whirling me around with his right or the other way around. My arms were plastered with leather and although I jabbed, hooked and crossed, it was like fighting an octopus.
Gene Tunney
The space began to move around them as the being on her plinth receded. The splintered world hurtled toward them as though they were in a kaleidoscope, images whirling to join, spinning outward to disintegrate, vortices of jagged light, horizons of endless time, pinwheels of splendor that rushed at them and receded through which they heard the small god cry, "You will not see me soon again. It is not fitting that gods, however small, consort casually with their servants. I leave you as Guardians for all that live on this world."
Sheri S. Tepper
I had written a beautiful piece for today. It was a rant about how much I despise Halloween. It was witty, well-written and a shining example of a writer at the top of his form. Then I tried to save it, and my computer crashed. So I guess you won't get to read it. Out of all the people in the world, I am the only one who had the opportunity to read my brilliant Halloween article, and now the text is already fading from my cruel, cruel short-term memory, the paragraphs lost in a whirling sea of data, never to be seen again.
Ben Croshaw
I have seen motions of the air so furious that they have carried, mixed up in their course, the largest trees of the forest and whole roofs of great palaces, and I have seen the same fury bore a hole with a whirling movement digging out a gravel pit, and carrying gravel, sand and water more than half a mile through the air.
Leonardo da Vinci
on the radio I heard the news
of that day
at least 6 times, I was
well versed in world
affairs.
the remainder of the stations played a
thin, sick music.
the classical stations refused to come in
clearly
and when they did
it was a stale repetition of standard and
tiresome works.
I turned the radio off.
a strange whirling began in my
head-it circled behind the forehead, clockwise...
I began to wonder, is this what happens
when one goes
mad?
Charles Bukowski
