Inspiring Quotes (page 25)
Yossarian - the very sight of the name made Colonel Cathcart shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word "subversive" itself. It was like "seditious" and "insidious" too, and like "socialist," "suspicious," "fascist" and "Communist." It was an odious, alien, distasteful name, a name that just did not inspire confidence.
Joseph Heller
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but? even though hideous? remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror. They are virtues with a single vice? error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves some mournful radiance that inspires veneration. Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like every ignorant man in triumph. Nothing...
Victor Hugo
Every one of us, unconsciously, works out a personal philosophy of life, by which we are guided, inspired, and corrected, as time goes on. It is this philosophy by which we measure out our days, and by which we advertise to all about us the man, or woman, that we are... It takes but a brief time to scent the life philosophy of anyone. It is defined in the conversation, in the look of the eye, and in the general mien of the person. It has no hiding place. It's like the perfume of a flower --...
George Matthew Adams
The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.” The spirit of Bugs Bunny inspires the finale of Yossarian’s adventures with 256th Squadron. It’s the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it...
Joseph Heller
I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically...
Don DeLillo
Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature.
Stanislaw Lem
Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.
Fulton J. Sheen