Knowing More Quotes (page 64)
-
-
-
I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a...
Bill Bryson
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty...
W. H. Auden
He looked down at the glass again. ‘I care that these things happen, that we poison ourselves and our progeny, that we knowingly destroy our future, but I do not believe that there is anything - and I repeat, anything - that can be done to prevent it. We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as “the common good”. The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a...
Donna Leon
Maybe you'll come to know that every man in every generation is refined. Does a craftsman, even in his old age, lose his hunger to make a perfect cup - thin, strong, translucent?" He held his cup up to the light. "All umpurities burned out and ready for a glorious flux, and for that - more fire. And then either the slag heap or, perhaps what no one in the world ever quite gives up, perfection." He drained his cup and he said loudly, "Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us -...
John Steinbeck
It is undeniable that the source of all our miseries comes from our obstinacy in maintaining that Paradise is a garden. The psychoanalysts have added to the confusion by interpreting the floating dreams as a flight into space. The mystic is the only one who knows that all states of ecstasy are a state of floating in an ambiance more heavy than air. Paradise is at the bottom of the sea, and I can also prove to you that angels are ships. They have no wings but large sails which they unfold...
Anais Nin
I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely. I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance: besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade-the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no...
Charlotte Bronte
I'm smart enough to know that Elizabeth had no doubt seen dozens of men leap over curbs without her falling in love with the leaper, but I do believe this: When an endeavor is special in a person's life, others discern it intuitively and appreciate it more, like the praise a child receives for a lumpy clay sculpture. And as ordinary as such an event might be, it can be instilled with uncommon power.
Steve Martin
Break the glass, I thought to myself, because it is a symbolic gesture. Try to understand that within myself, things were breaking of much more importance than a glass, and I’m happy for that. Look to your own inner struggles and break this glass.
Our parents taught us to be careful with glasses and with our bodies. They taught us that the passions of childhood are impossible; we should not remove men from the priesthood, that people do not perform miracles and that no one goes on a journey...
Paulo Coelho
you know when i was a little kid in oregon i didn't feel that i was and american at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when i discovered buddhism and all i suddenly felt that i had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of the faults and sins in that lifetime i was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in america where...
Jack Kerouac
How like a mirror, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you? People were more often - he searched for a simile, found one in his work - torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
Ray Bradbury