Our Time Quotes (page 40)
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I am apprehensive, therefore - perhaps too apprehensive - that the Government of these States may in futures times end in a monarchy. But this catastrophe, I think, may be long delayed, if in our proposed system we do not sow the seeds of contention, faction, and tumult, by making our posts of honor places of profit.
Benjamin Franklin
I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, . . . but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood. The house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some...
Daphne du Maurier
Alas. What have we done to our good, bawdy, Anglo-Saxon four-letter words? ...We have blunted them so with overuse that they no longer have any real meaning for us. ...When will we be able to redeem our shock words? They have been turned to marshmallows. ...We no longer have anything to cry in time of crisis. 'Help!' we bleat. And no one hears us. 'Help' is another of those four-letter words that don't mean anything any more.
Madeleine L'Engle
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can...
Audre Lorde
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden.
C. S. Lewis
Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off and educated. . . I know that from my own story, and from the evidence of every child ever born? they all want to hear and to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to paint pictures, to make sculptures. This is born in and we breed it out. And then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, and at the same time we either fetishize art? the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility? or we ignore...
Jeanette Winterson
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortazar
This is our one and only chance at mortal life-here and now. The longer we live, the greater is our realization that it is brief. Opportunities come, and then they are gone. I believe that among the greatest lessons we are to learn in this short sojourn upon the earth are lessons that help us distinguish between what is important and what is not. I plead with you not to let those most important things pass you by. As you plan for that illusive, nonexistent future when you will have time to do...
Thomas S. Monson
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and...
Oscar Wilde
As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time unless he eats, so is with the inner man. What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God-not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe. No, we must consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts.
George Muller
The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.
John Greenleaf Whittier
Sleep occupies a third of our life. It is the consolation to the woes of our days or the woe of their pleasures; but I have never found that sleep was a rest. After a swoon of a few minutes a new life begins, freed from conditions of time and space, and doubtless like the life which awaits us after death. Who knows whether there does not exist a link between these two existences, and whether it is not possible for the soul now to bind them together?
Gerard De Nerval