Standing Quotes (page 56)
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The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.
John Piper
Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all...
H. G. Wells
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before...
Stephen Hawking
The Master Speed No speed of wind or water rushing bybut you have speed far greater. You can climbback up a stream of radiance to the sky, and back through history up the stream of time. And you were given this swiftness, not for hastenor chiefly that you may go where you will, but in the rush of everything to waste, that you may have the power of standing still--off any still or moving thing you say. Two such as you with such a master speed. From one another once you are agreedthat life is...
Robert Frost
I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the. Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusionwhich border upon the foul Charonian canal." And then did we, theseven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, andshuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow werenot the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly uponour ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of...
Edgar Allan Poe
Edward:
Well Mortimer, ile make thee rue these words,
Beseemes it thee to contradict thy king?
Frownst thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster,
The sworde shall plane the furrowes of thy browes,
And hew these knees that now are growne so stiffe.
I will have Gaveston, and you shall know,
What danger tis to stand against your king.
Gaveston:
Well doone, Ned.
Christopher Marlowe
The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help. Which is right? Neither. Both. Maybe...
George Saunders
She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! --she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.
C. S. Lewis