Taken Quotes (page 48)
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This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but...
David Foster Wallace
A rainbow every morning who would pause
to look at? The wonderful which comes often or is plentifully about us is soon taken for granted. Th at is practical enough. It allows us to get on with life. But it may stultify if it
cannot on occasion be thrown off . To recapture now and then childhood’s wonder, is to secure a driving force
for occasional grown-up thoughts.
Charles Scott Sherrington
Earlier I had thought a lot about why it was so extremely unusual for a person to be able to live for an ideal. Now I saw that many people, all in fact, are capable of dying for an ideal. Only, it mustn't be a personal, freely chosen ideal, but one held in common and taken over from other people.
Herman Hesse
My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch-- words,...
Vladimir Nabokov
And if it is a mystery, then we, too, had the right to preach mystery and to teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but the mystery, which they must blindly obey, even setting aside their own conscience. And so we did. We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
Ernest Hemingway
A work of (whatever) art can either be 'received' or 'used'. When we 'receive' it we expert our senses and imagination and various other powers according the the pattern set by the artist. When we 'use' it, we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned image, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have not yet explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of...
C. S. Lewis