Which Quotes (page 648)
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Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.
Rebecca West
I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.
Fernando Pessoa
And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.
Virginia Woolf
It is remarkable how I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions. Is that a sign of confusion or inner dishonesty or is it a sign that we are guided without our knowing or is it both ...The reasons one gives for an action to others and to one's self are certainly inadequate. One can give a reason for everything. In the last resort one acts from a level which remains hidden from us. So one can only ask God to judge us and to forgive us.... At the end of the day I can only...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possiblity of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover against his will what another human being is thinking and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.
George Orwell
The old order changeth yielding place to new And God fulfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me I have lived my life and that which I have done May he within himself make pure but thou If thou shouldst never see my face again Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.
Bill Bryson
Around the world–even in some of the countries most troubled by poverty or civil war or pollution–many thoughtful people are making a deep, concerted search for a way to live in harmony with each other and the earth. Their efforts, which rarely reach the headlines, are among the most important events occurring today. Sometimes these people call themselves peace workers, at other times environmentalists, but most of the time they work in humble anonymity. They are simply quiet people changing...
Eknath Easwaran
