Lapses Quotes - Page 4

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness

Gregory Maguire

Grief, Dirty, Character

Gregory Maguire (2009). “A Lion Among Men: Volume Three in The Wicked Years”, p.8, Harper Collins

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I think one remains the same person throughout, merely passing, as it were, i these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house.

James M. Barrie

Thinking, House, Rooms

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...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Art, Doe, Opinion

Arthur Schopenhauer (1950). “The World as Will and Idea”

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...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N. T. Wright

Christian, Easter, People

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The longest day must have its close — the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Time, Morning, Night

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher STOWE (2016). “Collected Works (Complete and Illustrated Editions: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Queer Little Folks, The Chimney-Corner, ...)”, p.374, Harriet Beecher Stowe

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We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

William Carlos Williams

Eye, Long, Silence

William Carlos Williams (1995). “Paterson”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

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Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

Max Beerbohm

Humility, Acceptance, Triumph

Saturday Review, 5 Nov. 1904 See Maugham 11

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[Phelps] firmly denies that he takes drugs, suggesting that the notorious photo of him smoking from a bong was a one-time lapse of judgment.

Michael Phelps

Weed, Smoking, Drug

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The best reason to be assigned, in this case, for not having made the Constitution more free from a charge of uncertainty in its meaning, is believed to be, that it was not suspected that any such charge would ever take place; and it appears that no such charge did take place, during the early period of the Constitution, when the meaning of its authors could be best ascertained, nor until many of the contemporary lights had in the lapse of time been extinguished. How often does it happen, that a notoriety of intention diminishes the caution against its being misunderstood or doubted!

James Madison

Light, Misunderstood, Doe

James Madison (1884). “1816-1828”

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I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

William J. Clinton

Facts, Judgment, Responsible

President William J. "Bill" Clinton's televised address on CNN, edition.cnn.com. August 17, 1998.

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The mere lapse of years is not life. To eat, to drink, and sleep; to be exposed to darkness and the light; to pace around in the mill of habit, and turn thought into an instrument of trade-this is not life. Knowledge, truth, love, beauty, goodness, faith, alone can give vitality to the mechanism of existence.

James Martineau

Life, Truth, Sleep

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Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.

Thomas Merton

Distance, Loss, Discovery

Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.45, Macmillan

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Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

Edward Abbey

War, Patriotic, Judging

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Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

Fareed Zakaria

Mistake, Media, Editors

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I am aware that I am very old now; but I am also aware that I have never been so young as I am now, in spirit, since I was fourteen and entertained Jim Wolf with the wasps. I am only able to perceive that I am old by a mental process; I am altogether unable to feel old in spirit. It is a pity, too, for my lapses from gravity must surely often be a reproach to me. When I am in the company of very young people I always feel that I am one of them, and they probably privately resent it.

Mark Twain

Often Is, People, Age

Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.266, Univ of California Press

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There is no lapse in His character or inconsistency in His nature. Our God is everything he says He is… for now and all eternity.

Matt Redman

Character, Eternity, Inconsistency

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But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Spring, Fall, Focus

Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005). “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life”, Hyperion

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How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending,--the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Running, Fall, Night

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1851). “The prose works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, p.413

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I don't know what I can do about the aging. Yes, I am aging. Oh my God, I'm aging all the time. It's like those flowers that wilt in front of you in time-lapse films. But what can I possibly do? Look like a lunatic?

Sarah Jessica Parker

Flower, Looks, Aging

"Why We Love Sarah Jessica Parker" by Maggie Bullock, www.elle.com. December 2, 2010.

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From laboratories employing complex apparatus, poetry often emerges into the outside world after a long lapse of time, just as some scientific discoveries become common property only after they have entered the blood stream of the generations.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

Blood, Discovery, Long

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To have a reputation for being noble, she thought, is more confining than to be known as a wit. On the rare days when a comedian has no jokes, people pardon the lapse. There is no forgiving a saint's occasional day of sin.

Libbie Block

Perfection, People, Comedian

Libbie Block (1957). “The hills of Beverly”

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It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.

Washington Irving

Departed, Warning, Hours

Washington Irving (1999). “Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories”, p.145, Penguin

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I have prepared myself to be at my peak in London. But in the Olympics, there are so many factors. You need to stay alert all the time, and a lapse of concentration, even for a second, will let you down.

Vijender Singh

Needs, Olympics, London

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Some [intentional communities], like the Shakers and the Harmony Society, have endured for a century or even longer. The Hutterians, to cite an extreme example, are today still strongly committed to communal living after practicing it, punctuated only by occasional lapses into private enterprise, for 450 years. The Hutterian rate of membership turnover has been only about 0.0006 per year.

Benjamin Zablocki

Years, Community, Membership

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But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, --
What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's --
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?

Sidney Lanier

Best Love, Jesus, Kings

Sidney Lanier (1999). “Poems of Sidney Lanier”, p.32, University of Georgia Press

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