Oblivion Quotes - Page 12

• Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion.

  Anna Komnene

  Strong, Taken, History

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• I was learning the importance of names - having them, making them - but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace.

  Josephine Baker

  Yawning, Names, Recognition

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• My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

  David Knopfler

  Water, Sirens, Kind

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• Einstein - the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Jesus, Science, Names

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• I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.

  Alexander Borodin

  Ashamed, Composer

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• You are a fluid metaphor for existence. You are your own death and your own rebirth. Here is forever. It never changes. We bring perpetual oblivion until we change the world.

  Frederick Lenz

  Inspirational, Buddhism, Forever

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• It requires courage to utter truth; for the higher Truth lifts her voice, the louder will error scream, until its inarticulate sound is forever silenced in oblivion

  Mary Baker Eddy

  Errors, Voice, Forever

  Mary Baker Eddy (2014). “Science And Health”, p.122, Jazzybee Verlag

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• And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul.

  George Meredith

  Soul, Drink, Ifs

  George Meredith (1912). “Poems of George Meredith”, p.227, Library of Alexandria

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• Every Harvard class should have one Democrat to rescue it from oblivion.

  Will Rogers

  Funny, Humorous, Party

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• There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

  Oscar Wilde

  Memories, Madness, Horror

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.201, Diversion Books

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• The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Memories, Book

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• the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

  John Green

  Suffering, Nihilism, Problem

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• Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

  Anna Seward

  Fading, Tides, Cold

  Anna Seward (1810). “Works”, p.82

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• Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.

  William Wordsworth

  Vanity, Earth, Evening

  William Wordsworth (1847). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.267

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• The 2014 election has given the GOP the rare opportunity to retroactively redeem its brand. The conventional perception, incessantly repeated by Democrats and the media, is that Washington dysfunction is the work of the Party of No. Expose the real agent of do-nothing. Show that, when Harry Reid can no longer consign House-passed legislation to oblivion, Congress can actually work.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Real, Party, Opportunity

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• As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.

  Mervyn Peake

  Ocean, Imagination, Effort

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• One must console oneself with the thought that time has a sieve through which most of these important things run into the ocean of oblivion and what remains after this selection is often still trite and bad.

  Albert Einstein

  Running, Ocean, Important

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives”, p.21, Princeton University Press

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• For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  May, Fancy, Forgotten

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1854). “The complete works: With an introductory essay upon his philosophical and theological opinions. Ed. by [William Greenougl Thayer] Shedd in 7 Vol”, p.57

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• Come, evening, once again, season of peace;
  Return, sweet evening, and continue long!
  Methinks I see thee in the streaky west,
  With matron step, slow moving, while the night
  Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ'd
  In letting fall the curtain of repose
  On bird and beast, the other charged for man
  With sweet oblivion of the cares of day.

  William Cowper

  Sweet, Moving, Fall

  William Cowper, James Montgomery (1859). “Poems ... With an introductory essay by James Montgomery. [With plates.]”, p.215

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• Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls his watery labyrinth, which whoso drinks forgets both joy and grief.

  John Milton

  Grief, Rivers, Joy

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• That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fire, Trying, Imagine

  "The Pale King". Book by David Foster Wallace, April 15, 2011.

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• The concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomachs is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love. That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the world's full octave. Love as Agape, Eros and Philos; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

  Stephen Fry

  Passion, Gay, Eight

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• Staring in the darkness, trying to sleep. My body was aching with tiredness. My limbs were numb. My sightless eyes were crazed with light/ I was dying of oblivion, but it wouldn't come. I didn't think I've ever sleep again.

  Kevin Brooks

  Eye, Sleep, Thinking

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• I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Dream, Morning, Rap

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.513, Simon and Schuster

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• We're not planning for the future. If we continue to spend ourselves into oblivion, we are going to destroy this nation.

  Benjamin Carson

  Planning, Future Plans, Nations

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