Astonishing Quotes - Page 3

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

James A. Baldwin

Country, People, Speak

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Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing.

Lytton Strachey

Writing, Men, Creation Of Man

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When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good. . . . When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.

Carl Rogers

Responsibility, Confusion, Empathy

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Carla Hesse has given us an astonishing new look at women's struggle for independent expression and moral autonomy during the French Revolution and afterward. Denied the political and civil rights of men, literary women plunged into the expanded world of publication, answering the men's philosophical treatises with provocative novels about women's choices and chances. Lively and learned, The Other Enlightenment links women from Madame de Stael to Simone de Beauvoir in an alternate and daring path to the modern.

Natalie Zemon Davis

Philosophical, Struggle, Independent

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ATLANTA NIGHTS not only changed my life, it changed my mind. An astonishing read, worth it at half the price.

Robin Wayne Bailey

Night, Atlanta, Mind

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To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.

Lionel Barrymore

Beautiful, Struggle, Book

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My sons the same, hes terribly funny. Its a wonderful power to have. Its also fantastically disarming. Women find it unbelievably disarming. You can say the most astonishing things if youre funny. You can tell a woman that shes irresistibly attractive, but do it in such a funny way.

Robbie Coltraine

Son, Way, Wonderful

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Having observed the forces of all things natural and celestial and having examined by painstaking investigation the sympathy among those things, brings into the open powers hidden and stored away in nature; thus, magic links lower things (as if they were magical enticements) to the gifts of higher things...so that astonishing miracles thereby occur.

Giambattista della Porta

Inspiration, Addiction, Miracle

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By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success

Gore Vidal

Together, Inability, Disaster

Gore Vidal (1978). “Matters of fact and of fiction: essays, 1973-1976”, Vintage

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Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

Mark Twain

Memories, Done, Lines

Mark Twain (2015). “Life On The Mississippi: Mark Twain's Collections”, p.70, 谷月社

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Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible, without it nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

Arnold Bennett

Miracle, Raw Materials, Affair

Arnold Bennett (2013). “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: The Secret Edition - Open Your Heart to the Real Power and Magic of Living Faith and Let the Heaven Be in You, Go Deep Inside Yourself and Back, Feel the Crazy and Divine Love and Live for Your Dreams”, p.9, Lulu Press, Inc

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I have discovered an astonishing truth. God is attracted to weaknesses.

Jim Cymbala

Weakness

Jim Cymbala (2010). “Fresh Wind Fresh Fire: What Happens When God's Spirit Invades the Hearts of His People”, p.13, ReadHowYouWant.com

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Saving Italy is an astonishing account of a little known American effort to save Italy’s vast store of priceless monuments and art during World War II. While American warriors were fighting the length of the country, other Americans were courageously working alongside to preserve the irreplaceable best of Italy’s culture. Read it and be proud of those who were on their own front lines of a cruel war.

Tom Brokaw

Country, Art, War

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Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

John Medina

Exercise, Brain, Cubicles

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The greatest good we can do for anyone is not to share our wealth with them, but rather to reveal their own wealth to them. It's astonishing how much talent and ability rests inside a human being

Zig Ziglar

Talent, Wealth, Share

Zig Ziglar (2012). “Inspiration from the Top”, p.75, Thomas Nelson Inc

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The earth's warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors, I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the green stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed.

David Malouf

Nature, Night, Smell

David Malouf (2012). “An Imaginary Life”, p.147, Random House

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Don't you think it astonishing that, at 58, I am still working at improving my career?

Placido Domingo

Thinking, Careers, Stills

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We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.

Terence McKenna

Miracle, Looks, Alive

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To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you're smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness.

Rob Brezsny

Smart, People, Who Cares

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I am myself so exceedingly Nordic, as far as physical constitution is concerned, that I can enjoy almost any weather except what is called glorious weather. At the end of a few days, I am left wondering how the men of the Mediterranean ever managed to do almost all the most active and astonishing things that have been done.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men, Weather, Done

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Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth, Flower, Animal

Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Natural History Essays”, p.28, Gibbs Smith

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What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves.

Azar Nafisi

Queens, Historical, Looks

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It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.

G. H. Hardy

Knowledge, Science, Men

G. H. Hardy (1992). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.117, Cambridge University Press

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And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.

James Merrill

Thinking, Voice, Imagination

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I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

Edmund Burke

Ambition, Thinking, Abuse

Edmund Burke's remarks on the policy of the allies, as quoted in "The Works of Edmund Burke", 1839.

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