Birth Quotes - Page 37

• It is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births.... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive.

  Max Frisch

  Reflection, Views, Order

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• I was born in a Negro town.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Race, Towns, Born

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.28, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• Face troubles from their birth, for 'tis too late to cure
  When long delay has given the evil strength.
  Haste then; postpone not to the coming hour: tomorrow
  He'll be less ready who's not ready now.

  Ovid

  Long, Evil, Haste

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• The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

  Albert Camus

  Artist, Revolution, Poet

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• Not to be born surpasses all reckoning. The next best thing by far, when one has been born is to go back as swiftly as possible whence one came.

  Sophocles

  Next, Reckoning, Born

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• A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Ideas, Opposites

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1913*). “Golden Hours with Samuel Taylor Coleridge”

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• Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.

  Blaise Pascal

  Running, Ignorance, Knowledge

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• If we are the younger, we may envy the older. If we are the older, we may feel that the younger is always being indulged. In otherwords, no matter what position we hold in family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped.

  Judith Viorst

  Order, Envy, Doubt

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• Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  Country, Teacher, Money

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• The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against nature.

  Bertrand Russell

  Birth Control, Objections

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.64, Routledge

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• Big heart,
  wide as a watermelon,
  but wise as birth,
  there is so much abundance
  in the people I have.

  Anne Sexton

  Wise, Heart, People

  Anne Sexton (1975). “The Awful Rowing Toward God”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

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• Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

  Stendhal

  Pride, Men, Flattery

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• It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.

  Anna Quindlen

  Sex, Believe, Heart

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.219, Ballantine Books

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• Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

  Walter Pater

  Eye, Creativity, Exercise

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• The Reproductions of the living Ens
  From sires to sons, unknown to sex, commence...
  Unknown to sex the pregnant oyster swells,
  And coral-insects build their radiate shells...
  Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
  And fathers live transmitted in their sons;
  Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,
  The same their manners, and the same their minds.

  Erasmus Darwin

  Running, Sex, Father

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• The end of a life is always vivifying.

  Samuel Beckett

  Life, Death, Ends

  Samuel Beckett (2009). “Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable”, p.206, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.

  Samuel Beckett

  Dark, Forever, Want

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “More Pricks Than Kicks”, p.29, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Courage, Hero, Giving

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• Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

  Steven Weinberg

  Marriage, Beauty, Beautiful

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• I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.

  Stefan Zweig

  Depression, Dream, Giving

  Stefan Zweig, Friderike Maria Burger Winternitz Zweig (1954). “Stefan and Friderike Zweig: their correspondence, 1912-1942”

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• While American men are fighting to rid the old world of autocracy let American women set to and rid the new world of this intolerable old burden of sex ignorance.

  Crystal Eastman

  Sex, War, Ignorance

  Crystal Eastman (1978). “Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The tendency of organization is to kill out the spirit which gave it birth. Organizations do not protect the sacredness of the individual; their tendency is to sink the individual in the mass, to sacrifice his rights, and to immolate him on the altar of some fancied good.

  Angelina Grimke

  Sacrifice, Rights, Organization

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• It's not the suffering of birth, death, love that the young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without dream, eating the spare bread in bitterness, being a slave without the security of a slave.

  Meridel Le Sueur

  Dream, Suffering, Bread

  Meridel Le Sueur, Elaine Hedges (1990). “Ripening: Selected Work”, p.143, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• The Moral Majority supports legislators who oppose abortions but also oppose child nutrition and day care. From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.

  Barney Frank

  Children, Party, Day Care

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• When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. The ocean of life rises and falls within us - birth and death, joy and pain, it is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all.

  Jack Kornfield

  Pain, Ocean, Fall

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