Centre Quotes - Page 17

• Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal centre?
  As long as you do that you can never recognise your freedom.

  Wei Wu Wei

  Thinking, Long, Phenomenal

  Wei Wu Wei (2004). “Open Secret”, p.52, Sentient Publications

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• My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.

  Stephen Spender

  Eye, Light, Opposites

  Stephen Spender (1966). “World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centre is dark, it demands to be undefined.

  Alice Oswald

  Eye, Dark, Light

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• Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

  Jonathan Culler

  Art, Lying, Poetry

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• For the first time in the history of Bihar, I provided a stable government. Despite being denied funds by the Centre, Bihar survived on its resources. I provided pucca dwellings to half a million Dalit families.

  Lalu Prasad Yadav

  Government, Dwelling, Half

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• An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.

  Alan Bennett

  Daily Mail, Should, Articles

  Alan Bennett (2007). “Writing Home”, p.160, Macmillan

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• Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

  Northrop Frye

  Heart, Humans, Left

  Quoted by Paul Wilson in'Growing Up with Orwell', in The Idler, Jul - Aug 1989.

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• There would be a blaze and a confusion, in which timid men would doubt whether the constitution would be burned to tinder or only illuminated; but that blaze and that confusion would be dear to Mr. Daubney if he could stand as the centre figure, the great pyrotechnist who did it all, red from head to foot with the glare of the squibs with which his own hands were filling all the spaces.

  Anthony Trollope

  Men, Hands, Feet

  "Phineas Redux". Book by Anthony Trollope, Ch. 34, 1873.

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• Everybody deserves fair treatment, equal treatment in the eyes of the law and the state.
  And that includes gays, lesbians, transgender persons. I am not a fan of discrimination and bullying of anybody on the basis of race, on the basis of religion, on the basis of sexual orientation or gender. This is actually part and parcel of the agenda that's also going to be front and centre, and that is how are we treating women and girls.

  Barack Obama

  Girl, Bullying, Eye

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• We all have--to put it as nicely as I can--our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terriblepower that sometimes destroys us; but they don't talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before--truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Sex, War, Earthquakes

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• Twelve o'clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill; and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine; setting an eminent example to all mankind.

  Herman Melville

  Heart, Keys, Stopping

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.1428, Delphi Classics

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• Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight. The vacancy which afflicts them in private momentarily lifts when, oncemore, they feel the eyes of an audience upon them. Their old passion for holding the centre of the stage guides their uncertain footsteps to where the footlights shine, and summons up a wintry smile when the curtain rises.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Passion, Eye, Shining

  Malcolm Muggeridge, Ian Hunter (2003). “The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge”, p.123, Regent College Publishing

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• The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.

  John Berger

  Heart, Doors, Two

  John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.101, Vintage

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• To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

  John Berger

  Moving, World, May

  John Berger (2014). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos”, p.46, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body.

  George Berkeley

  Political, Religion, Body

  George Berkeley (1752). “A Miscellany, Containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects”, p.67

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• However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fate, Destiny, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (1980). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, Boston, [s.n.

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• Slobodan Miloševi?, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists. He reminded too many of us that inaction can be as toxic and murderous as action. He prepared us - for weal or woe - for the new world.

  Slobodan Milosević

  World, Woe, Toxic

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• Wherefore a monk's whole attention should thus be fixed on one point, and the rise and circle of all his thoughts be vigorously restricted to it; viz., to the recollection of God, as when a man, who is anxious to raise on high a vault of a round arch, must constantly draw a line round from its exact centre, and in accordance with the sure standard it gives discover by the laws of building all the evenness and roundness required.

  John Cassian

  Men, Law, Circles

  John Cassian, Aeterna Press (2016). “John Cassian Collection [4 Books]”, p.671, Aeterna Press

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• We enjoy a considerable net inflow of capital and I am sure that a condition of its coming, and staying, is that it is free to flow out again. It is also important for Hong Kong's status as a financial centre that there should be a maximum freedom of capital movement both in and out.

  John James Cowperthwaite

  Important, Hong Kong, Movement

  Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (p. 134), March 29, 1963.

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• Take five minutes to centre yourself in the morning...set your intention every day...if you don't have five minutes, you don't deserve to have the life of your dreams.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Dream, Morning, Intention

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• It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its centre. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity.

  Linda Colley

  Thinking, Islands, Scotland

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• As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago.

  Harriet Martineau

  Wise, Christian, Giving Up

  Harriet Martineau (1877). “Harriet Martineau's autobiography, with memorials by M.W. Chapman”, p.356

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• And the earth self-balanced on her centre hung.

  John Milton

  Self, Earth, Balanced

  1665 Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.242.

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• Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the keystone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till the habit is fully formed; but that done the habit may stand eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Evil, Arches, May

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 295, 1895.

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• The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister.

  Jane Austen

  Book, Men, Years

  Jane Austen (2014). “Sense and Sensibility By Jane Austen”, BookRix

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