Desert Quotes - Page 14

• The desert feels Irish in a way - lonely and barren. If someone said, 'Think of a happy place for you,' I'd say a glacial plane near the South Pole, the wind howling, nobody in sight, a shack with a pot-belly stove and some tea.

  Donal Logue

  Lonely, Thinking, Sight

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• I put all the blame legally and morally on the actions of the terrorist, but America's secular and anti-Christian environment left us open to our Lord's decision not to protect. When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture ... the result is not good.

  Jerry Falwell

  Christian, Religious, Humor

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• The retirement of Athanasius, which ended only with the life of Constantius, was spent, for the most part, in the society of the monks, who faithfully served him as guards, as secretaries, and as messengers; but the importance of maintaining a more intimate connection with the catholic party tempted him, whenever the diligence of the pursuit was abated, to emerge from the desert, to introduce himself into Alexandria, and to trust his person to the discretion of his friends and adherents.

  Edward Gibbon

  Retirement, Party, History

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.437, Wordsworth Editions

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• we are far too used to the assumption that poetry and poets will be there when we want them, no matter how long they have been ignored, taken for granted, misused. After all, isn't poetry a form of prophecy, and aren't prophets known for their talent for flourishing in inhospitable deserts and other bleak surroundings? Maybe. But maybe not indefinitely.

  Jan Clausen

  Taken, Long, Poetry

  Jan Clausen (1982). “A movement of poets: thoughts on poetry and feminism”, Long Haul Pr

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• People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

  Michael J. Fox

  Leadership, Drinking, Discovery

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• Grace Kelly was a glacially cool, like a wonderful sherbet in the middle of the desert. Cooling, icy, clean. She was a genetic miracle, a superior woman.

  Oleg Cassini

  Miracle, Grace, Icy

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• The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, War, People

  "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". Book by Milan Kundera, 1979.

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• When does money run out of time? The countdown begins when investable assets pose too much risk for too little return; when lenders desert credit markets for other alternatives such as cash or real assets.

  Bill Gross

  Running, Real, Risk

  "Credit Supernova!" by Bill Gross, www.pimco.com. February 2013.

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• Human civilization has been changing the Earths environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

  Jamais Cascio

  Urbanization, Wind, Civilization

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• There are two easy ways to die in the desert - thirst and drowning.

  Craig Childs

  Two, Way, Easy

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• The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.

  Tahir Shah

  Rain, Forests, Horror

  Tahir Shah “In Search of King Solomon's Mines, Dyslexic edition”, Lulu.com

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• Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.

  Tahir Shah

  Skeletons, Years, Elephants

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• The entity that gives life and motion to the human body is finer still and lies infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When this entity deserts the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder - deserted, motionless, dead.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Lying, Giving, Soul

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• When men change swords for ledgers, and desert
  The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed
  I had, my Country--am I to be blamed?

  William Wordsworth

  Country, Fear, Men

  William Wordsworth (1851). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth ...”, p.255

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• Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Leadership, Men, Blow

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• The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

  Mark Twain

  Breathing, Luck, Want

  Mark Twain (2009). “Mark Twain’s Book of Animals”, p.59, Univ of California Press

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• I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

  Mark Twain

  Lonely, New York, Race

  Mark Twain, Milton Meltzer (2002). “Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography”, p.82, University of Missouri Press

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• The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.

  John Dewey

  Children, Childhood, Community

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Murray G. Murphey (2008). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924: 1922”, p.71, SIU Press

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• The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Technology, Silence, Humanity

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• Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.

  Ouida

  Angel, Passion, Rose

  Ouida (1896). “Views and Opinions”

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• A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.

  Washington Irving

  Mother, Brother, Children

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• The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.

  Alexander Smith

  Greatness, World

  Alexander Smith (1854). “Poems”, p.120

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• Vain-glorious man, when fluttering wind does blow
  In his light wing's, is lifted up to sky;
  The scorn of-knighthood and true chivalry.
  To think, without desert of gentle deed
  And noble worth, to be advanced high,
  Such praise is shame, but honour, virtue's meed,
  Doth bear the fairest flower in honourable seed.

  Edmund Spenser

  Flower, Blow, Men

  Edmund Spenser (1965). “Books I and II of the Faerie queene: the mutability cantos, and selections from the minor poetry”

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• Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Dust, Littles, Study

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.6

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• Expediency is a law of nature. The camel is a wonderful animal, but the desert made the camel.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Animal, Law, Camels

  Benjamin Disraeli (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Benjamin Disraeli (Illustrated)”, p.3319, Delphi Classics

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