Desert Quotes - Page 19

• All of the great prophets of modern times have come from the desert and were uneducated: Mohammed, Jesus and myself.

  Muammar al-Gaddafi

  Jesus, Modern, Prophet

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• We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside.

  Ahad Ha'am

  Son, Men, Thinking

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• Christian humility does not consist in denying what there is of good in us; but in an abiding sense of ill-desert, and in the consciousness that what we have of good is due to the grace of God.

  Charles Hodge

  Christian, Humility, Grace

  Charles Hodge (1860). “An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians”, p.317

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• New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

  Roland Barthes

  New York, Real, Men

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

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• When does gold ore become gold? When it is put through a process of fire. So the human being during the training becomes as pure as gold through suffering. It is the burning away of the dross. Suffering has a great redeeming quality. As a drop of water failing on the desert sand is sucked up immediately, so we must become nothing and nowhere ... we must disappear.

  Bhai Sahib Singh

  Spiritual, Fire, Water

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• Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober - minded men.

  Socrates

  Life, Success, Education

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• It is the doctors who desert the dying and there is so much to be learned about pain.

  Norman Barrett

  Death, Pain, Science

  Quoted in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 94: 430 (2001)

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• Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love.

  Andy Gibb

  Islands, Two, World

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• No man has a right to leave his wife to fight the battle alone if he is able to help. No man has a right to desert his children if he can possibly be of use. As long as he can add to the comfort of those he loves, as long as he can . . . be of any use, it is his duty to remain.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Life, Children, Fighting

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.2305, Library of Alexandria

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• When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

  Kazimir Malevich

  Art, Squares, Objectivity

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• Man is a living lie--a bitter jest Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Lying, Men, Bitter

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• The high desert has an effect on people. The place has a way of swallowing you up.

  Campbell Scott

  People, Swallowing, Way

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• There were two saints in the desert, who had sewed thorns into all their clothes; and we seek for nothing but comfort!

  John Vianney

  Attachment, Two, Clothes

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• A traveller, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one star, the Pole star, is of itself a great acquisition.

  Maria Mitchell

  Travel, Stars, Acquisition

  Maria Mitchell (1896). “Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals”

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• The world is empty - all of the people and places, the earth, the seas, mountains, deserts, forests and cities, and the beings that inhabit them, are unchangeable.

  Frederick Lenz

  Cities, Sea, People

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• Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out into fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world's billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future.

  Alan Thein Durning

  Latin, Rain, Land

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• Indeed, as we begin the twenty-first century, the money and traditional economies are slowly destroying their own support system. Increasing demands of the two economies are surpassing the sustainable yields of the ecosystems that underpin them. For example, one-third of the world's cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that is undermining its long-term productivity, fully half of the world's rangeland is overgrazed and deteriorating into desert, and the world's forests have shrunk by about half since the dawn of agriculture and are continuing to shrink.

  Stuart L. Hart

  Support Systems, Yield, Land

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• I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.

  Margaret Fuller

  Thinking, Heaven, Rising

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• Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.

  Derrick Jensen

  Dog, Forests, Heels

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• And when night, guiding her bright train of stars, Throws o'er the sleeping world her gloomy veil, Lonely amidst the desert and the darkness, Musing upon the night's calm majesty; Wrapt up in quietness, with shade and silence, My soul more closely worshippeth Thy presence; With an internal day I feel enlighten'd, And hear a voice, which biddeth me to hope.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Lonely, Stars, Sleep

  Alphonse de Lamartine (1849). “A biographical sketch: the poetical meditations : and, poetical and religious harmonies”, p.18

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• By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity : all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Song, Nature, Wall

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Poems”, p.159, The Floating Press

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• I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?

  Charles de Lint

  Book, Night, Cities

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• Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

  Edward Abbey

  Philosophy, Lying, Mean

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• That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Retirement, Solitude, World

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.135

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• There is no quality of the mind, or of the body, that so instantaneously and irresistibly captivates, as wit. An elegant writer has observed that wit may do very well for a mistress, but that he should prefer reason for a wife. He that deserts the latter, and gives himself up entirely to the guidance of the former, will certainly fall into many pitfalls and quagmires, like him who walks by flashes of lightning, rather than the steady beams of the sun.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fall, Giving, Wife

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.49

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