Dissolution Quotes - Page 4

• We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Morning, Wall, Eye

  Erich Maria Remarque (1983). “All Quiet on the Western Front”

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• When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Grateful, Light, Self

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• It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

  Samuel Beckett

  Suicide, Home, Lingering

  All That Fall (1957) p. 10

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• Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.

  William Ralph Inge

  Rivals, Way, Institutions

  William Ralph Inge (2015). “The Victorian Age”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Confused, Confusion, Ego

  Chogyam Trungpa (2010). “The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism; The Myth of Freedom; The Heart of the Bud dha; Selected Writings”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

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• That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

  Learned Hand

  Religious, Eye, Winning

  "A Plea for the Open Mind and Free Discussion" (speech), Albany, N.Y., 24 Oct. 1952

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• Do not, I beseech you be troubled by the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistake the hour of the night: it is already morning.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Morning, Pain, Mistake

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• It is only in times of social dissolution, as in the last age of the small Semitic states, when men and their gods were alike powerless before the advance of the Assyrians, that magical superstitions based on mere terror, or rites designed to conciliate alien gods, invade the sphere of tribal or national religion. In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

  William Robertson Smith

  Men, Age, May

  William Robertson Smith (1889). “Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series. The Fundamental Institutions”

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• The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.

  Robert Briffault

  Life, Ideas, Goal

  Robert Briffault (1969). “Reasons for anger”, Books for Libraries

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• Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent relieves we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.

  Malcolm De Chazal

  Life, Wise, Depressing

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• There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Air, Together

  Joseph Campbell (2011). “Myths to Live By”, p.146, Joseph Campbell Foundation

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• It is difficult to conceive any situation more painful than to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption.

  Zachary Macaulay

  Country, Agony, Darkness

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• Transcendence and dissolution, always the same thing.

  Brian Francis

  Transcendence

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• The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

  Ross Macdonald

  Memories, Moving, Sea

  Ross Macdonald (2012). “The Drowning Pool”, p.183, Penguin UK

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• The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.

  Clement Greenberg

  Profound, Texture, Answers

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.157, Beacon Press

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• The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Tasks, Realization, Eras

  Ludwig Feuerbach, Manfred H. Vogel (1966). “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future”, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill

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• The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love and peace. Strife, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed.

  Empedocles

  Love Is, Hands, Four Elements

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• ... I feel tired to death, paralyzed by this mysteriously wasted life's stubborn concentration on hopelessness and dissolution. It occurs to me that if I lie still like this for long enough, then I'll be dead when I finally wake again, and nothing can ever again torment me, beset me, or present me with evidence of my baseness and decay. That thought is the only one that can comfort me.

  Christer Kihlman

  Depression, Lying, Tired

  Christer Kihlman (1990). “The blue mother”

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• Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.

  Mark Doty

  Thinking, Names, Ties

  Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Night, Government, Crow

  Letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821.

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• The Greeks are wrong to recognize coming into being and perishing; for nothing comes into being nor perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being composition and perishing dissolution.

  Anaxagoras

  Life, Science, Greek

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• Look at Christ, my dear friend: His life was divine through and through, full of self-denial, and He did everything for mankind, finding His satisfaction and His delight in the dissolution of His material being.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Self, Delight, Satisfaction

  Mikhail Bakunin (1985). “Michael Bakunin: From out of the dustbin”

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• The cure-alls of the present day are infinitely various and infinitely obliging. Applied psychology, autosuggestion, and royal roads to learning or to wealth are urged upon us by kindly, if not altogether disinterested, reformers. Simple and easy systems for the dissolution of discord and strife; simple and easy systems for the development of personality and power. Booklets of counsel on 'How to Get What We Want,' which is impossible; booklets on 'Visualization,' warranted to make us want what we get, which is ignoble.

  Agnes Repplier

  Simple, Thinking, Personality

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• When this crisis began, crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world's biggest companies - companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars in assets - took place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night. We should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution or forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.

  Barack Obama

  Fall, Night, People

  Obama Wall Street Speech, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 14, 2009.

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• To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders of towns, counties or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws.

  John Adams

  Men, Self, Hands

  "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government". Book by John Adams. Chapter 3: "Marchamont Nedham: Errors of Government and Rules of Policy", Sixth Rule, 1787.

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