Ears Quotes - Page 15

• One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, Distance, Communication

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.91, Cosimo, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some of the biggest bores I've ever known are men who have been highly successful in business, particularly self-made heads of big companies. Before the first olive has settled into the first martini, they pour the stories of their lives into the nearest and sometimes the remotest ears capturable.... These men have indeed paid the price of success. To rise to the top of a big company often takes a totality of effort, concentration and dedication. Others, too, have to pay part of the price. Wife and children are out of mind even when in sight.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Children, Successful, Men

  13 Copy quote

• I don't expect the human race to progress in too many areas. However, having a child with an ear infection makes one hugely grateful for antibiotics.

  David Bowie

  Children, Grateful, Race

  "David Bowie: What I've Learned". www.esquire.com. March 2004.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have mummy truths to tell
  Whereat the living mock,
  Though not for sober ear,
  For maybe all that hear
  Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

  William Butler Yeats

  Truth, Afterlife, Laughing

  William Butler Yeats (1962). “Poems of William Butler Yeats”, p.37, Hayes Barton Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For what but eye and ear silence the mind
  With the minute particulars of mankind?

  William Butler Yeats

  Eye, Silence, Mind

  William Butler Yeats (1962). “Poems of William Butler Yeats”, p.233, Hayes Barton Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?
  I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;
  I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns.

  William Butler Yeats

  White, Calling, Stones

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.49, Wordsworth Editions

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I weave the shoes of Sorrow:
  Soundless shall be the footfall light
  In all men's ears of Sorrow,
  Sudden and light.

  William Butler Yeats

  Fate, Men, Shoes

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.5, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

  William James

  Truth, Real, Thinking

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.78, 谷月社

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.

  Joseph Addison

  Music, Art, Plato

  Joseph Addison (1867). “The Works of Joseph Addison: Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition, with Letters and Other Pieces Not Found in Ay Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.65

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?
  Or the glistening eye to the poison of a smile?

  William Blake

  Regret, Eye, Poison

  William Blake (2005). “Collected Poems”, p.162, Routledge

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
  All Nature was degraded;
  The King dropped a tear in the Queen's ear,
  And all his pictures faded.

  William Blake

  Kings, Queens, Artist

  Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds p. cix 'When Sir Joshua Reynolds died' (c.1808)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk.

  Alexander Graham Bell

  Laughter, Clouds, Laughing

  11 Copy quote

• I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.

  Charles Dickens

  Believe, Party, Sarcasm

  Charles Dickens (2016). “Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit”, p.280, Xist Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

  George Santayana

  Men, Soul, Vision

  'Little Essays' (1920) 'Ideal Immortality'

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

  James Joyce

  Night, Names, Maleficent

  James Joyce (2014). “The Dead and Other Stories: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition”, p.17, Broadview Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• If the hero is not a person, the emblem
  Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
  To stand taller than a person stands, has
  A wider brow, large and less human
  Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
  Of a primitive.

  Wallace Stevens

  Hero, Eye, Men

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

  Albert Camus

  Marriage, Hair, Numbers

  6 Copy quote

• I would like to think that no one would die anymore
  if we all believed in daisies
  but the worms know better, don't they?
  They slide into the ear of a corpse
  and listen to his great sigh.

  Anne Sexton

  Thinking, Slides, Daisies

  Anne Sexton (1974). “The death notebooks”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Soon the purple dark must bruise
  Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
  And the little Cupid lose
  Eyes and ears and chin and nose

  Donald Justice

  Heart, Eye, Dark

  Donald Justice (2009). “Collected Poems”, p.40, Knopf

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let my style capture all the sounds of my time. This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries. But later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud.

  Karl Kraus

  Music, Ocean, Style

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.

  Anna Quindlen

  Eye, Hands, Medicine

  4 Copy quote

• Mine be a cot beside the hill;
  A bee-hive's hum shall soothe my ear;
  A willowy brook, that turns a mill,
  With many a fall shall linger near.

  Samuel Rogers

  Fall, Bees, Hills

  Samuel Rogers (1843). “Poems”, p.215

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Salvation, O the joyful sound!
  'Tis pleasure to our ears;
  A sov'reign balm for ev'ry wound,
  A cordial for our fears.

  Isaac Watts

  Sound, Reign, Joyful

  Isaac Watts (1813). “The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts D.D. in Nine Volumes”, p.180

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Eye, Listening Ear

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... the hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sympathy, Children, Humanity

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2016). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: As Revealed in Her Letters & Diary (Abridged)”, p.233, BIG BYTE BOOKS

  4 Copy quote

  Show source