Incessant Quotes

• How vainly men themselves amaze, / To win the palm, the oak, or bays; / And their incessant labours see / Crowned from some single herb or tree.

  Andrew Marvell

  Winning, Men, Tree

  'The Garden' (1681) st. 1

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• The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Inspirational, Trials, Absence

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• Permanent success cannot be achieved except by incessant intellectual labour, always inspired by the ideal.

  Sarah Bernhardt

  Congratulations, Intellectual, Inspired

  Sarah Bernhardt (1924). “The Art of the Theatre”

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• But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

  Rick Moody

  Party, Paris, Important

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• Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

  Mary McCarthy

  Labor, Behinds, Finished

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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• Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.

  Mary McCarthy

  Men, Identity, Doe

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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• The scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world, inexorably impresses upon us a dynamic picture of the world of entities, structures and processes involved in continuous and incessant change and in process without ceasing.

  Arthur Peacocke

  Perspective, World, Structure

  "Paths From Science Towards God: The End of all Our Exploring".

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• Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Thinking

  Eckhart Tolle (2001). “Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now”, p.17, New World Library

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• No marriage can stand up under the strain of incessant.

  Johnny Weissmuller

  Motivational, Marriage, Athlete

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• The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

  Federico Fellini

  Children, Eye, Law

  "I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon". Book edited by Damian Pettigrew, December 1, 2003.

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• I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Money, Business, Philosophy

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.98, David M Gross

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• They [i.e. ambitious men] may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain, so Budaeus compares them; they climb and climb still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top.

  Robert Burton

  Dog, Business, Ambition

  "The Anatomy of Melancholy". Book by Robert Burton, 1621.

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• I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.

  Lucy Larcom

  Slave, Enough, Machinery

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

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• How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

  C. S. Lewis

  Age, Aging, Old Age

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• The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.

  Donal Henahan

  Brain, Listening, Results

  "Music View; When Inspired Awfulness Becomes Interesting" by Donal Henahan, www.nytimes.com. August 31, 1986.

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• It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Country, Peace, Fear

  Douglas MacArthur's speech to the Michigan Legislature in Lansing (May 15, 1952) as quoted in "General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964" edited by Edward T. Imparato (p. 206), June 14, 2000.

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• There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Creativity, World, Novelty

  Henry David Thoreau (1977). “The portable Thoreau”, Penguin

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• It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Men, Law, People

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Quentin P. Taylor, John Jay (1998). “The Essential Federalist: A New Reading of the Federalist Papers”, p.79, Rowman & Littlefield

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• When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is 'control.' That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York.

  Thomas Sowell

  New York, Gun, Thinking

  "Random Thoughts". capitalismmagazine.com. August 25, 2008.

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• What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.

  Walter de La Mare

  Sky, Snow, Soldier

  'Napoleon' (1906)

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• In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Dream, Dark, Men

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• My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

  Anais Nin

  Pride, Worry, Talent

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• Anyone who lives with poor health or chronic pain, or who has endured poverty - real poverty - knows what it is to live with lack and a resulting fear so incessant that it becomes thoroughly normalized, invisible in its ubiquity. If you're lucky enough to have that fear begin to ease, it's an odd experience. A stranglehold eases off your entire body, one you never fully realized was there.

  C.E. Morgan

  Pain, Real, Ubiquity

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• As I became a creature of the empty tunnels, survival became easier and more difficult all at once. I gained in the physical skills and experience necessary to live on. I could defeat almost anything that wandered into my chosen domain. It did not take me long, however, to discover one nemesis that I could neither defeat nor flee. It followed me wherever I went - indeed, the farther I ran, the more it closed in around me. My enemy was solitude, the interminable, incessant silence of hushed corridors.

  R. A. Salvatore

  Tunnels, Skills, Long

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• But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Memories, Struggle, Ambition

  "The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald".

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