Inscriptions Quotes - Page 2

• What seems to us but dim funeral tapers may be heaven's distant lamps.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Memorial, Funeral, Heaven

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• Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.

  John Milton

  Death, Keys, Eternity Of Life

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• Creatures are cups. The sciences and the arts and all branches of knowledge are inscriptions around the outside of the cups. When a cup shatters, the writing can no longer be read. The wine's the thing! The wine that's held in the mold of these physical cups. Drink the wine and know what lasts and what to love. The man who truly asks must be sure of two things: One, that he's mistaken in what he's doing or thinking now. And two, that there is a wisdom he doesn't know yet. Asking is half of knowing.

  Rumi

  Art, Writing, Wine

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• History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

  Washington Irving

  Fall, Character, Dust

  Washington Irving (2006). “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories From the Sketch Book”, p.144, Penguin

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• So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Spring, Book, Years

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• for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

  Virginia Woolf

  Men, Unity, Tablets

  Virginia Woolf (2006). “To the Lighthouse”, p.92, OUP Oxford

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• Marble statues, engraved with public inscriptions, by which the life and soul return after death to noble leaders.

  Horace

  Leader, Soul, Return

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 524-25, Carmina, IV. 8, 1922.

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• History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  Home, Style, Facts

  Edward Hallett Carr (1965). “What is History?”

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• Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. Its just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.

  Carlos Barrios

  Writing, Names, People

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• Dr Johnson said, the inscription should have been in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent, should be.

  James Boswell

  Latin, Should Have, Drs

  James Boswell, John Wilson Croker (1831). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: In Five Volumes”, p.384

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• I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

  Socrates

  Farewell, Passion, Ignorance

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• In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!

  Bart D. Ehrman

  Christian, Jesus, Zero

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• Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

  Paul Valery

  Beautiful, Writing, Doe

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• The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.

  Margaret Atwood

  Art, Character, Two

  Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.44, Anchor

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• A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put.

  Bernard Ramm

  Tombstone, Cutting, Funeral

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• Just let the artist sign an empty canvas or a frame, with the inscription, 'I had such and such a concept in mind' for this work. The artist then need not bother with producing the work, and therefore need not be worried about being dis-satisfied. All he or she needs to do is to sell it to a collector. The collector will have the guarantee that the artist thought about the work, even if momentarily, and therefore be satisfied.

  Semir Zeki

  Artist, Guarantees That, Mind

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• Martin Luther King (Jr.) during the civil rights movement used to exclaim that he looked forward to heaven where he would be "Free at last." That is the inscription on his tomb in Atlanta.

  Billy Graham

  Kings, Freedom, Rights

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• When I spoke at the St. Lawrence Seaway ceremonies in 1969, I borrowed some words from the monument there which I had joined Queen Elizabeth in dedicating just 10 years before. That monument, as its inscription puts it, 'bears witness to the common purpose of two nations whose frontiers are the frontiers of friendship, whose ways are the ways of freedom, whose works are the works of peace'.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Queens, Two, Common Purpose

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• For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.

  Pericles

  Country, Heart, Men

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• Having read the inscriptions upon the tombstones of the great and little cemeteries, Wang Peng advised the Emperor to kill all the living and resurrect the dead.

  Paul Eldridge

  Life, Death, Tombstone

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• Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.

  Victor Hugo

  Wine, Sheep, Degrees

  Victor Hugo (2000). “Les Mis??rables”, p.439, Modern Library

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• Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

  Alexander Smith

  Coffins, Reputation, Melancholy

  Alexander Smith (1863). “Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.21

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• Over the door of the library in Thebes is the inscription "Medicine for the soul.

  Diodorus Siculus

  Doors, Medicine, Soul

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• I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)

  Helene Hanff

  Reading, Long, Wish

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• With sharpen'd sight pale Antiquaries pore, Th' inscription value, but the rust adore. This the blue varnish, that the green endears; The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years.

  Alexander Pope

  Sight, Blue, Years

  Alexander Pope (1797). “Moral essays”, p.305

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