Intermittent Quotes

• Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Listening

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• The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

  Margaret Drabble

  Reality, Mind, Bears

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• Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Music, Hearing, Perpetual

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• Laughter, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Laughter, Noise, Inarticulate

  Ambrose Bierce (1958). “The Devil's Dictionary: A Selection of the Bitter Definitions of Ambrose Bierce”, p.100, Prabhat Prakashan

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• The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.

  John Boyd Orr

  War, Civilization, Has Beens

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• Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

  Fernand Braudel

  Firefly, Dark, Light

  Fernand Braudel (1995). “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II”, p.901, Univ of California Press

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• And the way
  Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes
  Not heard of for years at a time, did,
  Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise
  It was inside the house,
  And always getting narrower.

  John Ashbery

  Moving, Thoughtful, Thinking

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”, Penguin Group USA

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• The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet.

  Stewart Brand

  Earth, Problem, Surface

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sympathy, Knowledge, Intelligence

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.361, Simon and Schuster

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• Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Artist, Humanity, Vitality

  "Superheroes movies like Avengers Assemble should not be scorned" by Tom Hiddleston, www.theguardian.com. April 19, 2012.

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• The greatest trouble with most of us is that our demands upon ourselves are so feeble, the call upon the great within of us so weak and intermittent that it makes no impression upon the creative energies; it lacks the force that transmutes desires into realities.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Commitment, Reality, Creative

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• Wit is an intermittent fountain; kindness is a perennial spring.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Kindness, Spring, Fountain

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• My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Feet, Atmosphere, Desire

  Henry David Thoreau (1960). “H. D. Thoreau, a Writer's Journal”, p.26, Courier Corporation

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• the intermittent breeze carried her scent to me again and again , singing in another language of memories from another form .

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Memories, Singing, Scent

  Maggie Stiefvater (2014). “Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)”, p.285, Scholastic Inc.

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• The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

  Erik Larson

  Adults

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• Like waves, our feelings may continue by repeating themselves, by intermittent rushes; but no emotion any more than a wave can long retain its own individual form.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Long, Feelings, May

  Henry Ward Beecher (1897). “The Original Plymouth Pulpit: Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn”

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• We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry.

  G. M. Trevelyan

  Running, Children, Insanity

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• Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.

  John Berger

  Art, Italian, Space

  "Past present" by John Berger, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2002.

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• One of the reasons intermittent fasting can work is that it reconnects you with what hunger feels like.

  Chris Mohr

  Fasting, Hunger, Reason

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• Sincere repentance is continual. Believers repent until their dying day. This dropping well is not intermittent.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Dying, Sincere, Repentance

  Charles Spurgeon (2016). “Morning and Evening”, p.1151, Discovery House

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• I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Stars, Philosophy, Men

  Olaf Stapledon (1975). “To the End of Time”, Macmillan Reference USA

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• suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you - who you really are - do survive.

  June Jordan

  Suicide, Thinking, Survival

  June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.93, Basic Books

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• A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge - I find one of the great advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive.

  E. M. Forster

  Running, Views, Long

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• At times the [radio telescope] records exhibited a feature characteristic of interference, occurring some time later than the passage of the two known sources. This intermittent feature was curious, and I recall saying once that we would have to investigate the origin of that interference some day. We joked that it was probably due to the faulty ignition of some farm hand returning from a date.

  Kenneth Franklin

  Hands, Two, Records

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• It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

  Marisha Pessl

  People, Feelings, Common

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.229, Penguin

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