Lifetime Quotes - Page 14

• Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Sea, Soul

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• A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Thinking, Terror, Persons

  Barbara Kingsolver (2001). “Homeland and Other Stories”, Wheeler Pub Incorporated

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• If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

  May Sarton

  Couple, Writing, Thinking

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• If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ideas, Attention, May

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• Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

  Doris Lessing

  Pain, Cat, Knowing

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Particularly Cats-- and Rufus”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• By some fluke, my folks forgot to ask me the question most crucial to ensuring a lifetime of self-doubt: 'What if you fail?

  Lizz Winstead

  Confidence, Self, What If

  Lizz Winstead (2012). “Lizz Free or Die: Essays”, p.46, Penguin

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• It is important that early in life you choose companionable prejudices, for the fact is that they are likely to stay with you for a lifetime.

  Virginia Cary Hudson

  Important, Prejudice, Facts

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• If you feed a man a meal, you only feed him for a day-but if you teach a man to grow food, you feed him for a lifetime.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Helping Others, Men, People

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.60, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• [On President Clinton's address:] It was the worst inaugural address of our lifetime, and I think the only controversy will be between those who say it was completely and utterly banal and those who say, 'Well, not completely and utterly.

  Peggy Noonan

  Thinking, President, Addresses

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• For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown. ... It is a city that offers me more people -- more different kinds of people -- than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.

  Katharine Graham

  Eight, Cities, People

  Katharine Graham (2009). “Katharine Graham's Washington”, p.16, Vintage

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• For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime. This concept must be changed; we must realize in our bones that almost everything in time and history has changed except the human being.

  Uta Hagen

  Believe, Peculiar, Way

  Uta Hagen (2009). “Respect for Acting”, p.104, John Wiley & Sons

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• The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

  Storm Jameson

  Brother, Stupid, Men

  Storm Jameson (1956). “The Intruder”, London Macmillan 1956.

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• Better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.

  Robert De Niro

  Kings, Night, Schmucks

  "Fictional character: Rupert Pupkin". "The King of Comedy", www.imdb.com. December 18, 1982.

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• Technology is at the forefront of everything these days - communication, work. Its amazing and scary at the same time how robots have evolved, but I find it hard to believe that robots will completely rule the world. Not in my lifetime anyway.

  Graham McTavish

  Believe, Communication, Technology

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• Sometimes people come into your life for a season and other times for a lifetime.

  Fran Drescher

  People, Sometimes, Seasons

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• Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  Sick, Alive, Language

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• It seems to take a lifetime for us to learn that wisdom consists largely in a graceful acceptance of things that do not immediately concern us.

  Myrtle Reed

  Wisdom, Acceptance, Concern

  Myrtle Reed (1916). “Old Rose and Silver”, p.49, Library of Alexandria

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• You are going around on the wheel again and again. You go around and around from lifetime to lifetime. You never quite wake up. Enlightenment is waking up.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Suffering, Enlightenment

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• There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.

  Florence King

  Years, Sexism

  Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.65, Macmillan

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• It always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned. Talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless.

  Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

  Book, Writing, Men

  Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (1898). “The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C.L. Dodgson)”

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• One experienced minute sometimes teaches us more than a lifetime.

  Wladyslaw Sikorski

  Sometimes, Minutes, Teach

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• You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime. The hair-tearing / Grief of the mother / Whose child has been swept away.

  Mary Jo Bang

  Mother, Children, Grief

  Mary Jo Bang (2007). “Elegy: poems”, Graywolf Pr

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• Natural law is only whatever happens in your lifetime within fifty miles of you.

  Marcy Dermansky

  Natural, Natural Law, Housework

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• We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth. We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

  Barack Obama

  Acting, Use, Conflict

  Nobel Prize for Peace Acceptance Speech and Lecture, delivered 10 December 2009, Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway

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