Lofty Quotes - Page 4

• A tall, well-built man with a deep chest and broad shoulders can carry a heavy burden with ease and unconcern, and still keep one hand free; a dwarf would be crushed by half that weight. Thus lofty posts make great men greater still, and small men much smaller.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Men, Office, Small Man

  "Of Man". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.

  Annie Besant

  Simple, Men, Evolution

  Annie Besant (2012). “The Theosophical Writings of Annie Besant”, p.744, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Remember, you and you alone are responsible for maintaining your energy. Give up blaming, complaining and excuse making, and keep taking action in the direction of your goals - however mundane or lofty they may be.

  Jack Canfield

  Inspirational, Giving Up, Remember You

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• I was thrust into a really lofty, enviable, but isolated position with 'Princess Diaries' in that I could carry a film before I really knew if I could act.

  Anne Hathaway

  Princess, Diaries, Film

  The Associated Press Interview, www.cbsnews.com. June 21, 2006.

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• Keep your feet on the ground and your thoughts at lofty heights.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Peace, Feet, Height

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.131, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• In my earliest of years, my mother was a huge force in my life. She was for all intents and purposes, a single parent. My father had abandoned us. He was an alcoholic and a physical abuser. My mother lived through that tyranny and made her living as a domestic worker. She was uneducated but she brought high principles and decent values into our existence, and she set lofty goals for herself and for her children. We were forever inspired by her strength and by her resistance to racism and to fascism.

  Harry Belafonte

  Mother, Children, Father

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

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• I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.

  Alice Munro

  Romance, Attention, Notion

  Alice Munro (1999). “The love of a good woman: stories”, Penguin, 1999

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• We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Kindness, Character, Real Friends

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.259, Princeton University Press

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• My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Taken

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• The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.

  Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

  Dream, Exercise, Mind

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• Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Animal, Past

  Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

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• The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Men, Thinking, Church

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1975). “The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life”

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• What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

  Thomas Sowell

  Circles, Doe, Phrases

  Thomas Sowell (1996). “Knowledge And Decisions”, p.296, Basic Books

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• Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideals hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Views, People

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1968). “I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King, Jr”

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• That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.

  Will Durant

  Christian, Jesus, Powerful

  Will Durant (1944). “The Story of Civilization...: Caesar and Christ”

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• When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms, not shadows of a fading summer; but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.

  Djuna Barnes

  Summer, Book, School

  Djuna Barnes, Alyce Barry (1989). “New York”, Sun & Moon Pr

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• I'm profoundly changed. There's a bittersweet emotion that I feel from playing this role. . . . I want the world to be different because I was here. However lofty or crazy or delusional that may sound, I want people's lives to be better because I was here.

  Will Smith

  Crazy, Famous Inspirational, People

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• So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Selfish, Learning, Watches

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• A bird maintains itself in the air by imperceptible balancing, when near to the mountains or lofty ocean crags; it does this by means of the curves of the winds which as they strike against these projections, being forced to preserve their first impetus bend their straight course towards the sky with divers revolutions, at the beginning of which the birds come to a stop with their wings open, receiving underneath themselves the continual buffetings of the reflex courses of the winds.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Ocean, Mean, Science

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• Imagination is like a lofty building reared to meet the sky; whereas fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will.

  Gelett Burgess

  Wind, Sky, Imagination

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• There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual

  James Russell Lowell

  Self, Sensual, Life Is

  James Russell Lowell (1872). “Among my Books: Contents: Dryden. Witchcraft. Shakespeare once more. New England two centuries ago. Lessing. Rousseau and the Sentimentalists”, p.363

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• Patriotism! It is used to define so many diversities, to justify so many wrongs, to compass so many ends, that its life is killed out; it becomes a dead word in the vocabulary-a blank counter, to be moved to any part of the game; and that flag which, streaming from the mast-head of our ship of state, striped with martyr-blood, and glistening with the stars of lofty promise, should always indicate our worldwide mission, and the glorious destinies that we carry forward, is bandied about in every selfish skirmish, and held up as the symbol of every political privateer.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Stars, Selfish, Destiny

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• Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.

  Helen Keller

  Family, Knowledge And Power, Deep Life

  Helen Keller (2012). “The Story of My Life”, p.67, Courier Corporation

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• Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!

  Stanislaw Lem

  Faces, Six, Heroism

  STANISLAW LEM (1974). “THE CYBERIAD”

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• What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in "serious" music.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Laughter, Sadness, Fighting

  "Sovetskoye Iskusstvo", quoted in "Shostakovich: A Life", transl. by Laurel Fay (2000) p. 77, November 5, 1934.

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