Martyr Quotes - Page 7

• No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

  Zadie Smith

  Suicide, Beach, Ocean

  Zadie Smith (2000). “White teeth”

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• A martyr's just a casualty with really good PR.

  Mira Grant

  Casualties

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• We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Kings, Reality, Greek

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.16, Graphic Arts Books

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• You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know”.

  Penn Jillette

  Atheist, Smart, Brave

  Penn Jillette (2012). “God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• A dead martyr is just another corpse.

  Leo Gordon

  Hero, Idealism, Corpses

  "Fictional character: Major Craig". "Tobruk", www.imdb.com. 1967.

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• What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

  John le Carre

  Thinking, Cowboy, Play

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Sounds like some writers.

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• Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
  Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
  Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
  My heart remembers how!

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Rain, Heart, Blow

  1894 Songs of Travel (published 1896), no.45,'To S.R. Crockett (in reply to a dedication)', stanza 1.

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• Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

  Dylan Thomas

  Music, Musician

  Dylan Thomas (1954). “Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices”, p.52, New Directions Publishing

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• Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others--first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.

  Jean Baker Miller

  Mother, Children, Women

  Jean Baker Miller (2012). “Toward a New Psychology of Women”, p.62, Beacon Press

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• Power makes gods. Virtue makes martyrs.

  Mason Cooley

  God, Power, Virtue

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• I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Attitude, Suffering And Death, Lasts

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.56, Beacon Press

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• Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days. God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Struggle, Angel, Army

  Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir (2009). “The White Company: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.26, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hurt, Pain, Cities

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• I am convinced that the majority of the religious hierarchy today deplores the hardship inflicted on our people. I am referring not only to the martyrs but of the families who have been dispersed and terrified, who have no resources, and to the four million unemployed who are suffering from the economic chaos of a country which only a year earlier was giving employment to a million foreigners. Those who have chosen to serve God must feel profoundly sad at seeing ridicule poured on the most sacred principles of our religion.

  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

  Country, Religious, Years

  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (Shah of Iran) (1980). “The Shah's story”, Michael Joseph

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• Many a woman shudders... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Art, Army, Intellectual

  "The Female Experience". Book by Gerda Lerner (Chapter 87), 1977.

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• Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Stars, Hero, Honor

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• Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs; are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm.

  Arthur Helps

  Art, Business, Character

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• That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Jesus, Hero, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2907, Delphi Classics

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• In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands.

  James A. Garfield

  Struggle, Long, Church

  Garfield, James A. (1882). “The works of James Abram Garfield. Volume 2”, p.576, Best Books on

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• Religion is passionate, reckless, destructive, idol-smashing. It's a martyr burning at the stake. It's a crown of thorns and a cross.

  Martha Ostenso

  Idols, Religion, Thorns

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• Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

  Annie Dillard

  Ideas, Joy, Secret

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.174, Canongate Books

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• Being one step ahead makes you a leader Being fifty steps ahead could make you a martyr.

  John C. Maxwell

  Leader, Fifty, Steps

  John C. Maxwell (2015). “The Leadership Handbook: 26 Critical Lessons Every Leader Needs”, p.15, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Gratitude, Love Is, Axes

  Friedrich Schiller (2017). “Philosophical Letters of Friedrich Schiller”, p.20, Litres

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• "Gospel preachers nowadays preach the gospel of the Crucifixion, the Apostles preached the gospel of the Resurrection as well. The Crucifixion loses its meaning without the Resurrection. Without the Resurrection the death of Christ was only the heroic death of a noble martyr; with the Resurrection it is the atoning death the Son of God. It shows that death to be of sufficient value to cover our sins, for it was the sacrifice of the Son of God."

  R. A. Torrey

  Son, Sacrifice, Noble

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• All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

  Richard Le Gallienne

  Book, Eras, Periods

  Richard Le Gallienne (1915). “Vanishing Roads, and Other Essays”

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