Perpetual Quotes - Page 21

• Perseverance in object, though not by the most direct way, is often more laudable than perpetual changes, as often as the object shifts light.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Perseverance, Light, Way

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, 1: Correspondence and Private Papers”, p.161

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• Sign at a New England church: Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?

  Dave Barry

  God, Light, Stupidity

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• In a world of universal poverty
  The philosophers alone will be fat
  Against the autumn winds
  In an autumn that will be perpetual.

  Wallace Stevens

  Philosophical, Autumn, Wind

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.152, Vintage

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• Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.

  Blaise Pascal

  Passion, Men, Deception

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen?... The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and the fire glowing in her cheeks.

  Angela Carter

  Mother, Air, Glowing

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• The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known).

  Martin Buber

  Gnosticism, Enemy, Atheism

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• Monarchs not only fashion their age, but are fashioned by it, so that they can become a sort of personification of the age. If Elizabeth I, independent, strong, represents the age of Shakespeare's heroines, a woman's heyday, Victoria represents another image of womanhood, predominant in the nineteenth century: a woman who, although queen in her own right, leaned on her husband, looked up to him, and went into perpetual mourning after his death. The feminist movement filled her with shocked horror and outrage.

  Eva Figes

  Fashion, Strong, Queens

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• Study detains the mind by the perpetual occurrence of something new, which may gratefully strike the imagination.

  Isaac Watts

  Imagination, Mind, May

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• The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

  Margot Asquith

  Kings, Ideas, People

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• That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Struggle, Competition, States

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). “The Signature of All Things”, p.444, A&C Black

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• The double law of attraction and radiation or of sympathy and antipathy, of fixedness and movement, which is the principle of Creation, and the perpetual cause of life.

  Albert Pike

  Sympathy, Law Of Attraction, Principles

  Albert Pike “Morals and Dogma : Scottish Rite in Freemasonry”, Lulu.com

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• Now to rivulets from the mountains Point the rods of fortune-tellers; Youth perpetual dwells in fountains, Not in flasks, and casks, and cellars.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Drinking, Mountain, Youth

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849). “The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Complete in One Volume”, p.110

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• Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Wise, Brave

  William Faulkner (1951). “Absalom, Absalom!”

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• [S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, War, Fighting

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• Sinners, hear and consider, if you wilfully condemn your souls to bestiality, God will condemn them to perpetual misery.

  Richard Baxter

  Soul, Misery, Gods Will

  Richard Baxter, William Orme (1830). “The practical works of Richard Baxter: with a life of the author and a critical examination of his writings by William Orme”, p.169

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• The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Emptiness, States, Very Good

  Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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• The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.

  Georges Bernanos

  Mean, Emotional, Animal

  Georges Bernanos (1999). “The Impostor”, p.152, U of Nebraska Press

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• I Have often thought if the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagances, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both. The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.

  Joseph Addison

  Wise, Men, Vanity

  Joseph Addison (1858). “Works, Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition: Withletters and Other Pieces Not Found in Any Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.530

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• Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice. If they knew its charms, the dignity that accompanies it, how much a free man feels like a king, the perpetual inner light that is produced by decorous self-awareness and realization, perhaps there would be no greater friends of freedom than those who are its worst enemies.

  Jose Marti

  Kings, Men, Worst Enemy

  "Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos" edited by Carlos Ripoll, 1994.

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• The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Desire, Habit

  Isaiah Berlin (1978). “Karl Marx: His Life and Environment”, p.93, Oxford University Press

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• As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

  Herbert Spencer

  Fall, Self, Long

  "The Principles of Ethics" by Herbert Spencer, (Ch. 10), 1897.

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• I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua ; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Powerful, Fighting, Europe

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Patrick Riley (1988). “Leibniz: Political Writings”, p.183, Cambridge University Press

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• It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.

  Camille Paglia

  Letting Go, Attitude, Reading

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Mean, Men, Desire

  Leviathan pt. 1, ch. 11 (1651)

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• In our worship of certainty we must distinguish between the sound certainty and the sham, between what is gold and what is tinsel; and then, when certainty is attained, we must remember that it is not the only good; that we can buy it at too high a price; that there is danger in perpetual quiescence as well as in perpetual motion; and that a compromise must be found in a principle of growth.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Growth, Gold, Sound

  "The Growth of the Law". Book by Benjamin N. Cardozo, 1924.

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