Phantoms Quotes - Page 11

• Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Strong, Heart, Apology

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• Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men, nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Men, Soul, Atheism

  "Ingersoll the Magnificent". Book by Joseph L. Lewis, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1957.

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• Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again.

  Diane Ackerman

  Space, Needs, Found

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir”, p.180, W. W. Norton & Company

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• God is not an elusive dream or a phantom to chase, but a divine person to know. He does not avoid us, but seeks us. When we seek Him, the contact is instantaneous.

  Neva Coyle

  Dream, Doe, Divine

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• In that undifferentiated reality of the Self there is eternal bliss. All the phantoms of existence fade away.

  Frederick Lenz

  Yoga, Reality, Self

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• We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.

  Daphne du Maurier

  Sunshine, Yesterday, Shadow

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• Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

  Herman Melville

  Brother, Ocean, Keys

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.9

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• Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Color, Shadow

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.241, e-artnow

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• There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Night, Reality

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.92, Wordsworth Editions

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• We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Stupid, Believe, Work Out

  Source: www.terrain.org

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• I have questioned myself about the brutality in the last few novels. Actually in The Leopard, in hindsight, I feel I went a little bit too far with screaming blood. There are a couple of scenes that I regret and wish I had the chance to rewrite. Phantom has less blood.

  Jo Nesbo

  Couple, Regret, Blood

  "Jo Nesbø: 'I am a vulture'". Interview with Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. March 10, 2012.

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• Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

  Carl Sandburg

  Rainbow, Poetry, Going Away

  Carl Sandburg (2015). “Harvest Poems: 1910-1960”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Insecure, Ego, Defense

  Eckhart Tolle (2001). “Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now”, p.28, New World Library

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• To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reality, Literature, Disease

  Virginia Woolf (2006). “Orlando (Annotated): A Biography”, p.123, HMH

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• The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Party, Night, Tree

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• The world runs on from one folly to another; and the man who, solely from regard to the opinion of others, and without any wish or necessity of his own, toils after gold, honour, or any other phantom, is no better than a fool.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Running, Men, Wish

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “The Sorrows of Young Werther: Top Classic of German”, p.19, 谷月社

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• And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, wiht a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. - Sal Paradise

  Jack Kerouac

  Moving, Fall, Angel

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• The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

  Philip K. Dick

  Insanity, Teeth, Doe

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “The VALIS Trilogy”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)

  June Jordan

  Reality, Hatred, Tree

  June Jordan (2012). “Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan”, p.232, Copper Canyon Press

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• As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Spiritual, Loss, Grandchildren

  Farewell Address, delivered 17 January 1961

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• Throughout history, works of art have been stolen under mysterious circumstances...Said by some to be the work of "Phantom" thieves... ...Others dismiss it as mere myth. But in this country, the stories are all too true. The name of this mysterious thief? "Dark." And his true identity? No one knows.

  Yukiru Sugisaki

  Country, Art, Dark

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• Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Littles, Sometimes

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.204, Virginia Woolf

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• Haunted Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine, Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing And lay ghost hands on everything, But leave the noonday's warm sunshine To living lads for mirth and wine. I met you suddenly down the street, Strangers assume your phantom faces, You grin at me from daylight places, Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet Dead men down the morning street.

  Robert Graves

  Morning, Wine, Sunshine

  Robert Graves (1920). “Country Sentiment”

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• The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows.

  Adolfo Bioy Casares

  Love Is, Perception, Shadow

  Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ruth L. C. Simms (2003). “The invention of Morel”, New York Review of Books

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• But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet. I still loved him. It felt like anything else permanent that has gone missing; a lost tooth, a severed leg. You might know better, but that doesn’t keep your tongue from poling at the hole in your gum, or your phantom limb from aching.

  Jodi Picoult

  Moving, Heart, Feet

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.268, Simon and Schuster

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