Quickening Quotes

• It's a very small and select slice of all the people who have ever been born. I believe we've come back during this time, those of us who are here now, specifically to experience it. And to cause a 'quickening of the spirit.'

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Inspiring, Believe, People

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• There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

  Martha Graham

  Positive, Uplifting, Dance

  "The Life and Work of Martha Graham". Book by Agnes de Mille, p. 264, 1991.

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• There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

  Martha Graham

  Dance, Block, Yoga

  "The Life and Work of Martha Graham". Book by Agnes de Mille, p. 264, 1991.

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• Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Waste, Wasting Time, Life Is

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Douglas B. Quine (2008). “Quine in Dialogue”, p.333, Harvard University Press

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• Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

  James Russell Lowell

  Book, Reading, Mind

  1849 'Nationality in Literature', in the North American Review, Jul.

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• There has never been a time on Earth like we see today. What we need are more ways to experience our interconnectedness - it is a precursor to deep love. So in this quickening light, with the dawn of each new day, let us look for love. Let us no longer struggle. Let us ever become who we most want to be. As we begin to be who we truly are, the world will be a better place.

  John Denver

  Struggle, Deep Love, Light

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• Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

  Giacomo Puccini

  Inspiring, Art, Inspiration

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• It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

  Martha Graham

  Expression, Vitality, Unrest

  "The Life and Work of Martha Graham". Book by Agnes de Mille, p. 264, 1991.

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• No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

  Martha Graham

  Dance, Blessed, Artist

  "The Life and Work of Martha Graham". Book by Agnes de Mille, p. 264, 1991.

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• Love to me is - the final lines in Dante's Paradiso, when he says, "The love that moves the Sun and all the stars" - it's what draws us together, it's why we have leaky margins with each other. It is that sumptuous, sensuous, sensitive quickening that happens when we really know ourselves as love and see ourselves as loving.

  Jean Houston

  Stars, Moving, Together

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• As we move into the 21st century, there's what the Bible calls a 'quickening of the spirit.'

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Moving, Literature, Spirit

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• You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

  Martha Graham

  Dance, Motivation, Believe

  "The Life and Work of Martha Graham". Book by Agnes de Mille, p. 264, 1991.

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• And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

  W. H. Auden

  Heart, Bears, Forgotten

  1936 'Night Mail', written to accompany a documentary by the Post Office Film Unit.

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• In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Memories, Self, Long

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser. Introduction, 1949.

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• A new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is nonetheless of great value in quickening the spirit of invention.

  Michael J. Gelb

  Ideas, May, Spirit

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• I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation.

  William Wordsworth

  Sweet, Heaven, Body

  1799-1805 The Prelude, bk.1, l.33-8 (published 1850).

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• A spiritual Christian therefore is one whose spirit is led by God's Spirit... Perhaps their speech does convey truth, but without the quickening of the Holy Spirit even truth is of small advantage.

  Watchman Nee

  Christian, Spiritual, Doe

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• Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His Beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose - and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.

  William Temple

  Heart, Self, Worship Music

  William Temple (1939). “Readings in St. John's Gospel ...”

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• No eternal learning can take place without that quickening of the Spirit from heaven.

  Jeffrey R. Holland

  Heaven, Spirit, Eternal

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• And rural nature is full of the same quickening spirit-it is, in fact, the exhaustless mine from which the poet and the painter have brought such wondrous treasures-an unfailing fountain of intellectual enjoyment, where all may drink, and be awakened to a deeper feeling of the works of genius, and a keener perception of the beauty of our existence. For those whose days are all consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolities of fashion, unobservant of nature's loveliness, are unconscious of the harmony of creation

  Thomas Cole

  Fashion, Nature, Feelings

  Thomas Cole (1980). “The collected essays and prose sketches”

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• Advertising enriches life by quickening the imagination, arousing interest and enlarging the taste.

  Ralph Washington Sockman

  Imagination, Taste, Advertising

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• So that, were it the purpose of God to produce comets as signs of his wrath it would be true to say that he is quickening a false devotion almost all over the world, increasing the number of pilgrims to Mecca, multiplying the offerings to the most famous impostors, inducing men to build mosques for Mohammedan worship, causing the invention of new superstitions among the dervishes - in a word, stimulating many abominable things which otherwise might not have been.

  Pierre Bayle

  Men, Offering, Numbers

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• Every time I caught a fish, I wondered how something so small could have such clear, pure strength. It kept reminding me of another sensation, from another realm. The fish on the line, I eventually realized, felt like the baby, kicking inside you. Or the shocking, life-hungry pull of the baby on the breast. Perhaps fishing is like quickening for men, a long and patient wait for a few electric moments when they feel connected to another life.

  Marni Jackson

  Baby, Men, Fishing

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• I will not look upon the quickening sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure; Time shall not lose our passages.

  John Donne

  Running, Time, Fire

  c.1595 Elegies, no.12,'His Parting from Her'.

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• Since the foundation of the world man has had nearly all the forces on his side, working with him and for him; his intellect has been stimulated, while that of woman has been abased; he has had the run of the world and all quickening and brightening things, while she has sat in the cinders, and until of late been illumined only by his reflected light.

  Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford

  Running, Men, Light

  Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (1881). “The Servant Girl Question”

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