Refuge Quotes - Page 24

• In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city's life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

  Jonathan Raban

  Cities, Community, Nostalgic

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• Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.)

  Christopher Hitchens

  Hangover, Night, Glasses

  "Hitch-22" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. June 6, 2010.

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• Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.

  Bob Dylan

  Politics, Lasts, Scoundrels

  Song: Sweetheart Like You, Album: Infidels, 1983

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• I decided to write 'True Refuge' during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.

  Tara Brach

  Grief, Writing, Mobility

  "Where Do We Find Peace and Freedom?". Interview with Elisha Goldstein, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 14, 2013.

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• These (literary) studies are the food of youth, and consolation of age; they adorn prosperity, and are the comfort and refuge of adversity; they are pleasant at home, and are no incumbrance abroad; they accompany us at night, in our travels, and in our rural retreats.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Adversity, Home, Night

  "Oratio Pro Licinio Archia", VII, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 757,

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• Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Love Life, Giving, Amusement

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• Far away, where the swallows take refuge in winter, lived a king who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elise. The eleven brothers--they were all princes--used to go to school with stars on their breasts and swords at their sides. They wrote upon golden slates with diamond pencils, and could read just as well without a book as with one, so there was no mistake about their being princes. Their sister Elise sat upon a little footstool of looking-glass, and she has a picture-book which had cost the half of a kingdom. Oh, these children were very happy; but it was not to last thus forever.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Daughter, Brother, Stars

  Hans Christian Andersen (1993). “Andersen's Fairy Tales”, p.45, Wordsworth Editions

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• I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  Roger Ebert

  Wise, Long Ago, Editors

  Roger Ebert (2009). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2010”, p.583, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity; and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and corners, and then suddenly comes forth again, as soon as it believes itself at all safe.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Believe, Humanity, Fancy

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.56, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

  Aristotle

  Thinking, Men, Doctors

  Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.1746, Princeton University Press

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• Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

  Randall Jarrell

  Believe, Writing, Two

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 50), 1980.

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• The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.

  David Mamet

  Jingoism, Avant Garde, Nonsense

  David Mamet (2013). “Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama”, p.61, Vintage

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• Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Dream, Character, Frustrated

  Zygmunt Bauman (2013). “The Art of Life”, p.1992, John Wiley & Sons

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• Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries - or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me - in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Coffee, Two, House

  Letter to "The Keicomolo" - Kleiner, Cole, and Moe (October 1916), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 27), 1964.

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• Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.

  Eric Hoffer

  Strong, Power, Purpose

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

  Bill Vaughan

  Heart, Men, Mistress

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• The statesman, lawyer, merchant, man of trade
  Pants for the refuge of some rural shade,
  Where all his long anxieties forgot
  Amid the charms of a sequester'd spot,
  Or recollected only to gild o'er
  And add a smile to what was sweet before,
  He may possess the joys he thinks he sees,
  Lay his old age upon the lap of ease,
  Improve the remnant of his wasted span.
  And having lived a trifler, die a man.

  William Cowper

  Sweet, Retirement, Thinking

  William Cowper (1847). “Poems, with a memoir of the author”, p.146

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• There are some vile and contemptible men who, allowing themselves to be conquered by misfortune, seek a refuge in death.

  Agathon

  Men, Despair, Allowing

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• First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Men, Egypt

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.21, Macmillan

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• From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

  Lord Acton

  People, Redemption, Appeals

  John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom (and other Essays)”, p.36, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male "culture," in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our "society" are raving sex maniacs.

  Valerie Solanas

  Sex, Males, Culture

  Valerie Solanas (1971). “SCUM manifesto”

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• Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

  Theodor Adorno

  Revenge, Home, Independent

  "Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschadigten Leben (Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life)". Book by Theodor Adorno (1951) translated by E. Jephcott (§ 1), 1974.

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• That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.

  Ilka Chase

  Children, Real, Long Ago

  Ilka Chase (1967). “Fresh from the Laundry”

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• It has always been the habit of Catholic in danger and in troublous times to fly for refuge to Mary, and to seek for peace in Her maternal goodness; showing that the Catholic Church has always, and with justice, put all her hope and trust in the Mother of God. And truly the Immaculate Virgin, chosen to be the Mother of God and thereby associated with Him in the work of man's salvation, has a favour and power with Her Son greater than any human or angelic creature has ever obtained, or ever can gain

  Pope Leo X

  Mother, Son, Men

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• As for me and my house, I have no other refuge than this command of Jesus, 'Only believe' that is my refuge.

  T. B. Joshua

  Jesus, Believe, House

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