Sheer Quotes - Page 9

• It is a crime to put a Roman citizen in chains, it is an enormity to flog one, sheer murder to slay one: what, then, shall I say of crucifixion? It is impossible to find the word for such an abomination.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Citizens, Impossible, Murder

  16 Copy quote

• The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to this increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair. This is everywhere apparent, most clearly in despair at its maximum and minimum. The devil's despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse. Therefore, his despair is the most absolute defiance. . . .

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Despair, Devil, Degrees

  11 Copy quote

• . . . as far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare - how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.

  Wole Soyinka

  Gun, Play, Voice

  24 Copy quote

• Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.

  Arthur Miller

  Humanity, Theatre, Crafts

  4 Copy quote

• [A] sick mind cannot be cured by the sheer force of persuasion.

  Vincent de Paul

  Wisdom, Sick, Mind

  Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre Coste (1985). “Correspondence, Conferences, Documents: Apr. 1650-July 1653”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Flower, Men, Bird

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.73, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

  Don DeLillo

  Beautiful, Light, Silence

  Don DeLillo (2011). “The Body Artist”, p.7, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

  Abba Eban

  Men, Rejection, Missing

  Abba Solomon Eban (1968). “Forward to peace: text of the address in the twenty-third plenary session of the Gerneral Assembly of the United Nations, Monday, 8 October, 1968”

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have always felt it a great privilege to be in the theater, and I am grateful to all the playwrights who have given me so many wonderful roles. It's a terrifying business, but it has its compensations. Where else could I have found someone who for 50 years has given me sheer enchantment?

  Alfred Lunt

  Grateful, Found Someone, Years

  6 Copy quote

• God does not have to come and tell me what I must do for Him; He brings me into a relationship with Himself where I hear His call and understand what He wants me to do, and I do it out of sheer love to Him... When people say they have had a call to foreign service, or to any particular sphere of work, they mean that their relationship to God has enabled them to realize what they can do for God.

  Oswald J. Smith

  Mean, People, Missionary

  40 Copy quote

• Let a man go down as low as possible; there must come a time when out of sheer desperation he will take an upward curve and will learn to have faith in himself.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Faith, Men, Curves

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Practical Vedanta Philosophy”, p.10, editionNEXT.com

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• We like to imagine that in history, truth will prevail through sheer persuasive power. Sadly, this is not the case. Truth needs champions.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  Champion, Truth Will Prevail, Needs

  10 Copy quote

• Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Stars, Dancer, Intuition

  Deborah Eisenberg (2016). “Twilight of the Superheroes”, p.36, Pan Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most sheer fun I ever had in sports was playing volleyball, a game I commend highly. I understand that an effort is under way to establish a national league of professional volleyball teams, and if you have ever seen the great women's teams of Japan and Russia or the equally good men's teams of Cuba and East Germany, you know how exciting this playground game, which requires so little equipment, can be.

  James A. Michener

  Sports, Volleyball, Fun

  "Sports in America".

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Boredom, Dies

  Christopher Hitchens (2015). “And Yet...: Essays”, p.190, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The new shift in thinking is the gateway to human transformation. And because of the sheer number of people involved in this shift, and the growing magnitude of the crises that are driving us to change the way we think, we are standing on the threshold of human transformation at a level unlike anything ever before known on Earth.

  Gregg Braden

  Thinking, Numbers, People

  127 Copy quote

• The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow - the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Inspirational, People, Cost

  13 Copy quote

• Two out of every three goals you score come from checking. One out of every three comes from sheer finesse.

  Harry Sinden

  Sports, Two, Goal

  8 Copy quote

• These days no one can make money on the goddamn airline business. The economics represent sheer hell.

  C. R. Smith

  Airline Business, Aviation, Making Money

  7 Copy quote

• Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want. I used to think that the notoriously bad cooking of the English was an example to the contrary, and that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.

  Waverley Root

  Country, Art, Food

  7 Copy quote

• I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.

  Thornton Wilder

  Military, Rose, Soldier

  7 Copy quote

• In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Math, Ideas, Issues

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The trouble with the theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Government, Breathing, Tasks

  4 Copy quote

• I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love

  Anna Akhmatova

  Pain, And Love, Enchantment

  46 Copy quote

• I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructiv e but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

  Chris Kraus

  Thinking, Self, Talking

  "I Love Dick". Book by Chris Kraus, 2015.

  54 Copy quote

  Show source