Stifling Quotes - Page 4

• It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.

  Bessie Head

  Generosity, Laughing, Feelings

  22 Copy quote

• My heart is closed, soon it will crumble away. Stifling my tears, I scream every day. My heart has shown me that believing is nothing. My own heart killed me.

  Kyo

  Believe, Heart, Tears

  9 Copy quote

• Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Speech, Concealing

  Thomas Carlyle (2015). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh”, p.196, The Floating Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The resurrection blasts apart the finality of death, providing an alternative to the stifling, settling dust of death and opens the way to new life.

  Billy Graham

  Dust, Way, New Life

  Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Donna Lee Toney (2011). “Billy Graham in Quotes”, Thomas Nelson Inc

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth; particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise.

  Vince Cable

  Men, Breathing, Growth

  "Vince Cable and the pants of doom" by Simon Hoggart, www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.

  Tom Lehrer

  Fun, Dirty, Book

  5 Copy quote

• We are interested in stifling the sale of this book. We believe that this can be best accomplished by refusing to be stampeded into giving it publicity...The less discussion there is concerning it the more sales resistance will be created. We therefore appeal to you to refrain from comment on this book...It is our conviction that a general compliance with this request will sound the warning to other publishing houses against engaging in this type of venture. (Signed) Richard E. Gutstadt, Director.

  Madison Grant

  Book, Believe, Publishing House

  10 Copy quote

• Be reflective...and stay away from the theater as much as you can. Stay out of the theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, its corroding influence. Once become

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Atmosphere, World, Inbreeding

  52 Copy quote

• Without work all life goes rotten.

  Albert Camus

  Work, Rotten, Soulless

  10 Copy quote

• We are such idiots, We think everyone else has it all figured out. But we're all stumbling around in dark rooms bumping into furniture and stifling our cries so no one will know.

  Joan Ryan

  Dark, Thinking, Rooms

  Joan Ryan (2009). “The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, a Son, and Their Second Chance”, p.89, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Horror hostess, bondage goddess, Charles Addams cartoon comes to life, Vampire was every first-generation fanboy's wet dream. Scott Poole takes us on an unforgettable ride through the overlapping underworlds of B&D magazines, Hollywood noir, and early political liberation movements that inspired actress Maila Nurmi to challenge a postwar culture bent on stifling women's choices, bodies, and desires. This book is a subversive masterpiece.

  Sheri Holman

  Dream, Book, Political

  7 Copy quote

• Other than his ex-wife and despite appearances with a series of cultivated blondes, Edward de Bono has never publicly aligned himself with a woman. 'I’m looking for a fat, cross-eyed hunchback,' he explains, stifling a giggle. 'A prosthetic hump would do.' His delight evaporates when asked about his three grandchildren. 'Am I a doting grandfather?' He pauses. 'I’m a … something grandfather, yes.' The fact that De Bono remains unperturbed by this lack betrays an emotionally austere childhood, and his passions for play, toys, and bad jokes tell of the same deprivation. 

  Antonella Gambotto-Burke

  Passion, Grandchildren, Play

  4 Copy quote

• The young man [Turgot] destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his studies, his reading, his professors, his associates, all were combined to keep from him any results of observation or reflection save those prescribed: probably, of all means for stifling healthy and helpful thought, a theological seminary, as then conducted whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Wall, Reading, Mean

  "Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason". Book by Andrew Dickson White, p. 165, 1915.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we're believing, we're not really thinking, because the belief has walls: "This is what I believe." So what I believe is like a box, and we're taking the energy of our thinking and putting into a box of beliefs, pretending that we're thinking. But we're really stifling our own energy. We create these mental stresses and frustrations, because we're blocking our spirit, so to speak.

  John Trudell

  Wall, Block, Stress

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  213 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

  Jack London

  Sleep, Atoms, Writing Words

  Quoted in Bulletin (San Francisco), 2 Dec. 1916.

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

  Jack London

  Inspirational, Life, Ambition

  Quoted in Bulletin (San Francisco), 2 Dec. 1916.

  124 Copy quote

  Show source

• Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Fashion, Meditation, Silence

  Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.161, Univ of California Press

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

  Claude Debussy

  Trying, Music Love, Tradition

  69 Copy quote

• A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

  Ariel Durant

  Women, Memorable, Civilization

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1944). “The Story of Civilization: Caesar and Christ, a history of Roman civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325”

  78 Copy quote

  Show source

• The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes.

  Douglas Adams

  Air, Cities, Smell

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.492, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

  Jon Krakauer

  Cutting, Long, Parent

  Jon Krakauer (2011). “Into the Wild”, p.22, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.

  Kelly Corrigan

  Self, Parent, Perception

  4 Copy quote

• The claws of Truth were painful. The lies tore away like scabs, and John bled there for hours, stifling his cries of pain in the sleeve of his overcoat - the overcoat he'd received from his father.

  Frank Peretti

  Pain, Father, Lying

  Frank Peretti (2012). “Prophet: A Novel”, p.323, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Revenge, Sensual

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• D.H. Lawrence had the impression – that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as a production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a ‘dirty little secret’, a dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of nature and production

  Gilles Deleuze

  Dirty, Secret, Desire

  28 Copy quote