Stirring Quotes - Page 11

• The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.

  Felix Adler

  Love, Life, Friendship

  Felix Adler's Founding Address of New York Society for Ethical Culture, aeu.org. May 15, 1876.

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• Coquettes are, but too rare. It is a career that requires great abilities, infinite pains, a gay and airy spirit. 'T is the coquette who provides all the amusements,--suggests the riding-party, plans the picnic, gives and guesses charades, acts them. She is the stirring element amid the heavy congeries of social atoms,--the soul of the house, the salt of the banquet.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Pain, Party, Gay

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• We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Evening, Action, Muse

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• Hemingway, damn his soul, makes everything he writes terrifically exciting (and incidentally makes all us second-raters seem positively adolescent) by the seemingly simple expedient of the iceberg principle - three-fourths of the substance under the surface. He comes closer that way to retaining the magic of the original, unexpressed idea or emotion, which is always more stirring than any words. But just try and do it!

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Writing, Simple, Ideas

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• I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

  Wendell Berry

  Circles, Water, Tree

  Wendell Berry (2013). “This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems”, p.7, Counterpoint

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• Humanity and Immortality consist neither in reason, nor in love; not in the body, nor in the animation of the heart of it, nor in the thoughts and stirrings of the brain of it;--but in the dedication of them all to Him who will raise them up at the last day.

  John Ruskin

  Heart, Dedication, Humanity

  John Ruskin (1858). “The Stones of Venice”, p.41

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• There is a certain period of the soul-culture when it begins to interfere with some of characters of typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring of the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its way out to heaven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel; and there is, in this indication of subduing the mortal by the immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range than that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul than of, the fair and ruddy countenance of David.

  John Ruskin

  Beauty, Character, Thinking

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• I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.

  William Styron

  Girl, Dream, Sweet

  William Styron (1990). “Darkness visible: a memoir of madness”, Random House Incorporated

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• Poetry should be vital--either stirring our blood by its divine movements or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both is supreme glory, to do either is enduring fame.

  Augustine Birrell

  Blood, Perfection, Poetry

  Augustine Birrell (1885). “Obiter Dicta ...: Carlye. On the alleged obscurity of Mr. Browning's poetry. Truth-hunting. Actors. A rogue's memoirs. The via media. Falstaff [by George Radford”

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• I remember the good evenings I have fished, even the ones that realised material hopes not by the fish that came to the fly, but by the colour and movement of the water and sky, by the sounds and scents and gentle stirrings that were all about me.

  Roderick Haig-Brown

  Sea, Fishing, Sky

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• Amid the stirring and manifold activities of the age in which we live, to be neutral in the strife is to rank with the enemies of the Saviour. There is no greater foe to the spread of His cause in the world than the placid indifferentism which is too honorable to betray, while it is too careless or too cowardly to join Him.

  William Morley Punshon

  Enemy, Age, Causes

  William Morley Punshon, John Bunyan, Thomas Babington Macaulay Baron Macaulay, William Wilberforce (1881). “Biographical and Historical Lectures: Comprising: The Prophet of Horeb, John Bunyan; Macaulay; Wilberforce; The Huguenots”

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• Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.

  Herman Melville

  War, Heart, Spirit

  Herman Melville (2006). “Selected Poems (Melville, Herman)”, p.97, Penguin

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• It is a common error to imagine that to be stirring and voluble in a worthy cause is to be good and to do good.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Errors, Causes, Common

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• A man that's fond precociously of stirring , :;:; Must be a spoon.

  Thomas Hood

  Men, Spoons, Action

  Thomas Hood (1860). “The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood”, p.290

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• Epaminondas is reported wittily to have said of a good man that died about the time of the battle of Leuctra, "How came he to have so much leisure as to die, when there was so much stirring?

  Plutarch

  Men, Good Man, Battle

  Plutarch (1909). “Plutarch's Lives and Writings”

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• One knew, of course, that it was not the red cape any more than it was the boots, the tights, the trunks, or the trademark "S" that gave Superman the ability to fly. That ability derived from the effects of the rays of our yellow sun on Superman's alien anatomy, which had evolved under the red sun of Krypton. And yet you had only to tie a towel around your shoulders to feel the strange vibratory pulse of flight stirring in the red sun of your heart.

  Michael Chabon

  Heart, Krypton, Yellow

  Michael Chabon (2011). “Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands”, p.245, Open Road Media

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• Art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless energies in fields of peaceful enterprise.

  Francis Parkman

  Art, War, Men

  Francis Parkman (1865). “Pioneers of France in the New World”, p.214

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• To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. ... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.

  Walter Pater

  Passion, Artist, Flames

  Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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• Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers?

  Plutarch

  Kings, Army, Thinking

  Plutarch (1871). “Plutarch's Morals”, p.204

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• All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every additional amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties. We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring us a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Country, War, Thinking

  Cosmopolitan, Feb. 1940

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• To solicit the aid of luck is like stirring muddy water to bring objects submerged at the bottom to the top where they can be seen. Every worker would to well to tempt their good luck. Nevertheless, we should not depend on it too much.

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Good Luck, Water, Too Much

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• There are a lot of 'chicken Christians.' Chickens are generally afraid of life, and they seldom fly or reach their potential in life. And when a storm comes, all they seem to do is flap around the chicken yard, stirring up dirt and running to the chicken house.

  Joyce Meyer

  Christian, Running, House

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• The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf. Standing on the stirring ice one can imagine it is disturbed by the breathing and tossing of a mighty giant below.

  Ernest Shackleton

  Ice, Breathing, Surfing

  Ernest Shackleton (2015). “South”, p.59, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.

  Paul Tillich

  Song, Tongue, Ifs

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  The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.

  Jules Verne

  Lonely, Ocean, Men

  Jules Verne (2015). “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea: Science Fiction Stories”, p.49, 谷月社

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