Wave Quotes - Page 29

• I'm learning kite surfing. It's a little surfboard you have on your feet with straps, and you have a big kite like a power glider in the air that pulls you. You don't need waves to move, and it makes a big spray of water as you go.

  Bertrand Piccard

  Moving, Air, Feet

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• The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

  Aldous Huxley

  Anarchy, Utopia, Decadence

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

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• You know what else I've learnt? That it's all right not to ride the crest of the wave. Every time a wave comes along I retreat, and I haven't come to any harm yet.

  Jennifer Ehle

  Retreat, Harm, Havens

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• It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

  E. L. Doctorow

  Running, Country, Believe

  E.L. Doctorow (2009). “Homer & Langley: A Novel”, p.35, Random House

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• [London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Dirty, Sight, Sea

  V.S. Pritchett (2009). “Mr. Beluncle: A Novel”, p.13, Modern Library

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• The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.

  Jacques Barzun

  Art, Interesting, Rewards

  "A Surfeit of Fine Art". Essay by Jacques Barzun (1986) published in his book "The Culture We Deserve" (p. 127), 1989.

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• Nor fire, nor rocks, can stop our furious minds, Nor waves, nor winds.

  Francis Quarles

  Fire, Rocks, Wind

  Francis Quarles, William Walker Wilkins (1866). “Emblems, Divine and Moral: The School of the Heart ; And, Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man”, p.41

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• The man who boldly transgresses, amassing a great heap unjustly--by force, in time, he will strike his sail, when trouble seizes him as the yardarm is splintered. He calls on those who hear nothing and he struggles in the midst of the whirling waters. The god laughs at the hot-headed man, seeing him, who boasted that this would never happen, exhausted by distress without remedy and unable to surmount the cresting wave. He wrecks the happiness of his earlier life on the reef of Justice, and he perishes unwept, unseen.

  Aeschylus

  Struggle, Men, Hot Headed

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• Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

  Mary Oliver

  Moving, Fall, Voice

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave, He is wisdom to the mighty, he is succour to the brave, So the world shall be his footstool, and the soul of Time his slave, Our God is marching on.

  Julia Ward Howe

  Morning, Marching On, Brave

  Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn Of The Republic”

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• Give me a wave I can ride upon, come and show your strength to me.

  Gordon Lightfoot

  Friendship, Giving, Shows

  Song: Someone To Believe In, Album: Salute

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• The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.

  John Doerr

  Next, Users

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• Wave the flag, wave the Bible, wave your sex or your business degree, whatever you want, just don't wave that thing at me.

  Bruce Cockburn

  Sex, Degrees, Flags

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• I think Kurt Cobain and Nirvana represent this giant wave that came crashing in and turned music on its head again, and there's definitely something to be said for that.

  Pete Wentz

  Thinking, Giants, Cobain

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• But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Ocean, August, Ears

  Walter Savage Landor (2016). “Delphi Collected Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor (Illustrated)”, p.23, Delphi Classics

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• It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.

  John Ruskin

  Eye, Talking, Sea

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.69, University of Virginia Press

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• I've seen the Rhine with younger wave, O'er every obstacle to rave. I see the Rhine in his native wild Is still a mighty mountain child.

  John Ruskin

  Children, Mountain, Obstacles

  John Ruskin (1903). “The Works of John Ruskin”

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• The waves of hatred-night can easily be dissolved in the sea of oneness-love.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Night, Sea, Oneness

  "Twenty Seven Thousand Aspiration Plants". Poetry series by Sri Chinmoy (#170, Part 2), 1983.

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• We dance for the pure joy of it. In the kitchen to the record player. Because we've got it in us. All over ... it's not just in the legs. It comes from inside and runs all through you. In waves. From down below to up above. All the way to the scalp.

  Gunter Grass

  Running, Player, Joy

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• The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

  Cyril Connolly

  Beach, Art, Genius

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• Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators.

  Samuel Smiles

  Men, Wind, Looks

  Samuel Smiles (1859). “Self-help; with illustrations of character and conduct”, p.46

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• Our lives are waves that come up out of the ocean of eternity, break upon the beach of earth, and lapse back to the ocean of eternity. Some are sunlit, some run in storm and rain; one is a quiet ripple, another is a thunderous breaker; and once in many centuries comes a great tidal wave that sweeps over a continent; but all go back to the sea and lie equally level there.

  Austin O'Malley

  Life, Running, Beach

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• A great tragedy passes from crest to hollow of passion, rises and sinks again, as rhythmically as sea-waves.

  Austin O'Malley

  Passion, Sea, Tragedy

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• Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

  Samuel Johnson

  Thinking, People, Reason

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• Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave; That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave; That mid the forests where they roamed There rings no hunter's shout; But their name is on your waters; Ye may not wash it out.

  Lydia Sigourney

  Race, Names, Light

  Lydia Sigourney (2008). “Lydia Sigourney: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.149, Broadview Press

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