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Literary Quotes |
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| "Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said.
"One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you
haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your
age, I always did it half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." |
| -- Lewis
Carroll (1832-98), British mathematician, writer |
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"Water,
water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink." |
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-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" |
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"I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to health
With ease and plenty. Else small aid is wealth
For daily gladness; once a man be done
With hunger, rich and poor are all as one." |
| -- Euripides (485 BC - 406 BC), Electra,
413 BC |
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To see the
world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold
infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.
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--
William Blake
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"I
shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference." |
| --
Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" |
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| "If
a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away." |
| --
Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
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- "Life is but a walking Shadow, a poor Player That
struts and frets his Hour upon the Stage, And then is heard no
more; It is a tall Tale, Told by an Idiot, full of Sound and
Fury, Signifying nothing."
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-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene
V |
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"The
world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" |
| -- William Wordsworth,
"The World is Too Much With Us" |
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| "I have heard the mermaids singing, each
to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown." |
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-- T. S. Eliot, "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" |
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| "Wise words
quoted in lines from the mind of an inspired writer pass from mind
to mind to mind until the end of measured time, or maybe
longer." |
| -- Albert Emerson Unaterra
(1952-2002), American writer |
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| "Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and
ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his
long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a
capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts
of unity at every moment of life." |
| -- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha |
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| A sentence should contain no
unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the
same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a
machine no unnecessary parts.
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| -- William Strunk, The Elements of Style, 1918 |
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| "The great majority of us are required to
live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound
to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you
feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what
bring you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a
fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in
space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever
violated with impunity." |
| -- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago |
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| "I remembered one morning when I
discovered a cocoon in a bark of a tree, just as a butterfly was
making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited
awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent
over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I
could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than
life.
The case opened, the butterfly started
slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw
how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly
tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it
I tried to help it with my breath. In vain.
It needed to be hatched out patiently
and the unfolding of its wings should be a gradual process in the
sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to
appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and,
a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.
The little body is, I do believe, the
greatest weight I have on my conscience, for I realize today that it
is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not
hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey
the eternal rhythm." |
| -- Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba
the Greek |
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