“To have lived a full life is to have learned to love, that is, to give greatly. It is to have learned how to make the gesture that some scholars have called oblative, opposing this term to captative; as though contrasting the gesture of offering with the gesture of seizing.”
section 21
The Myth of Modernity (1946)
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Charles Baudouin4
French-Swiss psychoanalyst 1893–1963Related quotes
“Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.”
Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain
“Men and women whisper to each other because they have turned a sacred gesture into a sinful act.”
Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra
Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), About sex
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist
Quote in: 'An interview with Helen Frankenthaler', by Geldzahler, The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 67
Frankenthaler explains the difference between gesture and signature in her painting
1970s - 1980s
“I make rude gestures at nuns”
Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes
Variant: I kick kittens. I made rude gestures at nuns.
Source: City of Ashes
“They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of.”
Michael Nava (1954) American writer
Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.115