Source: "Keynote Speech by Ambassador Qin Gang at the Commemoration for the 50th Anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s Visit to China" https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjb_663304/zwjg_665342/zwbd_665378/202203/t20220303_10647768.html (25 February 2021)
“There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect.”
1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."
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Martin Luther King, Jr. 658
American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Ci… 1929–1968Related quotes
"Self-Culture", an address in Boston (September 1838) http://www.americanunitarian.org/selfculture.htm
Context: I have insisted on our own activity as essential to our progress; but we were not made to live or advance alone. Society is as needful to us as air or food. A child doomed to utter loneliness, growing up without sight or sound of human beings, would not put forth equal power with many brutes; and a man, never brought into contact with minds superior to his own, will probably run one and the same dull round of thought and action to the end of llfe.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)
Source: Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 72
1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)
“The best book is but the record of the best life.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 44
Même au point de vue des plus insignifiantes choses de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n'a qu'à aller prendre connaissance comme d'un cahier des charges ou d'un testament; notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres.
"Overture"
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)
Source: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
“In other words, a record of our past is etched into our genes.”
Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 2 “Species” (p. 35)
Quoted in "The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations" - Page 446 - by Robert Andrews - Reference - 1993.
“There are books… which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.”