Quotes about crest (56 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
Again and again their will-to-live becomes, as it were, intoxicated: spring sunshine, opening flowers, moving clouds, waving fields of grain — all affect it. The manifold will-to-live, which is known to us in the splendid phenomena in which it clothes itself, grasps at their personal wills. They would fain join their shouts to the mighty symphony which is proceeding all around them. The world seem beauteous…but the intoxication passes. Dreadful discords only allow them to hear a confused noise, as before, where they had thought to catch the strains of glorious music. The beauty of nature is obscured by the suffering which they discover in every direction. And now they see again that they are driven about like shipwrecked persons on the waste of ocean, only that the boat is at one moment lifted high on the crest of the waves and a moment later sinks deep into the trough; and that now sunshine and now darkening clouds lie on the surface of the water.
And now they would fain persuade themselves that land lies on the horizon toward which they are driven. Their will-to-live befools their intellect so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It forces this intellect to show them a map which lends support to their hope of land. Once again they essay to reach the shore, until finally their arms sink exhausted for the last time and their eyes rove desperately from wave to wave. …
Thus it is with the will-to-live when it is unreflective.
But is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we either drift aimlessly through lack of reflection or sink in pessimism as the result of reflection? No. We must indeed attempt the limitless ocean, but we may set our sails and steer a determined course.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 256

Life , Men , Lie , World

“Her Majesty's new Ministers proceeded in their career like a body of men under the influence of some deleterious drug. Not satiated with the spoilation and anarchy of Ireland, they began to attack every institution and every interest, every class and calling in the country…As time advanced it was not difficult to perceive that extravagance was being substituted for energy by the Government. The unnatural stimulus was subsiding. Their paroxysms ended in prostration. Some took refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Attacking William Gladstone's Liberal Government
Source: Speech to the Conservatives of Manchester (3 April 1872), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), pp. 530-531.

Men , Time , Sea , Country

“But Florentine was still riding the crest of her great wave…When it lifted her high she had to hold her breath. How could she ever again be bothered by these petty everyday cares? Would she ever again feel the old anxiety on hearing these dreadful midnight confidences, in the silence heavy with breathing? The wave that bore her was like a long, slow swell. There were hollows into which she sank with all her thoughts, all her willpower, where she was no more than a wing, a feather, a fringe, borne off ever faster, ever faster…He kissed me on the cheeks. On the eyes! "What's going to happen to us, Florentine? If your father's gone and lost his job again, we'll have to live on what you can give us, poor Florentine. We can always go back on relief…”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 85

Feeling , Confidence , Kiss , Silence

“There (in Mithilā) is settled the city of Janaka which is the crest-jewel (vasu) of the earth (vasumati); the upholder of the Karma as enunciated by the Brāhmaṇas (vasumukhamukhas – the mouths of Agni, who is the chief among the Vasus) and righteousness; the subduer of sins; the destroyer of sorrows; the pleasant destination; supremely spectacular; whose feet are bowed down to by all deities; the good nourisher of pure [forms of] abstention, love and devotion; the remover of doubts; the palace for the pleasure of Rāma; the birthplace of the paramour of the best amongst Raghus; and the cause of fear in [even] the son of Sūrya (Yama, the deity of death). ॥ 2.3 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya book Srisitaramakelikaumudi

tahaँ basa basumati basu basumukhamukha
nigadita nigama sukarama dharamadhura ।
durita damana dukha śamana sukha gamana
parama kamana pada namana sakala sura ॥
bimala birati rati bhagati bharana bhala
bharama harana hari haraṣa harama pura ।
giridhara raghubara gharani janama mahi
tarani tanaya bhaya janaka janakapura ॥
Srisitaramakelikaumudi

Love , Death , Pleasure , Fear

“The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator

Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.

World , Star , Reading , Night

“Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business, politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before they pass final judgment.

Life , Travel , Help

“The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough.
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat.
The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 26-27

Way , Cats , Failure , Question

“I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

“The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

Source: As I Lay Dying

Light , Sun

“One more instance I will give of his interest and his knowledge. We were passing under a fir tree when we heard a small song in the tree above us. We stopped and I said that was the song of a golden-crested wren. He listened very attentively while the bird repeated its little song, as its habit is. Then he said, "I think that is exactly the same song as that of a bird that we have in America"; and that was the only English song that he recognized as being the same as any bird song in America. Some time afterwards I met a bird expert in the Natural History Museum in London and told him this incident, and he confirmed what Colonel Roosevelt had said, that the song of this bird would be about the only song that the two countries had in common. I think that a very remarkable instance of minute and accurate knowledge on the part of Colonel Roosevelt. It was the business of the bird expert in London to know about birds. Colonel Roosevelt's knowledge was a mere incident acquired, not as part of the work of his life, but entirely outside it.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

Life , History , Business , Nature

“In retrospect, the reason for the assassination is hardly a mystery. It is now abundantly clear … why the C. I. A.'s covert operations element wanted John Kennedy out of the Oval Office and Lyndon Johnson in it. The new President elevated by rifle fire to control of our foreign policy had been one of the most enthusiastic American cold warriors…. Johnson had originally risen to power on the crest of the fulminating anti-communist crusade which marked American politics after World War II. Shortly after the end of that war, he declaimed that atomic power had become 'ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it' -- a Christian benediction if ever there was one. Johnson's demonstrated enthusiasm for American military intervention abroad … earned him the sobriquet 'the senator from the Pentagon….”

Jim Garrison (1921–1992) American judge

[On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988)]

War , World

“An MP had been elected as a Unionist candidate, but when Parliament re-assembled, he had immediately "crossed the floor" without seeking re-election.Smith said:"He entered the House not on the crest of a wave, but rather by means of an opportune dive. Everyone in the House must appreciate his presence, for there could be no greater compliment paid to it than that he should be in our midst, when his heart is far away. And it should be obvious to all who know the honourable gentleman's scrupulous sense of honour, that his one desire at present is to be amongst his constituents, who are understood to be at least as anxious to meet him."”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Legal Life and Humour (1916), edited by Joseph Heighton, p. 49

Sense , Heart , Housing

“When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy, I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God's embraces.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

God , Joy

“Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice," lines 37–42, from Poems 1938-1945 (1946).
Poems

Smile , Flowers , Time , Sea

“When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure it was a great soft mattress.”

Stephen Crane book The Open Boat

Pt. IV
The Open Boat (1894)

Suffering , Water , Sea

“You see the rivers running east. Then you see mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. When they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years.”

John McPhee (1931) American writer

In Suspect Terrain (1983), reprinted in Annals of the Former World (2000) page 209.

Mountain , Time , Parting

“Let them be friends,
devoted as in the old days. Let peace and wealth
come cresting through the land.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XXIV. 485–486 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Peace , Wealth

“Let's just ruin all the movies about pterosaurs: they could soar like airplanes, but they couldn't hover like hummingbirds. They couldn't carry things in their feet either, they couldn't perch on tree branches like birds, they didn't look like "bird-monsters", and they didn't look like "lizard-bats". They didn't have four-fingered wings like bats; their wings were based on an elongated pinky finger. The only thing bat-like about them was the way they walked; on all fours. So what are the possibilities for fluffy pterosaurs? We know they were a very diverse and almost certainly colorful group. They looked like a wide range of things, from fluttering bats to darting falcons. Some had powerful shell-crushing jaws and some had ridiculous crests, and some were quite huge. For decades, we were told that Pteranodon was the biggest animal that ever flew, then they discovered Ornithocheirus, then Quetzalcoatlus, then Hatzegopteryx (an apex predator)… These were capable killers of even human-sized prey, with a skull larger than that of even the biggest carnosaurs.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

Color , Way , Bird , Tree

“The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

Truth , World , Faith , Nature

“They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined — just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew —
Fresh from his Wessex home —
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

" Drummer Hodge http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_se/personal/pvm/HardyBWar/pracrit.html" (1899), lines 1-18, from Poems of the Past and Present (1901)

Home , Star , Tree , Night

“In glittering arms and glory dressed,
High he rears his ruby crest.
There the thundering strokes begin,
There the press and there the din;
Talymalfra's rocky shore
Echoing to the battle's roar.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

"The Triumphs of Owen. A Fragment", from Mr. Evans's Specimens of the Welch Poetry (1764) http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=trow

“Reeling up, blood streaming down his face from under his dented helmet, Conan glared dizzily at the profusion of destruction which spread before him. From crest to crest the dead lay strewn, a red carpet that choked the valley. It was like a red sea, with each wave a straggling line of corpses.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Black Colossus" (1933)

Sea , Dead

“Amid the roses fierce Repentance rears
Her snaky crest.”

James Thomson (poet) The Seasons

Source: The Seasons (1726-1730), Spring (1728), l. 996.

“In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book II, Ch. 8 (Ch. 25 in editions without Book divisions): Dead London
The War of the Worlds (1898)

Wisdom , God , War , Disease

“I would make the profession of every man, the rule by which to fashion his crest or coat of arms!… To the petifogger (sic), three links of a convict's chain, with the Penitentiary in the distance! To the Bank Director a Widow's Coffin, with a weeping Orphan on either side by way of heraldic supporters! Pah! There is no single word of contempt in the whole language, too bitter, to express my opinion of this magnificent Pretension - the Aristocracy of the Quaker City!”

George Lippard (1822–1854) Novelist, journalist

The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, part 2, chapter 4 "Dora Livingstone at Home" (1844)

Way , Fashion , Support

“Modern football is akin to a turbulent sea. Changes come fast and furious. One may be riding the crest of great waves before being engulfed in enormous crescendos of confusion. Sometimes is can be like surfboarding in the South Atlantic. You do the best you can to stay afloat while all the time fully understanding the fact that things can come crashing down around you. If you worry about the consequences you miss the thrill of the ride.”

Damien Richardson (1947) Irish footballer and manager

City Edition, Vol. 22, Issue 1, p. 7.

Understanding , Change , Time , Football

“Mindfulness is present-moment awareness. It takes place in the here and now. It is the observance of what is happening right now, in the present. It stays forever in the present, perpetually on the crest of the ongoing wave of passing time.”

Henepola Gunaratana (1927) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

Source: Mindfulness in Plain English (2011), p. 134

Time

“The hotel was called the Alta Loma. It was built on a hillside in reverse, there on the crest of Bunker Hill, built against the decline of the hill, so that the main floor was on the level with the street but the tenth floor was downstairs ten levels. If you had room 862, you got in the elevator and went down eight floors, and if you wanted to go down in the truck room, you didn't go down but up to the attic, one floor above the main floor.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter One

“No radiant pearl which crested Fortune wears,
No gem that twinkling hangs from Beauty’s ears,
Not the bright stars which Night’s blue arch adorn,
Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn,
Shine with such lustre as the tear that flows
Down Virtue’s manly cheek for others’ woes.”

Erasmus Darwin book The Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden (1791), Part ii, Canto iii, line 459.

Beauty , Star , Tear , Sun

“Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

March “RIPOSTE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Fish , Sea , Night

“And now the high crest sinks, now the head is nodding overpowered and the huge neck has slipped from around the fleece it guarded, like refluent Po or Nile that sprawls in seven streams or Alpheus when his waters enter the Hesperian world.”
Iamque altae cecidere iubae nutatque coactum iam caput atque ingens extra sua vellera cervix ceu refluens Padus aut septem proiectus in amnes Nilus et Hesperium veniens Alpheos in orbem.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 88–91

World , Water

“Were there really this many women in 1985 saying to their husbands, "Gee, honey, I'd love to have random strangers masturbate to a jpeg image of me deepthroating a titanium dildo, but there's no medium for that. Guess we'll have to watch 'Falcon Crest.'”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003)

Love , Women

“The peace that passeth understanding is that which comes when the pain is not relieved, which subsists in the midst of the painful situation, suffusing it, which springs out of the pain itself, which shimmers on the crest of the wave of pain, which is the spear of frustration transfigured into the shaft of light. It is upon those we love that we must anchor ourselves spiritually in the last moments. The sense of interconnectedness with them stands out vividly by way of contrast at the very moment when our mortal connection with them is about to be dissolved. And the intertwining of our life with theirs, the living in the life that is in them, is but a part of our living in the infinite manifold of the spiritual life. The thought of this, as apprehended, not in terms of knowledge, but in immediate experience, begets the peace that passeth understanding. And it is upon the bosom of that peace that we can pass safely out of the realm of time and space.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Book IV, Ch. 10 "The Last Outlook On Life"
Founding Address (1876), An Ethical Philosopy of Life (1918)

Love , Life , Pain , Peace

“It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.”

Sarah Dessen book That Summer

That Summer (1996)

Grass , Change , Christmas , Summer

“I do not care a button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known and a 'leader'. Then, again, I don't believe in advertisement except for books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom' and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere… or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the 'religions' and is the reason of their failure. If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly 'rational', I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed merely on any personal dislike of fame. If and so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

October 2, 1934
India's Rebirth

Hostility , People , Truth , Books

“Economics today rides the crest of intellectual respectability and popular acclaim. The serious attention with which our pronouncements are received by the general public, hard-bitten politicians, and even skeptical businessmen is second only to that which was given to physicists and space experts a few years ago when the round trip to the moon seemed to be our only truly national goal.”

Wassily Leontief (1906–1999) Russian economist

Source: "Theoretical assumptions and nonobserved facts," 1971, p. 1: Start of lead paragraph

“Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind, p. 4
War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)

Men , Lie

“Right here I might offer a word of advice to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, now the rarest bird on the North American continent and one that is going to come in for more and more attention. Keep away from bird lovers, fellows, or you'll be standing on a little wooden pedestal with a label containing your full name in Latin: Campephilus principalis. People will be filing past admiring your glossy blue-black feathers, your white stripes and patches, your nasal plumes in front of lores, your bright red crest and your beady yellow eyes. You'll be in the limelight, but you won't know it. I don't want to alarm you fellows, but there are only about twenty of you alive as I write these lines, but there are more than two hundred of you in American museums and in collections owned by Ivory-billed Woodpecker enthusiasts. Get it?”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

And I Ought to Know
How to Become Extinct (1941)

People , Lovers , Bird , Past

“The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Family , Flowers , Sister , Water

“No sound of joy or sorrow
Was heard from either bank;
But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
With parted lips and straining eyes,
Stood gazing where he sank;
And when above the surges,
They saw his crest appear,
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
And even the ranks of Tuscany
Could scarce forbear to cheer.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay book Lays of Ancient Rome

Horatius, st. 60
Lays of Ancient Rome (1842)

Appearance , Joy , Parting , Cry

“Washington was the right man at the right time – sometimes he was the first man, but sometimes he simply knew when to ride the crest of a wave or the leading edge of a trend.”

Alan Axelrod (1952) American historian

Alan Axelrod in an interview with Frank R. Shaw, Aug 23, 2007 http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/axelrod.htm.

Time

“Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will… By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 105

Teachers

“The king then kept his Christmas at his castle at Guildford; the dresses are said to be ad faciendum ludos domini regis, and consisted of eighty tunics of buckram of various colours; forty-two visors of different similitudes, namely, fourteen of faces of women, fourteen of faces of men, and fourteen heads of angels made with silver; twenty-eight crests; fourteen mantles embroidered with heads of dragons; fourteen white tunics wrought with the heads and wings of peacocks; fourteen with the heads of swans with wings; fourteen tunics painted with the eyes of peacocks; fourteen tunics of English linen painted; and fourteen other tunics embroidered with stars of gold.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 159
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Christmas

Women , Men , Angels , Star

“But no line of ferocious, lean-faced, swarthy Spaniards appeared. Shouts and cries and the harsh snarl of gunfire suggested the dons were busy, desperately busy, elsewhere in London. When chance swept Shakespeare and Richard Burbage together for a moment, the player said, "Belike they'll make a stand at the tower." "Likely so," Shakespeare agreed unhappily. Those frowning walls had been made to hold back an army, and this… thing he was a part of was anything but. Up Tower Hill, where he'd watched the auto de fe almost a year before. A great roar, a roar full of triumph, rose from the men in front of him as they passed the crest of the hill and swept on towards the Tower Ditch and the walls beyond. And when Shakespeare crested the hill himself, he looked ahead and roared too, in joy and amazement and suddenly flaring hope. Will Kemp had been right, right and more than right. All the gates to the Tower of London stood open.”

Harry Turtledove book Ruled Britannia

Source: Ruled Britannia (2002), p. 379

Men , Hope , Business , Appearance

“There's a Legion that never was 'listed,
That carries no colours or crest,
But, split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the road for the rest.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Lost Legion, Stanza 1 (1895).
The Seven Seas (1896)

“Young men, you who have any piety at all, what sort is it? Is it a hot-house plant, which must be framed and glassed, lest March, that bold young fellow, should shake the life out. of it in his rough play among the flowers? or is it a hardy shrub, which rejoices when the wild winds course along the heather or howl above the crest of Lebanon ' We need, believe me, the bravery of godliness to bear true witness for our Master now.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 452.

Life , Men , Flowers , Housing

“The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Speech to the state convention of the Illinois American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) (7 October 1965) http://www.aft.org/yourwork/tools4teachers/bhm/mlktalks.cfm, as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986)
1960s

Life , Age , Hope , Birth

“What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 96

Death , Game , Time , Future

“The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.”

Sophocles (-496–-406 BC) ancient Greek tragedian

Source: Oedipus Rex, Line 872.

Hope , Drink

“We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Seven, Part I
Context: Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

Sense

“BB: So, who here has a guinea pig?Various Audience Members cheerBB: What kind of guinea pig? Muffled suggestions from audience members BB: Nah, you're not serious about it! (Imitates guniea pig owners) "I dunno, some brown thing…". So what breed? Audience Member: Crested! BB: (misunderstands) A what? A crusty… a crusty guinea pig? (Imitates owner) I think you should take it to the vet as soon as possible! "Gah, it's crusting over again, it's crusting up Captain!!" (understands) Ah, crested? What you have there is a newt I think, madam! Some bloke in a pub sold you that! (as man in pub) "Yeah, that's a crested guinea pig, they're lovely, them…"”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Tinselworm (2008)

Love , Understanding , Thinking

“They are dead; but they live in each Patriot's breast,
And their names are engraven on honor's bright crest.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

"The Battle of Lovell's Pond," poem first published in the Portland Gazette (November 17, 1820).
Context: p>The warriors that fought for their country, and bled,
Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed;
No stone tells the place where their ashes repose,
Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes.They died in their glory, surrounded by fame,
And Victory's loud trump their death did proclaim;
They are dead; but they live in each Patriot's breast,
And their names are engraven on honor's bright crest.</p

Dead

“The crest and crowning of all good,
Life’s final star, is Brotherhood”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899), Brotherhood
Context: The crest and crowning of all good,
Life’s final star, is Brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth
Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face,
A kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves,
And travel downward to the dust of graves.

Life , Star

“For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

The Lady of Moge (p. 183)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)

Chance , History , War , Making love

“The warriors that fought for their country, and bled,
Have sunk to their rest; the damp earth is their bed;
No stone tells the place where their ashes repose,
Nor points out the spot from the graves of their foes.

They died in their glory, surrounded by fame,
And Victory's loud trump their death did proclaim;
They are dead; but they live in each Patriot's breast,
And their names are engraven on honor's bright crest.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

"The Battle of Lovell's Pond," poem first published in the Portland Gazette (November 17, 1820).

Dead , Country , Victory , Death