Quotes about end
page 68

Sarah Dessen photo
Arundhati Roy photo

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

James Fenimore Cooper photo

“For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand which alone can unite the elements of worlds as they float in gasses, equally from His mysterious laboratory, and scatter them again into thin air when the works of His hand cease to find favour in His view.
Let those who would substitute the voice of the created for that of the Creator, who shout "the people, the people," instead of hymning the praises of their God, who vainly imagine that the masses are sufficient for all things, remember their insignificance and tremble. They are but mites amid millions of other mites, that the goodness of providence has produced for its own wise ends; their boasted countries, with their vaunted climates and productions, have temporary possessions of but small portions of a globe that floats, a point, in space, following the course pointed out by an invisible finger, and which will one day be suddenly struck out of its orbit, as it was originally put there, by the hand that made it. Let that dread Being, then, be never made to act a second part in human affairs, or the rebellious vanity of our race imagine that either numbers, or capacity, or success, or power in arms, is aught more than a short-lived gift of His beneficence, to be resumed when His purposes are accomplished.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

The Crater; or, Vulcan's Peak: A Tale of the Pacific http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11573/11573-h/11573-h.htm (1847), Ch. XXX

Rudolph Rummel photo
Hideo Kojima photo
Yoshida Kenkō photo

“The truth is at the beginning of anything and its end are alike touching.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness)

Chester W. Nimitz photo

“The war with Japan had been enacted in the game rooms at the War College by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war. We had not visualized these.”

Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966) United States Navy fleet admiral

Writing the president of the US Naval War College shortly after World War II. Quoted by Donald C. Winter, Secretary of the Navy http://www.navy.mil/navydata/people/secnav/winter/SECNAV_Remarks_NWC_Current_Strategy_Forum.pdf]

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon photo
Julia Ward Howe photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Sarah McLachlan photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Steve Jobs photo

“We intend to release Leopard at the end of 2006 or early 2007, right around the time when Microsoft is expected to release Longhorn.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

2000s, WWDC 2005

Louis Brandeis photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Edward Young photo

“Where Nature’s end of language is declin’d,
And men talk only to conceal the mind.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

Satire II, l. 207.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)

Frank Miller photo

“If ever there was a theme song for the business end of the industry, it's: "We can't do that; we didn't do that yesterday."”

Frank Miller (1957) American writer, artist, film director

On the comics industry. p. 111
Eisner/Miller (2005)

Eerik-Niiles Kross photo
Tom Regan photo
Logan Pearsall Smith photo
Amrita Sher-Gil photo

“Towards the end of 1933 I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

In 1933, when she wanted to return to India.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Guy Lafleur photo
Fred Shero photo
J. M. Barrie photo

“Beware! By Allah the son of Abu Quhafah (Abu Bakr) dressed himself with it (the caliphate) and he certainly knew that my position in relation to it was the same as the position of the axis in relation to the hand-mill. The flood water flows down from me and the bird cannot fly upto me. I put a curtain against the caliphate and kept myself detached from it.
Then I began to think whether I should assault or endure calmly the blinding darkness of tribulations wherein the grown up are made feeble and the young grow old and the true believer acts under strain till he meets Allah (on his death). I found that endurance thereon was wiser. So I adopted patience although there was pricking in the eye and suffocation (of mortification) in the throat. I watched the plundering of my inheritance till the first one went his way but handed over the Caliphate to Ibn al-Khattab after himself.
(Then he quoted al-A`sha's verse):
My days are now passed on the camel's back (in difficulty) while there were days (of ease) when I enjoyed the company of Jabir's brother Hayyan.
It is strange that during his lifetime he wished to be released from the caliphate but he confirmed it for the other one after his death. No doubt these two shared its udders strictly among themselves. This one put the Caliphate in a tough enclosure where the utterance was haughty and the touch was rough. Mistakes were in plenty and so also the excuses therefore. One in contact with it was like the rider of an unruly camel. If he pulled up its rein the very nostril would be slit, but if he let it loose he would be thrown. Consequently, by Allah people got involved in recklessness, wickedness, unsteadiness and deviation.
Nevertheless, I remained patient despite length of period and stiffness of trial, till when he went his way (of death) he put the matter (of Caliphate) in a group and regarded me to be one of them. But good Heavens! what had I to do with this "consultation"? Where was any doubt about me with regard to the first of them that I was now considered akin to these ones? But I remained low when they were low and flew high when they flew high. One of them turned against me because of his hatred and the other got inclined the other way due to his in-law relationship and this thing and that thing, till the third man of these people stood up with heaving breasts between his dung and fodder. With him his children of his grand-father, (Umayyah) also stood up swallowing up Allah's wealth like a camel devouring the foliage of spring, till his rope broke down, his actions finished him and his gluttony brought him down prostrate.
At that moment, nothing took me by surprise, but the crowd of people rushing to me. It advanced towards me from every side like the mane of the hyena so much so that Hasan and Husayn were getting crushed and both the ends of my shoulder garment were torn. They collected around me like the herd of sheep and goats. When I took up the reins of government one party broke away and another turned disobedient while the rest began acting wrongfully as if they had not heard the word of Allah saying:
That abode in the hereafter, We assign it for those who intend not to exult themselves in the earth, nor (to make) mischief (therein); and the end is (best) for the pious ones. (Qur'an, 28:83)
Yes, by Allah, they had heard it and understood it but the world appeared glittering in their eyes and its embellishments seduced them. Behold, by Him who split the grain (to grow) and created living beings, if people had not come to me and supporters had not exhausted the argument and if there had been no pledge of Allah with the learned to the effect that they should not acquiesce in the gluttony of the oppressor and the hunger of the oppressed I would have cast the rope of Caliphate on its own shoulders, and would have given the last one the same treatment as to the first one. Then you would have seen that in my view this world of yours is no better than the sneezing of a goat.”

Known as the Sermon of ash-Shiqshiqiyyah (roar of the camel), It is said that when Amir al-mu'minin reached here in his sermon a man of Iraq stood up and handed him over a writing. Amir al-mu'minin began looking at it, when Ibn `Abbas said, "O' Amir al-mu'minin, I wish you resumed your Sermon from where you broke it." Thereupon he replied, "O' Ibn `Abbas it was like the foam of a Camel which gushed out but subsided." Ibn `Abbas says that he never grieved over any utterance as he did over this one because Amir al-mu'minin could not finish it as he wished to.
Nahj al-Balagha

Manuel Castells photo
Joanna Newsom photo
Francis Bacon photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Robert Frost photo

““Well, who begun it?”
That’s what at the end of a war
We always say not who won it,
Or what it was foughten for.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"Lines Written in Dejection on the Eve of Great Success
1960s

George Mitchell photo

“I formed the conviction that there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended. Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings.”

George Mitchell (1933) American politician

State Department ceremony (2009-01-26), quoted in Robert Burns, "Obama's Mideast envoy brings record of patience," http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i1hWov8APjI96ba4coEYQeeoavbAD95V7SK80 Associated Press (2009-01-27)

Andrew Bacevich photo

“In war-as-spectacle, appearances could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality.”

Andrew Bacevich (1947) United States Army officer

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005).

Adlai Stevenson photo
Jacopone da Todi photo
Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Sung-Yoon Lee photo
Al Sharpton photo

“Now that they have achieved the capture of Hussein, they should appeal to the UN to come in with a multilateral redevelopment plan. This is all the more reason this war should come to an immediate end.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

Remarks following the capture of Saddam Hussein, quoted in "The Capture of Hussein" (15 December 2003) New York Times p. A19.

Saddam Hussein photo
Mike Tyson photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“The non-violent resistors can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly and cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it.”

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

1960s, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousnes (1960)
Variant: The non-violent resistors can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly and cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it.

“Dear beautiful one, I praise the stars for the song's end. Farewell!”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Other texts
Source: Far Future Calling http://web.archive.org/web/20090721194935/http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/farfuturecalling.html

Georg Büchner photo

“We are always on stage, even when we are stabbed in earnest at the end.”

Act II.
Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) (1835)

Charles James Fox photo

“[Fox] exhibited two pictures of this country; the one representing her at the end of the last glorious war, the other at the present moment. At the end of the last war this country was raised to a most dazzling height of splendour and respect. The French marine was in a manner annihilated, the Spanish rendered contemptible; the French were driven from America; new sources of commerce were opened, the old enlarged; our influence extended to a predominance in Europe, our empire of the ocean established and acknowledged, and our trade filling the ports and harbours of the wondering and admiring world. Now mark the degradation and the change, We have lost thirteen provinces of America; we have lost several of our Islands, and the rest are in danger; we have lost the empire of the sea; we have lost our respect abroad and our unanimity at home; the nations have forsaken us, they see us distracted and obstinate, and they leave us to our fate. Country! …This was your situation, when you were governed by Whig ministers and by Whig measures, when you were warmed and instigated by a just and a laudable cause, when you were united and impelled by the confidence which you had in your ministers, and when they were again strengthened and emboldened by your ardour and enthusiasm. This is your situation, when you are under the conduct of Tory ministers and a Tory system, when you are disunited, disheartened, and have neither confidence in your ministers nor union among yourselves; when your cause is unjust and your conductors are either impotent or treacherous.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (27 November 1781), reprinted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume I (1815), p. 429.
1780s

Anthony Burgess photo

“I remember an old proverb. It says that youth thinks itself wise just as drunk men think themselves sober. Youth is not wise! Youth knows nothing about life! Youth knows nothing about anything except for massive cliches which for the most part through the media of pop songs are just foisted on them by middle-age entrepreneurs and exploiters who should know better. When we start thinking that pop music is close to God, then we'll think pop music is aesthetically better than it is. And it's only the aesthetic value of pop music that we're really concerned. I mean the only way we can judge Wagner or Beethoven or any other composer is aesthetically. We don't regard Wagner or Beethoven nor Shakespeare or Milton as great teachers. When we start claiming for Lennon or McCartney or Maharishi or any other of these pop prophets the ability to transport us to a region where God becomes manifest then I see red. We're satisfied with our little long playing record, ten pop numbers or thereabouts a side. This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told: "You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it." When you're told these things you sit down with a sigh of relief: "Thank God I don't have to learn, I don't have to travel, I don't have to exert myself in the slightest. I am what I am. Youth is youth. Pop is pop. There's no need to progress. There's no need to do anything. Let us sit down, smoke our marijuana (an admirable thing in itself but not the end of anything), let us listen to our records and life has become a single moment. And the single moment is eternity. We're with God. Finis!”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Pop Music

Báb photo
Georges Bataille photo
Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield photo
Paul Morphy photo
Moshe Dayan photo
Jacques Parizeau photo

“It is true, it is true that we were beaten, but in the end, by what? By money and ethnic votes, essentially.”

Jacques Parizeau (1930–2015) Canadian politician

C'est vrai, c'est vrai qu'on a été battus, au fond, par quoi? Par l'argent pis des votes ethniques, essentiellement.
1995 referendum concession speech.

James Fenimore Cooper photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo

“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

The earliest citation yet found does not attribute this to Roosevelt, but presents it as a piece of anonymous piece folk-wisdom: "When one reaches the end of his rope, he should tie a knot in it and hang on" ( LIFE magazine (3 April 1919), p. 585 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89063018576?urlappend=%3Bseq=65).
Misattributed
Variant: When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

“…if the Legislative Council really ends up with no representatives of industry and commerce, then it is possible that these sectors will comprehensively divest from Hong Kong.”

Gordon Wu (1935) Hong Kong businessman

Original:…如果立法會最終真係無工商界的代表,工商界可以唔同你玩,全面撤資囉。
Source: 胡 應 湘 : 爭 拗 至 2047 都 無 普 選 http://www.hkreporter.com/talks/viewthread.php?tid=870295&page=1

Tina Fey photo
David Weber photo
Alice A. Bailey photo

“When men feel that they have exhausted all their own resources and have come to an end of all their own innate possibilities and that the problems and conditions confronting them are beyond their solving or handling, they are apt to look for a divine Intermediary…”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter I: The Doctrine of the Coming One (Western Teaching), The Doctrine of Avatars (Eastern Teaching)

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Arun Shourie photo
Newton Lee photo

“The last thing we want is a nasty divorce between humans and superintelligent machines, for that would certainly spell the end of the human race.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

José Rizal photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Sheri-D Wilson photo

“Relationships are good
for at least two poems—
One at the beginning
and one at the end.”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"On Being a Poet"
Swerve (1993)

“Among other ends, modern art is related to the ideal of Internationalism.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950's, An Illustrated Survey, Herskovic, Marika; nyschoolpress, 2003, p.238
after 1970

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Salvador Dalí photo
B. W. Powe photo

“It began in images and it ended in symbolism.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Forms, Eulogies, Images and Symbols, p. 160
Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose (2007)

Zechariah Chafee photo

“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.”

Zechariah Chafee (1885–1957) American judicial philosopher and civil libertarian

"Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919). (Various permutations of this quote have been incorrectly attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.).
" Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-354_olp1.pdf" dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

John Crowley photo
Neville Chamberlain photo
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Thomas Hobbes photo

“Another advantage is the existence of an exercise section at the end of each chapter which enables the reader to verify understanding and, when needed, to go back to the right section and reread desired fragments.”

Book Reviews, REVIEWER: JAKUB PALIDER, NANOSCALE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS STEPHEN F. BUSH, ARTECH HOUSE, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-1-60807-003-9, HARDCOVER, 308 PAGES, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011.

Barbara W. Tuchman photo

“It is generally assumed that men are damaged in their capacity for closeness and intimacy. If intimacy is defined as a loving closeness with another person, then it is usually true that the early conditioning of men to be performers and competitors in the impersonal competitive world limits their intimacy capacity. Women are assumed to have a greater capacity for intimacy than men because they express caring emotions and allow themselves to be dependent and close in relationships more easily. Yet, a closer look will provide a different perspective.

True intimacy is love and closeness based on knowledge of the inner reality and inner experience of the other. However, in romantic relationships, closeness ends or is put into crisis when men describe honestly their inner experiences to women. Women assail the relationship behavior of men and men acknowledge what they are told. Rarely is the opposite true. Men accept the reality of women more than women accept the reality of men.

The fact that a woman's priority is placed on personal needs bears no relationship to a genuine capacity for intimacy. To be loved and known, and to be fully comfortable expressing one's personal self, are two major components of intimacy. There are few men who have received that from a woman. The opposite holds true. A woman's love for a man is contingent on his participating in her romantic fantasy of what he and the relationship should be. Few men risk challenging or undermining that fantasy. Instead, they play by the rules of romance even when it feels uncomfortable, knowing that being loved by her is fragile and easily broken once he reveals his resistances and unromantic feelings.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why Women Are Also Incapable of Intimacy, pp. 120–121
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

“You did not go through everything you've gone through just to end up in the same place you were when you started.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 124

Peter Akinola photo

“a misfit, a wolf in shepherd’s clothing and one of the end-time agents of the devil sent to lead astray those who would have believed in God.”

Peter Akinola (1944) Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria

referring to the Anglican Primate of South Africa, Archibishop Winston Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape Town

Yehuda Ashlag photo
Lewis Black photo
Max Weber photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Karel Čapek photo

“The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Two-Handed Engine (p. 135)
Short fiction, No Boundaries (1955)

Gideon Levy photo
Éric Pichet photo

“At the end of the current five-year presidential term and the “Trente-Six Dispendieuses” (36 years of uninterrupted deficits from 1981 to 2017) far-reaching public expenditure reforms will be required. These will be all the more painful as they are far too late.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

La trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 : impuissance du droit et vérité des comptes http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2563481 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n48 (2014).
Budgetary policy, From the Expensive 30 toe the Expensive 36, The Expensive 36

Charles Evans Hughes photo

“Mountains, solitude and the moon
until the journey's end?
The river holds the lost road of the sky;
the shape of eternity?”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Paul Mason (journalist) photo