Quotes about fall (3635 quotes, page 20)

“But for National Socialism with this demand for social justice stands and falls the question of destiny for the German people, whether the German people can find its way to a noble nation, or whether it will eke out a miserable life in degradation and corruption as a fellaheen nation.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), p. 71

Life , People , Justice , Way

“The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. … If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. … You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 63
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Age

“Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static - with movement. For a static of the present movement. Resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living.
Stop insisting on 'values' which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present, live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

Original text in German:
Es bewegt sich alles, Stillstand gibt es nicht. Lasst Euch nicht von überlebten Zeitbegriffen beherrschen. Fort mit den Stunden, Sekunden und Minuten. Hört auf, der Veränderlichkeit zu widerstehen. SEID IN DER ZEIT – SEID STATISCH, SEID STATISCH – MIT DER BEWEGUNG. Fur Statik. Im Jetzt stattfindenden JETZT... Lasst es sein, Kathedralen und Pyramiden zu bauen, die zerbröckeln wie Zuckerwerk. Atmet tief, lebt Jetzt, lebt auf und in der Zeit. Für eine schöne und absolute Wirklichkeit!
In For Statics (original title: Für Statik), 1958 programmatic text for the 'Concert for Seven Pictures' in Düsseldorf: as quoted in: Arts/Canada. Vol. 25. (1968) p. 4.
Quotes, 1950's

Reality , Time , Painting , Forgetting

“Sweet is the breath of vernal shower,
The bee's collected treasures sweet,
Sweet music's melting fall, but sweeter yet
The still small voice of gratitude.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Ode for Music http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=ocmu (1769), V, line 8

Music , Bee , Gratitude

“I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my superior, Anton Antonich Syetochkin. He was the the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I even wonder at the fact myself now. But I even went to see him only when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed at least one human being at hand who actually existed. I had to call on Anton Antonich, however, on Tuesday — his at-home day; so I always had to adjust my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Notes from Underground

Part 2, Chapter 2 (page 56)
Notes from Underground (1864)

Life , Dreams , Feeling , Home

“Why feel I so for him, whether he master his toils, or whether he fall?”
Quid me autem sic ille movet, superetne labores an cadat?

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 131–132

Feeling

“Catilina in particular was one of the most nefarious men in that nefarious age. His villanies belong to the criminal records, not to history; but his very outward appearance - the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns sluggish and hurried - betrayed his dismal past. He possessed in a high degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band - the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations, courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon, and that horrible mastery of vice which knows how to bring the weak to fall, and how to train the fallen to crime.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 1, Translated by W.P. Dickson
On the Praetor Lucius Catilina
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

Men , Pleasure , Age , History

“The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas—the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 155
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

People , Animals

“The first thing you see will be the two Cyanean Rocks, at the end of the straits. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever made his way between them, for not being fixed to the bottom of the sea they frequently collide, flinging up the water in a seething mass which falls on the rocky flanks of the straits with a resounding roar. Now if, as I take it, you are god-fearing travellers and men of sense, you will be advised by me: you will not rashly throw away your lives or rush into danger with the recklessness of youth. Make an experiment first. Send out a dove from Argo to explore the way. If she succeeds in flying in between the Rocks and out across the sea, do not hesitate to follow in her path, but get a firm grip on your oars and cleave the water of the straits. For that is the time when salvation will depend, not on your prayers, but on your strength of arm. So think of nothing else, be firm, and spend your energies on what will pay you best. By all means pray to the gods, but choose an earlier moment. And if the dove flies on, but comes to grief midway, turn back. It is always better to submit to heaven; and you could not possibly escape a dreadful end. The Rocks would crush you, even if Argo were an iron ship.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 317–340

Men , God , Youth , Fear

“It was an earnest, extreme, and irreverent book, a book that, in its mockery of authority, its relentless logic, its relentless hewing to the line of Reason, letting the sacred cows fall where they might, followed the old familiar script: CAMPUS REBEL FLAYS FACULTY. But the script was all balled up, for the author was more reactionary than any of the dignitaries in their black robes, and his book damned Yale as a hotbed of atheism and collectivism.”

Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) journalist

Review of God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted in Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders:How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Books

“And now that Thou has restored to me the knowledge of Thyself, O Lord, let thy pardon fall on me, since Thy infinite mercy is not better known in anything than in pardoning a Dismas (the traditional name of the good thief) on the Cross and a Dominicus Corea on the gallows. If in Hell there is room for sinners, in Heaven also there is room for penitents.”

Dominicus Corea (1565–1596) King of Kotte and Sitawaka

The last address of King Dominicus Corea (Edirille Rala) on the gallows in Colombo before he was executed by the Portuguese - as quoted in:

Hell , Knowledge

“I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of mt erotic-emotional life.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from the catalog of the exhibition 'Dali una vida de libro', Bibliotheca de Catalunya, Barcelona 2004
Dali's memory is written in a mixture of French and Catalan accent
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

Life , Fear , Solitude , Light

“Nothing falls entirely! Nothing dies away completely! Nothing can totally deprive another of its rights! On the contrary, the deeper the fall, the higher the reactive upswing!”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: The Fertile Earth

“Instead of copying Nature, we [ Cubists ] create a 'milieu', of our own, wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors. It is hard to explain it, but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy of literature and music. Your [ Gelett Burgess is American] Edgar Poe did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically. Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in 'The Fall of the House of Ushur.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

That subjective idea he translated into art. He made a composition of it.
Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf, in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 413

Life , Art , Music , Color

“Falling from the pan
Into the fire beneath.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Canto XIII, stanza 30 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“Softly, at first, as if it hardly meant it, the snow began to fall.”

Arthur Ransome book Winter Holiday

Winter Holiday (Chapter 5), 1933

“But yet they that have no Science, are in better, and nobler condition with their naturall Prudence; than men, that by their mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd generall rules.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 5, p. 21
Leviathan (1651)

Men , Science , Falseness

“I've got to tell you, 25 years ago, I believe that in this country, we should not be selling automatic weapons which are designed to kill people. We have got to do everything that we can on top of that to make sure that guns do not fall into the hands of people who should not have them, criminals, people who are mentally ill. So that struggles continues.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Meet the Press NBC, 12 June 2016
2010s, 2016

People , Country

“Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff — even though it is the stuff of life.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Life , Books , Art , Sex

“But some, making no account of the wealth of nature, pursue the wealth of vain opinions. They choose to lean on one who lacks rather than one who has the gift of sight, and with this defective guidance to their steps must of necessity fall.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

167.
On the Virtues

Nature , Wealth

“Nature appears to us in four seasons. The spring is bright and warm, the summer lazy and hot. The fall is decked with colour with a trace of sadness, and the winter frosted and severe. Similarly, the movement of shin shin toitsu aikido are rich and varied. There is both severity and kindness, speed and calmness. It is designed to express the many moods and characteristics of men and women, young and old. But if it for one moment varies from the principles of the universe, it is no longer aikido with ki.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

23
Ki Sayings (2003)

Women , Men , Sadness , Spring

“I can't actually play any instrument properly. I can't read music. And here's the New York Times calling me the new George Gershwin. It was so ridiculous, really embarrassing. It was embarrassing to watch these people fall into the trap of their own critical conceits.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

Musician (March 1986)

People , Music , Time , Reading

“What is seen and called the picture is what remains – an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanished and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. The very matter of painting – its pigment and space – is so resistant to the will, so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still. Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state – corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

12 Americans, by Dorothy C.Miller, New York, 1956. p. 36
1950 - 1960

Travel , Feeling , Sense , Light

“"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love — if once one has ever fallen in."
Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

Love , People , World , Family

“What has to do with your ability to fall asleep is not caffeine. It's having a clean conscience. I have a clean conscience so I can drink all the caffeine I want.”

Bob Barr (1948) Republican and Libertarian politician

Los Angeles Times, (23 July 2008) He's Bob Barr, and he's running for president. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-barr23-2008jul23,0,7621903.story?page=1 Los Angeles Times. 23 July 2008.
2000s, 2008

Drink

“Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Rainy Day

"The Rainy Day", Bentley's Miscellany ( December 1841 http://books.google.com/books?id=pW8AAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Thy+fate+is+the+common+fate+of+all+Into+each+life+some+rain+must+fall+some+days+must+be+dark+and+dreary%22&pg=PA626#v=onepage).

Life , Fate

“Each green leaf or each needle is in effect a remarkably well-regulated metal factory. Its operation can be demonstrated experimentally. With the falling of the leaves or needles this supply of metals is scattered by the wind, and the more undergrowth there is, the greater is the dispersion of organic metal salts, which during the winter are pressed down hard by the snow.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Living Water

Winter

“We all make mistakes - we fall in love with tenors and sopranoes even though tenors are as dumb as quarrelsome women, because high tones damage their brains.”

Waldemar Łysiak book Kielich

Kielich (2002)

Love , Women

“We fall short when we ascribe all the modes of happiness to walking in paths of rectitude. There are joys which only tramps and thieves know.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 116

Joy , Happiness

“When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XII: God and Nature

God , Way , Idea , Nature

“What if he has borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it oft falls out?”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 8. Of the Art of Conversation
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 1: The Sierra Nevada

Flowers , Nature , Sun , Sea

“What, exactly, is the cost of this inaction? Estimates of the total national cost of medical malpractice range from $20 billion to $45 billion annually. But this number hardly tells the whole story. There also is the more hidden cost of defensive medicine, including unnecessary testing and second opinions that send patients scurrying through processes that would not otherwise be ordered and deepen the financial burden of America’s health care system by an estimated three percent of our country’s total health care expenditures. Who ultimately pays these costs? Reckless doctors? Faceless insurance companies? Seldom mentioned, the totality of these expenses ultimately falls exclusively on the consumer, since each malpractice award translates ultimately to increased malpractice insurance premiums, which, in turn, translates to either higher health care costs, fewer physicians (with less competitive pricing pressure), or both.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

"Malpractice: Where Will It End?" Orthopedic Technology Review, September/October 2003, by Michael Johns: Advocating Statutory Constraints on Medical Malpractice

Health , Country

“Consider, for example, the state of Science generally, in Europe, at this period. It is admitted, on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention. In most of the European nations there is now no such thing as a Science of Mind; only more or less advancement in the general science, or the special sciences, of matter.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Science

“Intellectual truth alone will not make you free, though it is certainly a necessary preliminary. If this were the case your walls would fall away, since intellectually you understand their rather dubious nature. Since feeling is so often the cohesive with which mind builds, it is feeling itself which must be changed if you would find freedom from your particular plane of existence at your particular time.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 13, Page 72
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 1

Truth , Feeling , Understanding , Nature

“The fact is nearly everyone forces God to fit into his own perception. Even Christians serve a God they perceive rather than the God who truly is. They limit Him according to those special needs of their own psyche. It's actually hard not to do that, but every time we do, it has consequences. Seeing God for who He truly is takes effort and always has one inevitable result that many people cannot accept: our understanding will always fall short.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

Open Letter To Satanists

God , People , Understanding , Effort

“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Age , Art , Sense , Help

“I know what turns me on, and it's that fine line, that point where you're falling off the edge of a cliff, where your stomach turns, [and] I'm always trying to find that point in music. You rarely hit it, and again, that's the joy of playing live, because there you can be just at that point where you've lost balance. I'm always walking between polarities, trying to find the opposing sides.”

KatieJane Garside (1968) English singer

On creative aspirations, Drowned in Sound http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4562-i-want-to-have-a-past (2002)

Music , Joy

“Honest and peace-loving people shun the Courts and are prepared to suffer loss rather than fall into a Lawyer's clutches. However, the vagaries and inconsistencies of human nature are such that people are unwillingly dragged in and the experiences they undergo leave an indelible and nauseating impression. One of these is the flagrant and plausible manner in which clients are fleeced, and snowed under a series of documents and forms which not only puzzle them, but which are always accompanied with demands for payment. There is, of course, the Lawyer's fee, but this is accompanied with the fees of his clerk (real or imaginary), then typing charges, copying charges and numerous other innumerable heads and sub-heads. In this context it is refreshing to recall that eminent legal luminary, the late Pt. Motilal Nehru was paid Rs. 5/- as his first fee and the remuneration of Dr. John Mathai was a bunch of bananas. These latter have increased immeasurably in value and are good foreign exchange getters and it is not so easy now to slip on a banana peel!”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Lawyers

Love , People , Peace , Nature

“Love is a self-manifested notion depending on how lonely you are - so if you're really attracted to someone, and you're really lonely, I think you can fall in love in an instant. It's all about where you're at.”

Kiefer Sutherland (1966) English-Canadian actor, director, producer, voice actor

Interview in The Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1429594,00.html (6 March 2005).

Love , Thinking , Dependency

“And I'm tired of living here in this hotel,Snow and the rain falling through the sheets.In fact, I'm tired of 23rd Street.Strung out like some Christmas lightsOut there in the Chelsea night.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Hotel Chelsea Nights
Love Is Hell pt. 2 (2003)

Christmas , Night

“The best sky was in Italy and Spain and northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

Part II, Ch. 2
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

“The pain which has passed away has been spent up by experience. It cannot, therefore, fall within the sphere of avoidable. And that which is present, is being experienced at the time of its existence; it cannot, therefore, be considered as the avoidable with reference to the future movement of time. Hence that pain alone which has not yet been experienced, troubles the Yogi who is sensitive as the eye-ball; it does not trouble any other knower. Hence that alone is avoidable pain.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 124.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Pain , Time , Future

“I was told you either stand or you fall, as long as you know when you walk you holding' hands with a god. That alone can turn the dark to a walk in the park.”

Blu (1983) American rapper and music producer

The World Is (Below the Heavens)
Below the Heavens (2007)

God

“A scene that has often come into my mind, both sleeping and waking — I am standing in the wings of a theatre waiting for my cue to go onstage. As I stand there I can hear the play proceeding, and suddenly it dawns on me that the lines I have learnt are not in this play at all, but belong to quite a different one. Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what should I do. Then I get my cue. Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way onto the stage, and then look for guidance to the prompter, whose head I can just see rising out of the floor-boards. Alas he only signals helplessly to me and I realise of course that his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience, who begin to hiss and shout: “Get off the stage!”, “Let the play go on!”, “You’re interrupting!””

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

I am paralysed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don’t fit. The only lines I know.
Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (1972)

Way , Thinking , Sleep , Waiting

“She turned, and flashed upon their view
Her stately neck's purpureal hue;
Ambrosial tresses round her head
A more than earthly fragrance shed:
Her falling robe her footprints swept,
And showed the goddess as she stept.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book I, p. 21

“The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1960s, First Inaugural Address (1969)

Dreams

“Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Source: North America (1862), Ch. 21

“So we're led by denial like lambs to the slaughter
Serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water
And the old farm road's a four-lane that leads to the mall
And our dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Subdivision
Song lyrics

Dreams , Water , Waiting

“Here a little child I stand
Heaving up my either hand.
Cold as paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a benison to fall
On our meat, and on us all.”

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) 17th-century English poet and cleric

Noble Numbers (1648), "A Child's Grace".

“For a while longer you may be able to carry on with your plundering and murderous crimes, but you will not escape your ultimate fate. We shall exhaust and then destroy you in a difficult and prolonged battle. When one of us falls, there are tens of others who will rise. Our death is no ordinary death and our life no ordinary life.”

Ashraf Dehghani (1948) amongst the most well known Iranian female Communist revolutionary and member of the Iranian People's Fedai Guer…

Torture and Resistance in Iran, 1971

Life , Death , Fate

“Our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for often nor for grievous falling: for our falling hindereth not Him to love us. Peace and love are ever in us, being and working; but we be not alway in peace and in love.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 39
Context: Our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for often nor for grievous falling: for our falling hindereth not Him to love us. Peace and love are ever in us, being and working; but we be not alway in peace and in love. But He willeth that we take heed thus that He is Ground of all our whole life in love; and furthermore that He is our everlasting Keeper and mightily defendeth us against our enemies, that be full fell and fierce upon us; — and so much our need is the more for we give them occasion by our falling.

Love , Peace , Despair

“I love the whirling of the dervishes.
I love the beauty of rare innocence.
You don't need no crystal ball,
Don't fall for a magic wand.
We humans got it all, we perform the miracles.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Love , Beauty

“Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvelousness But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, 'I believe such and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unraveling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms…. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)

Life , Faith , Law , Penalty

“As a child walking over a slippery and dangerous path cries out, "Father, I am falling!" and has but a moment to catch his father's hand, so every believer sees hours when only the hand of Jesus comes between him and the abysses of destruction.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 89.

““On the 1st Rajab 990 [AD 1582] he (Husain Qulî Khãn) encamped by a field of maize near NagarkoT. The fortress (hissãr) of Bhîm, which is an idol temple of Mahãmãî, and in which none but her servants dwelt, was taken by the valour of the assailants at the first assault. A party of Rajpûts, who had resolved to die, fought most desperately till they were all cut down. A number of Brãhmans who for many years had served the temple, never gave one thought to flight, and were killed. Nearly 200 black cows belonging to Hindûs had, during the struggle, crowded together for shelter in the temple. Some savage Turks, while the arrows and bullets were falling like rain, killed those cows. They then took off their boots and filled them with the blood and cast it upon the roof and walls of the temple.”173”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Jalãlu’d-Dîn Muhammad Akbar Pãdshãh Ghãzî (AD 1556-1605) Nagarkot Kangra (Himachal Pradesh)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

War , People , Education , Disease

“Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. And it would be a crime against Nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place, and which the gravest statesmen and the hoarsest politicians hope to make available to all men in the end: I mean the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under trees, to read, to hit a ball and bounce the baby.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

One Man's America (1952).
Quoted in "The Very Moving Day", Season 6, Episode 1 of All in the Family (1975)

Love , Men , World , Hope

“Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. “it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I – I – I.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 137
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Wisdom

“Then the young samurai's mother had the child sold to a brothel, where she swept the floors and oiled the women and watched the secret ways. At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch. Like other girls who have been trained this way, she learned to handle many men in a single night and her skin turned a milky white.”

Scooter Libby book The Apprentice

page 81 https://books.google.ca/books?id=obXWAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA81
The Apprentice (1996)

Love , Women , Men , Secret

“Reader, you may ask this question; in fact, you must ask this question: Is it ridiculous for a very small, sickly, big-eared mouse to fall in love with a beautiful human princess named Pea?
The answer is… yes. Of course, it's ridiculous.
Love is ridiculous.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

The Tale of Despereaux (2004)

Love , Beauty , Question , Princess

“I fall into the category of Weird West, but I think it may be more of a “Down West” as I’d like to call it, for its sense of macabre western humor.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

interview with Lorin Morgan-Richards by Laura LaVelle of Newswhistle (28 November 2017).

Thinking , Sense

“Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about when your personalities and sexualities were compatible.”

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 3 “Spectral Lines” (p. 40)

Love , Personality

“the distribution of flexibility among the many variables of a system is a matter of very great importance. The healthy system … may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire. To maintain the ongoing truth of his basic premise (“I am on the wire”), he must be free to move from one position of instability to another, i. e., certain variables such as the position of his arms and the rate of movement of his arms must have great flexibility, which he uses to maintain the stability of other more fundamental and general characteristics. If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

7.4 Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Truth , Communication

“To rise by others' fall
I deem a losing gain;
All states with others' ruins built
To ruin run amain.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

Source: Content and Rich, Line 57; p. 59.

“It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

“She stood and turned around and of course there was nothing there. But she could see him standing there, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, that easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face, leaning lanky and at ease against a monument or one of the stone gateposts or maybe just a tree gone red with fall's dying fire.”

Stephen King book The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone (1979)

Tree

“When God's hand is bent to strike, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

No. 76 http://books.google.com/books?id=eypXAAAAYAAJ&q=%22When+God's+hand+is+bent+to+strike+it+is+a+fearful+thing+to+fall+into+the+hands+of+the+living+God+but+to+fall+out+of+the+hands+of+the+living+God+is+a+horror+beyond+our+expression+beyond+our+imagination%22&pg=PA386#v=onepage, preached at Sion to The Earl of Carlisle and company (c. 1622)
LXXX Sermons (1640)

God , Fear , Imagination

“What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 367 et seq.

Mountain , Maternity

“Whether the influence of increasing returns on trade and geography is rising or falling, one thing is clear: much was learned from the intellectual revolution that brought increasing returns into the heart of how we think about the world economy. It wasn't just that economists could make sense of previously puzzling data, we found ourselves able to see things that had previously been in an intellectual blind spot. Many people contributed to this process of enlightenment; I'm proud to have been a part of the journey.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography", The American Economic Review (Jun., 2009)

People , World , Thinking , Sense

“I can do short jobs. If I was still starring in three movies every year, there’s no way that I’d be the person my kids want when they fall down.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, Elle http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Cover-Shoots/The-Spellbinder-Gwyneth-Paltrow#mode=base;slide=0; (August 3 2011)

Way , Star , Personality

“Men and things rise, fall, move away, approach. Everything is a comedy of distances.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Hombres y cosas, suben, bajan, se alejan, se acercan. Todo es una comedia de distancias.
Voces (1943)

Men

“It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological — and sometimes military — pressure to fall into line.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"How Neo-Conservatives Perish" (1990).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Hostility , World , Parting

“Roger: No, not anyone in the band. No, not really. We don't get that. There was one time where we played a show and we were playing at Sunlight Convention Center or something and they just had no idea what they were doing security wise. Kids were dancing and stuff and kicking stuff on the stage and this security guy had no idea on what to do so he just pushes this kid right off the stage and he just falls and breaks his leg in like a second! There's been some stories like that. Faulty employees, I called it. (laughs) You have no idea what to expect. Sometimes we'll play a college show and we'll just show up and start doing our thing and security's like stop, no moshing, no crowd surfing, no circle pits or whatever. Well, why did you have us play here? Don't you know that's what we do? Haven't you ever heard of us before? That's what we do! We get people excited, get them running around! They're going to jump around! That's what we're trying to do!! (laughs) Get some energy flowing between us.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

People , Guy , Idea , Time

“This proposal will help protect everyone from hazardous lead paint chips falling onto the street. We need to remove this dangerous problem from our above ground subway lines.”

Jose Peralta (1971–2018) American politician

Problem , Help , Painting

“Drying up in conversation,
You will be the one who cannot talk,
All your insides fall to pieces,
You just sit there wishing you could still make love.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

High and Dry
Lyrics, The Bends (1995)

Love , Making love

“It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"Class Struggle on the Desktop"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

People , Guy , History , Intelligence

“About the hill lay other islands small,
Where other rocks, crags, cliffs, and mountains stood,
The Isles Fortunate these elder time did call,
To which high Heaven they reigned so kind and good,
And of his blessings rich so liberal,
That without tillage earth gives corn for food,
And grapes that swell with sweet and precious wine
There without pruning yields the fertile vine.The olive fat there ever buds and flowers,
The honey-drops from hollow oaks distil,
The falling brook her silver streams downpours
With gentle murmur from their native hill,
The western blast tempereth with dews and showers
The sunny rays, lest heat the blossoms kill,
The fields Elysian, as fond heathen sain,
Were there, where souls of men in bliss remain.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Ecco altre isole insieme, altre pendíci
Scoprian alfin men erte ed elevate.
Ed eran queste l'isole felici;
Così le nominò la prisca etate,
A cui tanto stimava i Cieli amici,
Che credea volontarie, e non arate
Quì partorir le terre, e in più graditi
Frutti, non culte, germogliar le viti.<p>Quì non fallaci mai fiorir gli olivi,
E 'l mel dicea stillar dall'elci cave:
E scender giù da lor montagne i rivi
Con acque dolci, e mormorio soave:
E zefiri e rugiade i raggj estivi
Temprarvi sì, che nullo ardor v'è grave:
E quì gli Elisj campi, e le famose
Stanze delle beate anime pose.
Canto XV, stanzas 35–36 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Men , Food , Soul , Mountain

“If all the sky was made of gold leaf, and the air was starred with fine silver, and treasure borne on all the winds, and every drop of sea-water was a florin, and it rained down, morning and evening, riches, goods, honours, jewels, money, till all the people were filled with it, and I stood there naked in such rain and wind, never a drop of it would fall on me.”

Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) French poet

Se tout le ciel estoit de feuilles d'or,
Et li airs fust estellés d'argent fin,
Et tous les vens fussent pleins de tresor,
Et les gouttes fussent toutes florin
D'eaue de mer, et pleust soir et matin
Richesses, biens, honeurs, joiaux, argent,
Tant que rempli en fust toute la gent,
La terre aussi en fust mouillee toute,
Et fusse nu, – de tel pluie et tel vent
Ja sur mon cors n'en cherroit une goutte.
"Se tout le ciel estoit de feuilles d'or", line 1; text and translation from Brian Woledge (ed.) The Penguin Book of French Verse, 1: To the Fifteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1961] 1968) p. 236.

Money , People , Star , Water

“[Stendhal] was small, ugly and obsessed by physical beauty in others, and he spent most of his time in salons and opera houses, pursuing aristocratic hostesses and singers. After the fall of Napoleon, he retired to Italy, adopted his pseudonym and began to write. He was a sexual freebooter who “found a notion of obtaining happiness from a virtuous woman wholly inconceivable.””

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

At 59, unmarried, syphilitic and obscure, he dropped dead in a Paris street.
"Homage to QWERT YUIOP".
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Beauty , Time , Housing , Dead

“Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born... All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 131-132 - (VSD), Dali's quotes on the void

Sleep , Heart

“If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won't find anything to beat it, and you won't know if it will come to you once more.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Love , Chance , Time

“The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 269

Love

“Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 7 “Tier” section II (p. 212).

Life , Age , Time

“I had built a little cabin in Yosemite, and for convenience in getting water, and for the sake of music and society, I led a small stream from Yosemite Creek into it. Running along the side of the wall it was not in the way, and it had just fall enough to ripple and sing in low, sweet tones, making delightful company, especially at night when I was lying awake. Then a few frogs came in and made merry with the stream, — and one snake.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 6: Among the Animals of the Yosemite

Music , Way , Lying , Water

“Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Autumnal Sonnet; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Autumn , Dead

“Good morning, Mr. Greenspan. I understand that you did not take my friendly advice last fall. I thought maybe you should look for other employment, but I see you have kept your job.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Financial Services, February 17, 2000 http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/bank/hba62930.000/hba62930_0.HTM#53
2000s, 2001-2005

Understanding

“Ask me no more, where those stars light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.”

Thomas Carew (1594–1640) English poet

"Song".
Carew's Poems

Star , Light , Night , Dead

“As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. … To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", p. 540.

Men , Truth , Faith , Religion

“Prediction of the fall of Russian communism: "Russia enveloped with communism—a new religious freedom must come. God will overrule it, for that people must hear the truth, and truth in simplicity. Truly there is much for the church to do in the coming century."”

David O. McKay (1873–1970) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

At Brigham Young University, reported in Church News, May 28, 1960.

God , People , Truth , Communication

“When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.”

Anaïs Nin book A Spy in the House of Love

A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

Sleep , Time , Cheating , Night

“So what happens when the regime falls, as it must? We are in the first stage of change in our country, and the feeling among the revolutionaries is that the people of Yemen will find solutions for our problems once the regime has gone, because the regime itself is the cause of most of them. A new Yemen awaits us, with a better future for all.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen (2011)

People , Feeling , Problem , Change

“"With these victories to which you refer, the Confederate States do seem to have retrieved their falling fortunes," Lord Lyons said. "I have no reason to doubt that Her Majesty's government will soon recognize that fact." "Thank you, your excellency," Lee said quietly. Even had Lincoln refused to give up the war- not impossible, with the Mississippi valley and many coastal pockets held by virtue of Northern naval power and hence relatively secure from rebel AK-47s- recognition by the greatest empire on earth would have assured Confederate independence. Lord Lyons held up a hand. "Many among our upper classes will be glad enough to welcome you to the family of nations, both as a result of your successful fight for self-government and because you have given a black eye to the often vulgar democracy of the United States. Others, however, will judge your republic a sham, with its freedom for white men based upon Negro slavery, a notion loathsome to the civilized world. I should be less than candid if I failed to number myself among that latter group." "Slavery was not the reason the Southern states chose to leave the Union," Lee said. He was aware he sounded uncomfortable, but went on, "We sought only to enjoy the sovereignty guaranteed us under the constitution, a right the North wrongly denied us. Our watchword all along has been, we wish but to be left alone."”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 182-183

Men , War , World , Family

“And we fall as if we never really mattered”

Pete Yorn (1974) American musician

Crystal Village
Song lyrics

“Far in the stillness a cat
Languishes loudly. A cinder
Falls, and the shadows
Lurch to the leap of the flame.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

Source: In Hospital (1908), p. 11

Cats

“While a small domain (consisting of fifty or fewer objects) can generally be analyzed as a unit, large domains must be partitioned to make the analysis a manageable task. To make such a partitioning, we take advantage of the fact that objects on an information model tend to fall into clusters: groups of objects that are interconnected with one another by many relationships. By contrast, relatively few relationships connect objects in different clusters.
When partitioning a domain, we divide the information model so that the clusters remain intact… Each section of the information model then becomes a separate subsystem. Note that when the information model is partitioned into subsystems, each object is assigned to exactly one subsystem.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World In Data (1988), p. 145; as cited in: The Object Agency, Inc. (1995) " A Comparison of Object-Oriented Development Methodologies http://www.ipipan.gda.pl/~marek/objects/TOA/OOMethod/mcr.html".