Quotes about fall
page 28

“It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed

Love, Understanding, Time, Help

“Canst thou not see adown the silver cloudland streaming
Rivers of faery light, dewdrop on dewdrop falling,
Starfire of silver flames, lighting the dark beneath?
And what enraptured hosts burn on the dusky heath!
Come thou away with them, for Heaven to Earth is calling.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Light

“I should be glad of loneliness
And hours that go on broken wings,
A thirsty body, a tired heart
And the unchanging ache of things,
If I could make a single song
As lovely and as full of light,
As hushed and brief as a falling star
On a winter night.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Compensation"
Flame and Shadow (1920)

Love, Star, Light, Winter

“As the trend in the ballots slowly made me realize that — in a manner of speaking the guillotine would fall on me — I started to feel quite dizzy. I thought that I had done my life's work and could now hope to live out my days in peace. I told the Lord with deep conviction, 'Don't do this to me. You have younger and better (candidates) who could take up this great task with a totally different energy and with different strength.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Evidently, this time he didn't listen to me.
Comments on his election during his first audience with German pilgrims, original comments given in German.
2005

Life, Peace, Hope, Feeling

“I was so, so lost and unhappy. If you listen to the songs on the first album, you can hear it. They’re really sad songs and they come from a lonely place. The relationship broke up, and I went into free fall. I saw drugs as a way of avoiding…the darkness.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

The Sunday Times, May 14, 2006
Drugs

Sadness, Way

“So what did they do? They solemnly asked Parliament, not to approve or disapprove, but to 'take note' of our decision. Perhaps some of the older ones among you will remember that popular song: 'She didn't say "Yes", she didn't say "No". She didn't say "stay", she didn't say "go". She wanted to climb, but dreaded to fall, she bided her time and clung to the wall.'”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Mr Macmillan Denies Threat to Britain's Sovereignty", The Times, 15 October 1962, p. 6.
Speech to the Conservative Party conference, Blackpool, 13 October 1962, having some fun at the expense of the opposition Labour Party.
1960s

Decision, Time

“The only factor that poses a genuine challenge to the current order is the willingness of human beings to reject the injustice and irrationality of this economy, and stand up for something better. Capitalism will not fall-rather, it must be pushed.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 5, Chapter 25, Evaluating Capitalism, p. 314
Economics For Everyone (2008)

“When happily ever after fails
And weve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly
But I know a place where we can go
Thats still untouched by man
Well sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind.
You can lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me.
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence.”

Don Henley (1947) American singer, lyricist, producer and drummer

"The End of the Innocence" (co-written with Bruce Hornsby)
Song lyrics, The End of the Innocence (1989)

Grass, Flying

“The Southwest was spectacular, but I have no interest in moving there. North Carolina is beautiful in spring and fall. But I can say I didn't find anyplace I'd rather live than Maine.”

Angus King (1944) United States Senator from Maine

Bowdoin Academic Spotlight interview (2011)

Beauty, Spring

“I don't want to do any of those things you said. I want – I want – to make things right.'
'Then so you shall.'
'Is it so easy?'
'Not easy. Not easy at all. Think how much is wanting to make things wrong. All the fear in the world, and the violence that comes from the fear, and the hatred that comes from the violence, and the loneliness that comes from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, it gathers like clouds in the air, and grows dark and cold and heavy, and falls like grey snow in thick layers over the land. Then the world is all muffled and numb, and no one can hear each other or feel each other. Think how sad and lonely that must be.”

William Nicholson (1948) British screenwriter, playwright and novelist

Source: The "Wind on Fire" Trilogy (2000-2003), Firesong (Book 3), p. 274

World, Sadness, Fear, Feeling

“If Israel falls to the terrorists, the entire free world will tremble. To forsake Israel now would be tantamount to forsaking Great Britain in 1940. It is unthinkable, and it is unthinkable because the world wants to know if we believe freedom is worth fighting for.”

Tom DeLay (1947) American Republican politician

[31 August 2004] [citation needed]
2000s

World, Freedom, Fight

“Hitherto our principal difficulty has arose from a want of proper supplies of money, and from the inefficacy of that which we obtained; but now there appears a scene opening which will introduce new embarrassments. The Congress have recommended to the different States to take upon themselves the furnishing certain species of supplies for our department. The recommendation falls far short of the general detail of the business, the difficulty of ad justing which, between the different agents as well as the different authorities from which they derive their appointments, I am very apprehensive will introduce some jarring interests, many improper disputes, as well as dangerous delays. Few persons, who have not a competent knowledge of this employment, can form any tolerable idea of the arrangements necessary to give despatch and success in discharging the duties of the office, or see the necessity for certain relations and dependencies. The great exertions which are frequently necessary to be made, require the whole machine to be moved by one common interest, and directed to one general end. How far the present measures, recommended to the different States, are calculated to promote these desirable purposes, I cannot pretend to say; but there appears to me such a maze, from the mixed modes adopted by some States, and about to be adopted by others, that I cannot see the channels, through which the business may be conducted, free from disorder and confusion.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

Money, Idea, Business, Knowledge

“Professionally he declines and falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry.”

Charles Dickens book Our Mutual Friend

Bk. I, Ch. 5
Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865)

“There existed long ago in Tibetan, Indian, and partly also in Chinese Buddhism the idea that the religious practice of meditation serves the goal of producing within the still-living and mortal body the diamond body into which you move, so to speak. Already in this lifetime you use your diamond body more and more as a dwelling place, so that at the moment of death, like a skin which falls off from a fruit, this mortal body falls away and the glorified body -or in Eastern language, the diamond body- is already there. The glorified body, a sort of immortal substance as carrier of the individual personality, is already produced by religious practice during one's lifetime. This same idea, which is strange to official Christian teaching, does come up vigorously in alchemical philosophy. The alchemists, too, strove from the beginning to produce such a glorified or diamond body, and Christian alchemists from the beginning identified it with the glorified body. In order to build up this glorified body, called the philosopher's stone, you must repeat the whole process of creation.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Creation Myths (1972), Creation Renewed & Reversed, P. 331

Death, Idea, Personality

“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

"In Another Country" in Men Without Women (1927).

War

“And yet, I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument, to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.”

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

[Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, 2004, 1560255803, 2005298401, 56991027, 24964445M]
2000s, 2004

“Thus falling, falling from afar,
As if some melancholy star
Had mingled with her light her sighs,
And dropped them from the skies.”

Washington Allston (1779–1843) American artist

Poem Rosalie

Star, Light

“Remember the words of the Bible in Amos 5:24, 'Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-falling stream'.”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

2000, Excerpts from an address to Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs, 28 July 2005

Justice

“I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer…but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God's miracle-working ways.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

God, Way, Reading

“They could see the rapids on their right. The swaying of the bus made her sick and weak, and her willpower was failing with her strength. She was afraid of falling into a torpor in which everything would become immaterial to her, and she tensed in an effort to seem gay and even attentive to Emmanuel.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 330

Effort

“One naked star has waded through
The purple shadows of the night,
And faltering as falls the dew
It drips its misty light.”

James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) American poet from Indianapolis

The Beetle.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Star, Light, Night

“The Vammika Sutta likens skeptical doubt to a fork in the road. Say a traveler who is carrying many valuables arrives at a fork in the road; if he lingers there unable to decide which way to take, robbers may catch and possibly kill him. In the same way, a doubtful meditator who falls prey to wavering and procrastination cannot continue on with practice. He or she will then become a victim of mental defilements and be unable to escape the cycle of suffering. Only when he or she abandons doubt by noting it and uninterruptedly continues the practice can he or she be liberated from the cycle of suffering.”

Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982) Burmese Buddhist philosopher

Source: Manual of Insight (1945), p. 64

Way, Travel, Suffering

“What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure. It is to prevent that that I have tried my best to urge the maintenance of every bulwark of defence—first the timely creation of an Air Force superior to anything within striking distance of our shores; secondly, the gathering together of the collective strength of many nations; and thirdly, the making of alliances and military conventions, all within the Covenant, in order to gather together forces at any rate to restrain the onward movement of this Power. It has all been in vain. Every position has been successively undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/05/policy-of-his-majestys-government#column_370 in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement The 1930s

Pleasure, Sense, Time, Success

“I find that companies are inclined to be at their most interesting when they are undergoing a little misfortune, and therefore I chose the fall of 1966 as the time to have a look at Xerox.”

John Brooks (writer) (1920–1993) American writer

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

Time

“Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clam'rous lapwings feel the leaden death;
Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall, and leave their little lives in air.”

Alexander Pope book Windsor Forest

Source: Windsor Forest (1713), Line 131.

Death, Feeling

“The farther West we drove [to California, Fall of 1963, with Gerard Malanga, Wynn Chamberlain, and Taylor Mead for an opening of Warhol's 'Liz & Elvis paintings' at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles], the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere – that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it – to us, it was the new Art. Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. The moment you label something, you take a step – I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure.... the mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

quote in 1963
Quote in Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz; as quoted in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467
1963 - 1967

People, Art, Angels, Way

“I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot —one thing after another.
From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

DOD news briefing following the fall of Baghdad (11 April 2003) http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030411-secdef0090.html

People, Food, Freedom, Water

“A million feathers falling down,
a million stars that touch the ground,
so many secrets to be found
amid the falling snow.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Secret, Star

“Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power.”

James Bovard (1956) American journalist

From Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's Press, 1999) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigram%20page%20Freedom%20in%20Chains.htm

Lying

“Autumn was falling, but the pine
Seem'd as it mock'd all change; no sign
Of season on its leaf was seen,
The same dark gloom of changeless green.
But like the gorgeous Persian bands
'Mid the stern race of northern lands,
The chesnut boughs were bright with all
That gilds and mocks the autumn's fall.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II
The Troubadour (1825)

Autumn, Change, Season

“The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 103

World, Nostalgia

“Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man.”

William Wordsworth The Recluse

The Recluse, l. 788 (1805).

Fear, Dreams, Help

“Should you encounter the enemy, he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

"Hun Speech": Kaiser Wilhelm II's Address to the German Expeditionary Force Prior to its Departure for China (27 July 1900) http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=755&language=english 1900s

Way, History

“YLERMI: The church will fall down before / the mitten parts from the stone! / The walls will crumble before / the finger rots on the wall! / Before that, may a time come / too, another, harsher time / which will not bow down to death, / will not crawl off to Mana. // He spurred the horse, and the flames / engulfed his golden helmet. / The mitten's on the stone still.”

Eino Leino (1878–1926) Finnish poet and journalist

Death, Time, Horse, Parting

“When you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.”

Richard Steele (1672–1729) British politician

No. 49 (26 April 1711)
The Spectator (1711-1714)

“Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was an act of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out into the street on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself, or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide.”

Martin Amis book Experience

Part II: One Little More Hug
Experience (2000)

Cars, Loss

“Let's remember one thing, folks, while we go forward. Not one Republican voted for this bailout. Remember way back in the fall, not one Republican voted for the TARP bailout, and this was why.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

The New McCarthyism
The Rush Limbaugh Show
2009-03-18
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/03/18/the_new_mccarthyism, quoted in * Limbaugh falsely claimed 'not one Republican voted for the TARP bailout'
Media Matters for America
2009-03-18
http://mediamatters.org/research/200903180032

Way

“The party in power, like Jonah's gourd, grew up quickly, and will quickly fall.”

Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician

As quoted in David Crockett: The Man and the Legend (1994) by James Atkins Shackford, p. 107

“He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle… To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, Collected Works, Vol. 23, pages 78-9.
Attributions

War, Nature, Forgetting

“So, life is like, again, an icy ladder. So, when you climb up, you have to be really, really energetic or you won’t be able to climb up ‘cause you slip and fall down.”

Stanislav Pozdniakov (1973) Russian fencer

Pozdniakov &ndash; Climb the Icy Ladder http://www.fencing.net/news/world/pozdniakov-%11-climb-the-icy-ladder.html

Life

“There is oftentimes a great deal of knowledge where there is but little wisdom to improve that knowledge. It is not the most knowing Christian but the most wise Christian that sees, avoids, and escapes Satan's snares. Knowledge without wisdom is like mettle in a blind horse, which is often an occasion of the rider's fall.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 365.
Quotes from secondary sources

Wisdom, Knowledge, Horse

“One thing you must know: Just as there is no comparison between actually hearing the sound of harp-strings sweetly plucked and listening to someone talking about it, so too there is no comparison between words which are received in pure grace, issuing from a living heart, spoken by living lips, and those self-same words committed to dry parchment — especially words in German. For these somehow grow chill, losing their vitality like roses cut. For the enchanting melody which, more than anything else, moves human hearts, then fades away, so that the words are received now into the dryness of dry hearts. No harp-strings were ever so sweet but, when stretched across dry timber, they fall silent. An unloving heart can no more understand a love-filled speaker than a German an Italian. Therefore, an eager enquirer should hasten to the out-flowing streams of these sweet teachings so that she may see and observe them at their source in all its living and wondrous beauty – that is, the in-flowing of present grace which is able to restore dead hearts to life.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom

Love, Life, Beauty, Understanding

“Great cities, or the endless beautiful plains stretched out before
his jaded gaze and disappeared into the nothingness of his feeling. ~ Fall in Love”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Love, Beauty, Feeling

“I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

"Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)

World, Fear, Dreams, Feeling

“Reach out, it's a leap in the dark,
But there's no danger of falling.
Give out, give it straight from the heart,
You feel the thunder rolling…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Feeling, Heart

“I'd like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I'm too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I'm working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library […].”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§29
'Tis (2000)

Books, World, Business, Reading

“The negro. These developments have brought about a very remarkable improvement in the condition of the negro race. Gradually, but surely, with the almost universal sympathy of those among whom they live, the colored people are working out their own destiny. I firmly believe that it is better for all concerned that they should be cheerfully accorded their full constitutional rights, that they should be protected from all of those impositions to which, from their position, they naturally fall a prey, especially from the crime of lynching and that they should receive every encouragement to become full partakers in all the blessings of our common American citizenship.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, Color, Nature, Universe

“I am ice and dust. I am sky.
I can see horses wading through snowdrifts.
My broken hearts, my fabulous dances.
My fleeting song, fleeting.
The world is so loud. Keep falling. I'll find you.”

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

Song lyrics, 50 Words for Snow (2011)

World, Heart, Horse, Dance

“A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199709041935.MAA27136@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“He that could teach mathematics well, would not be a bad teacher in any of the rest [physics, chemistry, biology, psychology] unless by the accident of total inaptitude for experimental illustration; while the mere experimentalist is likely to fall into the error of missing the essential condition of science as reasoned truth; not to speak of the danger of making the instruction an affair of sensation, glitter, or pyrotechnic show.”

Alexander Bain (1818–1903) Scottish philosopher and educationalist

Source: Education as a Science, 1898, p. 298.

Truth, Error, Mathematics, Teachers

“You said in our old ash-tree a bird had built its nest;
Perhaps this very linnet has there its place of rest.
Now who will keep his little ones when night begins to fall?
They have no other shelter, and they will perish all.
There'll be no more sweet singing within that lonely grove;
Now, Henry, free your prisoner, I pray you, for my love.
Our father is a soldier, and in some distant war
He too might be a prisoner in foreign lands afar.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Prisoner
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Love, War, Bird, Tree

“For such fields deep historical studies can have considerable contemporary relevance and hence fall within the boundaries of the field itself. Weber and Durkheim are still studied by sociologists, just as Adam Smith and Ricardo are still studied by economists, whereas Galilean and Newtonian studies are not part of physics but of an altogether different discipline, the history of science.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 472

History, Study, Science, Parting

“It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
O falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act V, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Secret, Hope, Soul

“Paradise Lost, A further observation could be made upon the story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book II, Chapter 6, p. 299 (See also: John Milton)
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

“I think of the Ramones when I think of music that can save your life, but I’m not so sure about a band like Fall Out Boy who appears to make music in vein or that, at least, doesn’t sound like something they would die for.”

Shingai Shoniwa (1981) British musician

When asked: Is music more of a product today, or seen as something that can save your life? http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/33984/one-of-those-bands-an-interview-with-the-noisettes/

Life, Music, Boy, Thinking

“He's not cocky because of Fall Out Boy, he's cocky because he's Pete Wentz.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

Blender Magazine, "Boy Crazy" Article- June, 2006
Source: http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=1927

Boy

“Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. IV
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Life

“After midlife, one falls back on C G Jung and determines that the first years of life were in themselves symbolic.
To learn a profession (calling) doesn't mean that you are called. To obtain money doesn't mean that you are rich. To marry doesn't mean that you have learned to love. To build a house doesn't mean that you are at home.
All the things you did until you turned forty confront you again after midlife as a task, but this time inwardly.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung. II p 148 (1989)

Love, Life, Money, Home

“I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”

Jerome David Salinger book The Catcher in the Rye

Source: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Chapter 10

Love, Stupidity, Girl, Hell

“"Noah is a revolutio of Adam, as Moses is a revolutio of Abel and Seth," says the Kabala; that is to say, a repetition or another version of the same story. The greatest proof of it is the distribution of the characters in the Bible. For instance, beginning with Cain, the first murderer, every fifth man in his line of descent is a murderer. Thus there come Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methuselah, and the fifth is Lamech, the second murderer, and he is Noah's father. By drawing the five-pointed star of Lucifer (which has its crown-point downward) and writing the name of Cain beneath the lowest point, and those of his descendants successively at each of the other points, it will be found that each fifth name — which would be written beneath that of Cain — is that of a murderer. In the Talmud this genealogy is given complete, and thirteen murderers range themselves in line below the name of Cain. This is no coincidence. Siva is the Destroyer, but he is also the Regenerator. Cain is a murderer, but he is also the creator of nations, and an inventor. This star of Lucifer is the same one that John sees falling down to earth in his Apocalypse.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IX

Star, Success, Drawing

“If I were so time-poor as to have only one day to spend in Yosemite I should start at daybreak, say at three o'clock in midsummer, with a pocketful of any sort of dry breakfast stuff, for Glacier Point, Sentinel Dome, the head of Illilouette Fall, Nevada Fall, the top of Liberty Cap, Vernal Fall and the wild boulder-choked River Cañon.”

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

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 12: How Best to Spend One's Yosemite Time Advice for visitors to Yosemite given by John Muir at age 74 years. Compare advice given by the 37-year-old Muir above. 1910s

Time

“Passion is something which very few of us have really felt. What we may have felt is enthusiasm, which is being caught up in an emotional state over something. Our passion is for something: for music, for painting, for literature, for a country, for a woman or a man; it is always the effect of a cause. When you fall in love with someone, you are in a great state of emotion, which is the effect of that particular cause; and what I am talking about is passion without a cause. It is to be passionate about everything, not just about something, whereas most of us are passionate about a particular person or thing. I think one must see this distinction very clearly. In the state of passion without a cause, there is intensity free of all attachment; but when passion has a cause, there is attachment, and attachment is the beginning of sorrow.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIII, p. 251
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Love, Music, Literature, Thinking

“If I could shoot a game bird and still not hurt it, the way I can take a trout on a fly and release it, I doubt if I would kill another one. This is a strange statement coming from a man whose life is dedicated to shooting and gun dogs. For me, there is almost no moment more sublime than when I pull the trigger and see a grouse fall. Yet, as the bird is retrieved I feel a sense of remorse for taking a courageous life. About the time I passed fifty I noticed this conflict becoming more pronounced…”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

The Upland Shooting Life (1971)

Life, Dogs, Way, Feeling

“Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/rollerball-2002 of the 2002 film Rollerball (8 February 2002) Reviews, Half-star reviews

Color, Search, Sense

“Back in September, my friend Donald said he had his lawyers look at this from every which way and there was no issue there. There was nothing to this birther issue. Now since September, the Constitution hasn't changed. But the poll numbers have. And I recognize, I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa. But the facts and law here are really quite clear. Under longstanding U. S. law, the child of a U. S. Citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

Republican Presidential Debate http://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10774204/winners-losers-republican-debate-charleston-fox-business (January 14, 2016) 2010s

Law, Way, Nature, Change

“When authoritarianism is no longer necessary to protect the welfare of the people, I will be the first to move for its dismantling. But the easy, casual wave of the hand dismissing the dangers that confront the worsening world situation and us is not for me. It is for those who insist that I dismantle martial law against my best judgment but, legally and morally, cannot be held liable for any Kampuchean-like tragedy that would be fall our people if I followed their advice. But I would be liable. I would be called all kinds of names. I would be called stupid, naïve and obstinate. History and our people would hold me accountable not only perhaps for lack of wisdom, but for lack of courage if I followed such advice.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Remarks at the inauguration of the Philippines Columbian Association's New Clubhouse Complex, Plaza Dilao, Manila (14 December 1979)
1965

Wisdom, People, Stupidity, World

“The landed interest is the great foundation upon which rest the fabric of society, and the institutions of the country. I mean no disparagement to manufactures and commerce; I know how essential they are to the happiness and prosperity of the country, and how much they add even to the value of the land. But the land of the country is the country itself, and the owner of the land has the deepest and most permanent interest in its well-being; tied down to the soil, he must share the fortunes of his country, whether in its greatness or its fall.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 March 1831), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 172-173.
1830s

Happiness, Country

“But, whenever a portion of this facility we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will suggest of him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that with is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of these passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus produced, or feels to be produced, in himself. However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Life, Men, Truth, Feeling

“At break of day I feel as if I'm clasping a bouquet of smiling flowers
But the wind of time does not cease blowing
And the hours wilt like falling petals.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

As quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, p. 86

Smile, Feeling, Flowers, Time

“First, we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Cardinal Francis Spellman used this attribution in his speech to the 1954 National Convention of the American Legion. It has been debunked repeatedly, for example in They Never Said It (1999) by Paul F. Boller and John H. George. The last two sentences have also been misattributed to Nikita Krushchev. The metaphor of the ripe fruit appears much earlier in US policy discussions about Cuba:
If an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can only gravitate towards the North American Union.
John Quincy Adams, letter to Hugh Nelson (28 April 1823)
The fruit will fall into our hands when it is ripe, without an officious shaking of the tree. Cuba will be ours … in due season, without the wicked impertinence of war.
Parke Godwin, "Annexation" (February 1854)
Misattributed

“Have we not hereditary possessions in our just laws, our free and nobly developed constitution, our rich literature and philosophy, incomparably above material wealth, and which we are beyond all things bound to maintain, improve, and hand down in safety? And do we accomplish this duty in encouraging a growth of industry which must prove unstable, and perhaps involve all things in its fall?”

William Stanley Jevons book The Coal Question

The Coal Question (1865)

Law, Literature, Wealth

“I used to see songwriting like editing a film or something. You can edit music like you can edit a film. Or if I was painting or making a picture or something, that night I could sit down and write a song. I think it really helps to break things up. Sometimes when you sit down to write songs, you write three or four songs in a row feeling the same sort of vibe. But if you stop in-between that time and change something, you break the pattern – you prevent yourself from unconsciously falling into a format.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2008/05/qa_with_mia.php to Westword (2008) Sourced quotes

Music, Feeling, Thinking, Change

“Too late I stayed,—forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours;
How noiseless falls the foot of time
That only treads on flowers.”

William Robert Spencer (1770–1834) British poet

Lines to Lady A. Hamilton, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time", William Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well, Act v. Scene 3.

Flowers, Forgiveness, Time

“Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 1 (opening words)

“It is my considered opinion that the so called Kashmir problem, we have been facing, since 1947 has never been viewed in a historical perspective. That is why it has defied solution so far, and its end is not in sight in the near future. Politicians at the helm of affairs during this nearly half a century have been living from hand to mouth and are waiting for Pakistan to face them with a fait accompli. Once againg they are out to hand over Kashmir and its people to be butchers who have devastated this fair land and destroyed its rich eulture. … It is therefore high time that we renounce this ritual and have a look at the problem in a historical perspective. I should like to warn that histories of Kashmir written by Kashmiri Hindus in modern times are worse than useless for this purpose. I have read almost all of them, only to be left wondering at the piteous state to which the Hindu mind in Kashmir has been reduced. I am not taking these histories into account except for bits and pieces which fall into the broad pattern. … What distinguishes the Hindu rulers of Kashmir from Hindu rulers elsewhere is that they continued to recruit in their army Turks from Central Asia without realizing that the Turks had become Islamicized and as such were no longer mere wage earners. One of Kashmir's Hindu rulers Harsha (1089-1101 CE) was persuaded by his Muslim favourites to plunder temple properties and melt down icons made of precious metal. Apologists of Islam have been highlighting this isolated incident in order to cover up the iconoclastic record of Islam not only in Kashmir but also in the rest of Bharatvarsha. At the same time they conceal the fact that Kashmir passed under the heel of Islam not as a result of the labours of its missionaries but due to a coup staged by an Islamicised army. … Small wonder that balance of farces in Kashmir should have continued to tilt in favour of Islamic imperialism till the last Hindu has been hounded out of his ancestral homeland. Small wonder that the hoodlums strut around not only in the valley but in the capital city of Delhi with airs of injured innocence. Small wonder that the Marxist-Muslim combine of scribes who dominate the media blame Jagmohan for arranging an overnight and enmasse exodus of the Hindus from the valley. (They cannot forgive Jagmohan for bringing back Kashmir to India at a time when the combine was hoping that Pakistan would face India with an accomplished fact.) Small wonder that what Arun Shourie has aptly described as the "Formula Factory"”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

the Nayars, the Puris, the Kotharis, the Dhars, the Haksars, the Tarkundes - should be busy devising ways for handing over the Kashmir Hindus to their age-old oppressors. Kashmir: The Problem is Muslim Extremism by Sita Ram Goel https://web.archive.org/web/20080220033606/http://www.kashmir-information.com/Miscellaneous/Goel1.html

People, Age, Hope, Way

“Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 2
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Night

“Feeling deeply the difference between oneself and others, bearing ill will and falling out with people — these things come from a heart that lacks compassion. If one wraps up everything with a heart of compassion, there will be no coming into conflict with people.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

People, Feeling, Heart

“Galileo had provided the methodology for the analysis of motions on and near the earth and had applied it successfully. Copernicus and Kepler had previously obtained the laws of motion of the planets and their satellites. …But Galileo had succeeded in deriving numerous laws from a few physical principles and… the axioms and theorems of mathematics. …The Keplerian laws …were not logically related to each other. Each was an independent inference from observations. …They seemed to be suspended in the same vacuum in which the planets moved.
Galileo's laws had the additional advantage of supplying physical insight. The first law of motion and the law that the force of graviation gives… a downward acceleration of 32 ft/sec2… explain the vertrical rise and fall of bodies, motion on slopes, and projectile motion. Kepler's laws… had no physical basis. …Kepler tried to introduce the idea of a magnetic force which the sun exerted… But he failed to related the behavior of the planets to the precise laws of planetary motion. …
The new astronomical theory was completely isolated from the theory of motion on earth. …it bothered mathematicians and scientists who believed that all the phenomena of the universe were governed by one master plan instituted by the master planner—God.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), pp. 224-225

God, Law, Behavior, Mathematics

“Towards the end of May 1984, Indira Gandhi mentioned nonchalantly that some people had suggested to her to send the police into the golden temple complex to flush out militants entrenched therein, but he was not exactly convinced on this course as it was likely to have an unfavorable fall out. But at the same time, she said she could not see any alternative.”

Zail Singh (1916–1994) Indian politician and former President of India

Source: Presidents of India, 1950-2003, p. 172.

People, Time

“The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Uncle Fred in the Springtime

Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939)

“Die Hard represents the class of modern action pictures and the standard by which they must be judged. Few films falling into the "mindless entertainment" genre have as much going for them as this movie. Not only is it a thrill-a-minute ride, but it has one of the best film villains in recent memory, a hero everyone can relate to, dialogue that crackles with wit, and a lot of very impressive pyrotechnics.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/d/die_hard.html of Die Hard (1988). Four star reviews

Memory

“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women… The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty."”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

On Boxing (1987)

Women, Men, Girl, Boy

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?”

Paul Auster book The Book of Illusions

The Book of Illusions (2002)

Books, Tree, Reading

“In spite of the fact that we have no such fleet as we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun. It will now be my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed possession, in order that the sun's rays may fall fruitfully upon our activity and trade in foreign parts, that our industry and agriculture may develop within the state and our sailing sports upon the water, for our future lies upon the water.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech in Hamburg (18 June 1901)
As quoted in Germanism from Within (1916) by Alexander Duncan Mclaren
1900s
Variant: Germany must have her place in the sun. (is not of Wilhelm himself but of Bernhard von Bülow

Sport, Water, Sun, Future

“Sweet sleep be with us, one and all!
And if upon its stillness fall
The visions of a busy brain,
We'll have our pleasure o'er again,
To warm the heart, to charm the sight,
Gay dreams to all! good night, good night.”

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) Scottish poet and dramatist

The Phantom, song (1836); reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 201.

Pleasure, Dreams, Business, Sleep

“The sun was already a bright, running brook. From the gables of the houses hung sharp-pointed icicles, like gleaming crystal. From time to time one would break off with a snap, and crash at Rose-Anne's feet in shining shards. She progressed very slowly, afraid of falling, always seeking a hand-hold somewhere. Then she would be in soft snow again, which meant harder work but less fear of a slip and fall.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 94

Fear, Time, Sun, Housing

“I kno plenty ov folks who are so kondem kontrary, that if they should fall into the river, they would insist uopon floating up stream.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“The things we counterfeit are not worth the trouble of falling into disgrace with ourselves.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 140

“The crisis has not been overcome, but there are many encouraging signs. The economy is recovering in many countries, the imbalances in European trade are declining and the budget deficits in the monetary union are falling.”

Mario Draghi (1947) Italian banker and economist

spiegel.de http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/spiegel-interview-with-ecb-president-mario-draghi-a-941489.html.

Country

“I put it down on paper again in the summer of this year: ‘Berlin will live, and the Wall will fall.”

Willy Brandt (1913–1992) German social-democratic politician; Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

[...] ich habe es noch in diesem Sommer erneut zu Papier gebracht: Berlin wird leben, und die Mauer wird fallen. speech at the Rathaus Schöneberg in Berlin on 10 November 1989, hdg.de/lemo http://www.hdg.de/lemo/html/dokumente/DieDeutscheEinheit_redeBrandt1989/index.html

Summer

“To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

“ Animals can't speak for themselves - it's up to us to do it! http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/animals-cant-speak-for-themselves--its-up-to-us-to-do-it/2007/02/21/1171733841769.html,” in theage.com.au (February 22, 2007)

Food, Thinking, Past, Animals

“That was the stuff of other lives, he was waiting for his to begin. He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, "Who knows?" He said, "Who knows?" For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen. A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.”

Annie Proulx book The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 11

Waiting

“The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 11

God, Guy, Nature

“Fain would I describe the glories of those months in the ice-world — the beautiful and terrible network of crevasses, the clustering pinnacles, the thousand streams ringing and gurgling in azure channels cut in the living body of the glacier, the glorious radiance of the sunbeams falling on crystal dale and hill, the rosy glow of the dawn and sunset, the march of the clouds on the mountains, and the mysterious splendor of the auroras when the nights grow long, etc., etc., etc. But this would require a volume, while here I have only space to add — Go to Alaska, go and see.”

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

" Alaska http://books.google.com/books?id=h40OAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA287", The American Geologist volume XI, number 5 (May 1893) pages 287-299 (at page 299) 1910s

World, Beauty, Mountain, Night