Quotes about finer (114 quotes, page 2)

“I think the harder the life, the finer the type, yes, and I certainly felt this about the Bedu. When I went there, I felt that the difficulty was going to be living up physically to the hardships of their life. But, on the contrary, it was the difficulty of meeting their high standards: their generosity, their patience, their loyalty, their courage and all these things. And they had a quality of nobility.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Answer to “Do you think that hardship and, indeed, suffering bring nobility?”
Interview with Sir David Attenborough first broadcast on Channel 4 in August 1994.
Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Chris Morton and Philip Grover (2010), p. 82.

Courage , Life , Thinking , Patience

“He was different. He had little taste for the finer side of the politics no interest in political philosophy; and he had hardly any values. In any scheme of things, his one target was personal interest. He was anti-Nehru, anti-Indira, anti-Desai, anti-Ramon carrying it, ignoble. He was also given to anger.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

Source: Profiles of Indian Prime Ministers, p. 195

Personality , Anger

“I began to worship pubic hair, to touch it, to smell it, to lick it. This was when I came to realize that pubic hair wasn’t at all like the hair we had on our heads. No, pubic hair was tougher, coarse, and sharp. You could cut your tongue on it if you licked it too hard. The hair on our heads wasn’t just finer but also round, and our pubic hair was thicker and flat, and so this was why it could cut you if you weren’t careful.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work … a classic of our age.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Robertson Davies

World , Age

“His poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.”

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) Polish writer

A.Alvarez, The New York Review of Books (1985-07-18).

“You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

“Ideals of College” http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&pg=PA15&dq=%22You+are+not+here+merely%22, Swarthmore (25 October 1913)
1910s

World , Forgetting , Making love , Hope

“To few men was it given to realize so completely the element of eternity — of time-effacing enjoyment in work — as it was to John Muir. The secret of it all was in his soul, the soul of a child, of a poet, and of a strong man, all blended into one. … An innate nobility of character, an unstudied reverence for all that is sublime in nature or in life, unconsciously called forth the best in his friends and acquaintances. In the spiritual as in the physical realm flowers blossomed in his footsteps where he went. After all it is to such men as John Muir that we must look for the sustenance of those finer feelings that keep men in touch with the spiritual meaning and beauty of the universe, and make them capable of understanding those rare souls whose insight has invested life with imperishable hope and charm. … To all who knew John Muir intimately his gentleness and humaneness toward all creatures that shared the world with him, was one of the finest attributes of his character. … Among those who have won title to remembrance as prophets and interpreters of nature he rises to a moral as well as poetical altitude that will command the admiring attention of men so long as human records shall endure.”

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

William Frederic Badé (pages 38-40)
Sierra Club Bulletin - Memorial Issue

Soul , Time , Understanding , Strong

“I love simple things, I’m not really that turned on by the grandiosity of celebrity and fame. I love beautiful things… and I so appreciate all of the amazing experiences I get to have, and the finer things in life. But the things that really make me happy and re-ally touch my heart are just incredibly simple. I think I’ve always been that way my whole life.”

Liv Tyler (1977) American actress, producer and former model

Beauty , Happiness , Heart , Thinking

“To demonize all Soviet "leaders" at all levels, to portray them as unqualified villains and evildoers, unprincipled self-seeking scoundrels who were indifferent to the interests and needs of the people — that is a shallow and frivolous approach. Of course there were villains, quite a few of them. But most of those who came to power had the intention of serving the "toiling masses" from which they themselves had come. That the system rendered their aspirations useless, reduced their efforts to nothing, and ultimately snuffed out their finer impulses — that is a separate question.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

Question , Indifference , People , Self-confidence

“Every gentleman here is born a petty tyrant. Practised in acts of despotism and cruelty, we become callous to the dictates of humanity and all the finer feelings of the soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes. Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds; and in such an infernal school are to be educated our future legislators and rulers. The laws of impartial Providence may even by such means as these avenge upon our posterity the injury done to a set of wretches whom our injustice hath debased to a level with the brute creation. These remarks were extorted by a kind of irresistible, perhaps an enthusiastic impulse; and the author of them, conscious of his own good intentions, cares not whom they please or offend.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Source: Virginia Charters (1773)

School , Soul , Law , Future

“No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.”

Sam Rayburn (1882–1961) lawmaker from Bonham, Texas

Personality

“We must establish on broad and solid foundations a National Health Service. Here let me say that there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (21 March 1943), quoted in The Times (22 March 1943), p. 6
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Baby , Communication , Health , Country

“If through the years we're not to do
Much finer deeds than we have done;
If we must merely wander through
Time's garden, idling in the sun;
If there is nothing big ahead,
Why do we fear to join the dead?Unless to-morrow means that we
Shall do some needed service here;
That tasks are waiting you and me
That will be lost, save we appear;
Then why this dreadful thought of sorrow
That we may never see to-morrow?”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: Just Folks (1917), Living, first and second stanzas.

Appearance , Fear , Dead , Time

“Changin' laws an' legislatures ain't, as fur as I can see,
Goin' to make this world much better, unless somehow we can
Find a way to make a better an' a finer sort o' man.
The trouble ain't with statutes or with systems—not at all;
It's with humans jus' like we [are] an' their petty ways an' small.
We could stop our writin' law-books an' our regulatin' rules
If a better sort of manhood was the product of our schools.
For the things that we air needin' isn't writin' from a pen
Or bigger guns to shoot with, but a bigger type of men.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: All That Matters (1922), p.57 - The Need, from stanzas 1 (part) and 2.

Men , Books , World , School

Quotes about finer page 2

Quotes about finer
page 2