Quotes about gift
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“Then you must be willing to fight," Mircea responded. "Life is not a gift, Raphael; it's a challenge. Rise to it!”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Curse the Dawn

Life, Fight

“Every day should be unwrapped as a gift.”

Harry Harrison (1925–2012) American science fiction author

“We all posses different gifts and abilities. How we use those gifts determines who we are.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary

“And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. In darkness, understanding.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

Source: Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 44

Mountain, Understanding, Kiss, Despair

“But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Variant: We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self destruction.
Source: Mockingjay

Stupidity, Thinking, Memory

“Sometimes carrying the burden of an upsetting truth, and hiding it, is actually a gift you give to someone else. You bear that burden, so they don’t have to, in a situation where telling them will change nothing.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Truth, Change

“When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

“Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Source: Blood And Gold

Memory

“I bought my brother some gift-wrap for Christmas. I took it to the gift wrap department and told them to wrap it, but in a different print so he would know when to stop unwrapping.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Christmas

“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Art, Business, Science

“The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Source: Out of Africa

Star, Tear, Grass, Singing

“Sometimes the gift of an inquisitive nature to the young can be greater than that of the wisdom which comes of age.”

Brian Jacques book Mattimeo

Source: Mattimeo

Wisdom, Age, Nature

“In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Fear, Communication, Light, Past

“Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Ideas and Opinions
1950s, Essay to Leo Baeck (1953)

Beauty, Nature, Joy

“One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

World, Beauty, Help, Personality

“Offended people still may experience miracles, words of utterance, strong preaching, and healing in their lives. But these are gifts of the Spirit, not fruits. We will be judged according to fruit, not gifting. A gift is given. Fruit is cultivated.”

John Bevere (1959) American author

Source: The Bait Of Satan: Living Free from the Deadly Trap of Offense

People, Strong

“… hear rumors and go digging for the painful truth beneath the lovely lies. You believe you have a right to these things, but you don't. When someone tells you a piece of their life, they're giving you a gift, not granting you your due.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

People

“Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch--there's not a chance.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Sleep, Chance

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Wedding

“May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

Heart

“Charlie, you’re one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known. And I don’t mean in terms of my other students. I mean in terms of anyone I’ve ever met.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

People

“Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence—neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish—it is an imponderably valuable gift.”

Maya Angelou book Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Source: Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Time, Speed

“An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

“There's a gift in your lap and it's beautifully wrapped and it's not your birthday. You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you're alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you're that important.”

Aimee Bender (1969) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Fear, Feeling, Birthday, Thinking

“Think of every single thing that we 'have to' do to get through a day as something that we 'get to' do… before our turn is over.

Everything is a gift.”

Mike Dooley (1961) American writer

Thinking

“Like all Herondales, his ability to love without measure, without end, was both his great gift and his great curse.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Lost Herondale

Love

“Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning book Sonnets from the Portuguese

No. XXVI
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)

God, Dreams

“His love for her was a gift he gave her daily, expecting nothing in return. He walked at her side, his love for her a torch to guide her footsteps along the dark path she walked.”

Margaret Weis book Dragons of a Fallen Sun

Source: Dragons of a Fallen Sun

Love

“Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.”

Maya Angelou book Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Source: Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Love, Life, Pleasure, World

“James had given his heart to this
girl, Magnus thought, and Magnus knew
well enough from Edmund and Will what
it meant when a Herondale gave his heart
away. It was not a gift that could be
returned.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Midnight Heir

Girl, Heart

“But then, gifts are like beauty, are
they not. It is in the eye of the recipient that they find their seat, not in the hand of the giver.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Unbound

Source: Lover Unbound

Beauty

“Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.”

Chris Bohjalian (1962) American novelist

Source: Secrets of Eden

Food, Memory, Season

“Tiger Lily drifted down underneath herself. This was her one gift more than any other. Silently, she nodded. "Yes. Everything is more than okay.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

“Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Life, Beauty

“Anything I cannot thank God for for the sake of Christ, I may not thank God for at all; to do so would be sin…. We cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer book The Cost of Discipleship

Source: The Cost of Discipleship

God, Christ

“A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Source: Community And Growth

Life, Communication

“What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Pain

“The future is not a gift-it is an achievement.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: The Einstein Theory Of Relativity

Future

“But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say 'No. I disagree.' that was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: Incantation

Thinking

“Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Parent, Freedom, Reading

“It's good to be out of your comfort zone. Just don't step out of your gift zone.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

“Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”

Ann-Marie MacDonald book Fall on Your Knees

Variant: To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.
Source: Fall on Your Knees

Hope

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Nature

“When a demigod like me comes around, bad things happen. Really bad.-Leo

Maybe it's the other way around, Jason suggested. Maybe people with special gifts show up when bad things are happening because that's when they're needed most.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

People, Way

“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Truth, Faith, Learning, Falseness

“They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People, World, Way, Suffering

“I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U. S. poet and writer, 1943- )”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

Understanding

“Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.”

Max Stirner (1806–1856) German philosopher

As quoted in Forbes Vol. 78 (1956), and in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 275
Context: Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

Freedom

“… the best gift we can give each other is the gift of time -- those precious, special, eternal moments.”

Shmuley Boteach (1966) American Orthodox rabbi and writer

Time

“Give me my powers back, Artemis, or I’ll take your daughter’s life. (Sin)
Damn boy, you have an unholy gift for pissing off people. Why don’t you tell her that dress makes her look fat while you’re at it? (Kat)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Life, People, Boy, Daughters

“Actually, you know what? You keep thinking I'm God's gift to women, angel. It's better for me if you believe I'm the best you can get.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

Women, God, Angels, Thinking

“You know the bad thing about being a survivor… You keep having to get into difficult situations in order to show off your gift.”

Carrie Fisher book The Best Awful There Is

Source: The Best Awful

“The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Health, Books, Family, Music

“I am just two and two. I am hot. I am cold. I'm the parent of numbers that cannot be told. I'm a gift beyond measure, a matter of course, and I'm yielded with pleasure- when taken by force.”

L.J. Smith The Forbidden Game

Source: The Forbidden Game

Pleasure, Parent

“My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

Source: My Family and Other Animals

Life, Childhood

“Freedom is more precious than the gift that makes us lose it.”

Baltasar Gracián book The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Más preciosa es la libertad que la dádiva, porque se pierde.
Maxim 286
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Freedom

“Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2003, Treason : Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003)

“Only a book written by the God who knows the end from the beginning could predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy. The God of the Bible (unlike all other “gods”) is not limited by time, space, or matter. He created all of those on Day One and is “above” and “outside of” and “not limited by” His creation in any way. We are the ones who are limited by time, space, and matter, not God. The fact that He knows the future does not mean that He controls the future and we are robots acting out a pre-programmed set of instructions. He has complete knowledge, yet we have complete control at all times. He could step in and control everything, but then we would be robots and not humans. It is called Free Will. That’s a gift God gave to mankind.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), pp. 6-7

God, Books, Way, Knowledge

“I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to health
With ease and plenty. Else small aid is wealth
For daily gladness; once a man be done
With hunger, rich and poor are all as one.”

Euripidés Electra

Electra (413 BC)

Hunger, Health, Wealth

“A gift is the transfer of a good without an explicit specification of a quid pro quo. The good can be a tangible thing or money, but it also can be intangible, as in the form of time, attention, information or knowledge. A present is a gift and so may be the attention that one person ‘gives’ another, or the time that a person donates to an art institute as a volunteer. Usually a gift entails reciprocity: the giver expects something in return for the gift given. Friends expect friendly gestures in return for their friendly gestures; donors expect some form of appreciation or another; and those who give presents at Christmas expect to receive presents in return. The key to understanding the phenomenon of the gift is the nature of the reciprocity involved”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Arjo Klamer, " 30 Gift economy http://www.klamer.nl/docs/1dec_2002.pdf." A handbook of cultural economics (2003): 243.

Money, Art, Understanding, Nature

“The stamp of great minds is to suggest much in few words; by contrast, little minds have the gift of talking a great deal and saying nothing.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Comme c’est le caractère des grands esprits de faire entendre en peu de paroles beaucoup de choses, les petits esprits au contraire ont le don de beaucoup parler, et de ne rien dire.
Maxim 142.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“It is much like a rich man, who takes a man from the market and feeds him and gives him gold and silver and all desirables every day. And each day he showers him with more gifts than the day before. Finally the rich man asks: Do tell me, have your wishes all been fulfilled? And the man from the market replies, not yet, for how pleasant and wonderful it would be if all those possessions and precious things came to me through my own work as they came to you, and I would not be receiving the charity of your hand. The rich man told him then: In this case, there has never been born a person who could satisfy your wishes.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Shame with regard to Receiving

Personality

“Press on! If Fortune play thee false
To-day, tomorrow she'll be true;
Whom now she sinks she now exalts,
Taking old gifts and granting new,
The wisdom of the present hour
Makes up the follies past and gone;
To weakness, strength succeeds, and power
From frailty springs! Press on, press on!”

Park Benjamin, Sr. (1809–1864) American journalist

Press On.

Wisdom, Spring, Past, Falseness

“The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Ethos of Woman's Professions (1930)

Love, Life, God, Motivation

“I thought, beloved, to have brought to you
A gift of quietness and ease and peace,
Cooling your brow as with the mystic dew
Dropping from twilight trees.
Homeward I go not yet; the darkness grows;
Not mine the voice to still with peace divine:
From the first fount the stream of quiet flows
Through other hearts than mine.
Yet of my night I give to you the stars,
And of my sorrow here the sweetest gains,
And out of hell, beyond its iron bars,
My scorn of all its pains.”

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

"For Brian when he is grown up this handful of The Nuts of Knowledge I have gathered on The Secret Streams".
The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Pain, Peace, Star, Hell

“Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest:
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain;
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast:
Such profit he by envy could obtain.”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–1547) English Earl

"Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest", line 1

Envy

“Imagine buying a toy for a child's pleasure and having him love the toy more than he loves you. Yet, isn't that what you've done with God?… Isn't it true that you have been guilty of ingratitude?… Have you ever humbly thanked God for the gift of life?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Love, Life, God, Pleasure

“How safe and easy the poor man's life and his humble dwelling! How blind men still are to Heaven's gifts!”
O vitae tuta facultas pauperis angustique lares! o munera nondum intellecta deum!

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book V, line 527 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Life, Men

“We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

"The Fulfillment of Man"
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

Life

“God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible.”

James Clavell (1921–1994) American novelist

André Delambre
The Fly (1958)

God, Intelligence, Nature

“We Conservatives…are realists. We know that the British are one of the most creative and gifted peoples on earth. But we also know that the British are individualists, who do not respond to state direction and control. We like leadership—yes. But, above all, we like freedom.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Article for the News of the World (29 April 1979) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104052 <br class="br">Leader of the Opposition

People, Freedom

“Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

God, Home, Hell, Sun

“A gift of truth is the gift of love”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

ibid.
Variant: A gift of truth is the gift of love.

Love, Truth

“Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut—a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.”

Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970) American writer

How I Found America, pt. 3, from Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920)

Soul, Heart, Training

“The teenage female has less demand to perform and more resources to attract love. Her body and mind are more genetic gifts.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 166.

Love

“Thank you to everyone who has embraced the gifts and talents of my beloved and amazing daughter. I am grateful for your thoughts and prayers that are now guiding her to her next stop. Love Carries Mother”

Debbie Reynolds (1932–2016) American actress, singer, and dancer

Post to Facebook (27 December 2016) https://www.facebook.com/thedebbiereynolds/posts/811585312313920

Love, Daughters

“You do not need to feel guilty over the creation of any probable selves. They come into reality with problems, but all of you come into reality with challenges that you have set 'ahead of time.' You have given them the gift of existence. They will learn how to use it and develop their own abilities in their own way. You have also given them individuality, which means that they are not yourselves, but variations on yourselves.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 302-303, quoting from an ESP class session

Way, Feeling, Problem, Reality

“If you look at early shamanic texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren’t any gods, and that they can’t give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don’t burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It’s like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we’ll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said “The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production” didn’t take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Love, God, People, Dogs

“The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift,
That no philosophy can lift.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

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

“St. Augustine confesses that he himself had been formerly in a similar mistake. 'I was once,' says he, 'a Pelagian in my principles; I thought that faith towards God was not the gift of God, but that we procured it by our own powers, and that then, through the use of it, we obtain the gifts of God; I never supposed that the preventing grace of God was the proper cause of our faith, till my mind was struck in a particular manner by the apostle's argument and testimony: What hast thou that thou hast not received, and if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?”

Thomas Bradwardine (1300–1349) Theologian; Archbishop of Canterbury

In this whole business I follow the steps of Augustine.
De causa Dei contra Pelagium

God, Faith, Business

“We must mention the higher, nobler wealth, which does not belong to all, but to truly noble and divinely gifted men. This wealth is bestowed by wisdom through the doctrines and principles of ethic, logic and physic, and from these spring the virtues, which rid the soul of its proneness to extravagance, and engender the love of contentment and frugality, which will assimilate it to God. For God has no wants, He needs nothing, being in Himself all-sufficient to Himself, while the fool has many wants, ever thirsting for what is not there, longing to gratify his greedy and insatiable desire, which he fans into a blaze like a fire and brings both great and small within its reach. But the man of worth has few wants, standing midway between mortality and immortality.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

167-169.
On the Virtues

Love, Wisdom, Men, God

“Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Wisdom, Law, Feeling, Imagination

“Right honest studies my career can show
with long experience blent as best beseems,
and genius here presented for thy view;—
gifts, that conjoined appertain to few.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Nem me falta na vida honesto estudo,
Com longa experiência misturado,
Nem engenho, que aqui vereis presente,
Cousas que juntas se acham raramente.
Stanza 154, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Francis Burton)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto X

Study

“I do not wish to depreciate his great gifts and attainments in a country which unfortunately, if I may say so without offense, is suffering from a temporary lack of leading men.”

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) Greek politician

Source: Victory of Venizelos, 1920, p. 165; In discussing the responsibility of Zaimes, Venizelos himself remarked in the Greek Chamber.

Men, Suffering, Country

“The Christian as revolutionary is constantly welcoming the gift of human life, for himself and for all men, by exposing, opposing, and overturning all that betrays, entraps, or attempts to kill human life.”

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) American theologian

Source: William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (2013), "Jesus the Criminal" (1969), p. 64

Life, Men

“Over this landscape, Göran Therborn’s Between Sex and Power rises up like some majestic volcano. Throwing up a billowing column of ideas and arguments, while a lava of evidence flows down its slopes, this is a great work of historical intellect and imagination, the effect of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigour of his discipline at its best, with command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. But it is also a set of macro-narratives that compose perhaps the first true example of a work of global history we possess.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 11. "Atlas of the Family, Göran Therborn" (2005)

Sex, Imagination, History, Idea

“Afore this time I had great longing and desire of God’s gift to be delivered of this world and of this life. For oftentimes I beheld the woe that is here, and the weal and the bliss that is being there: (and if there had been no pain in this life but the absence of our Lord, methought it was some-time more than I might bear;) and this made me to mourn, and eagerly to long. And also from mine own wretchedness, sloth, and weakness, me liked not to live and to travail, as me fell to do.
And to all this our courteous Lord answered for comfort and patience, and said these words: Suddenly thou shalt be taken from all thy pain, from all thy sickness, from all thy distress and from all thy woe. And thou shalt come up above and thou shalt have me to thy meed, and thou shalt be fulfilled of love and of bliss. And thou shalt never have no manner of pain, no manner of misliking, no wanting of will; but ever joy and bliss without end. What should it then aggrieve thee to suffer awhile, seeing that it is my will and my worship?”

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

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 63

Love, Life, God, Pain

“All the Way; All or Nothing at All. This is the Sicilian in Sinatra; he permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn — fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they're down, adulation when they're up. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone.”

Gay Talese (1932) American writer

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (Esquire, April 1966)

Way, Personality

“Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”

Steven Pressfield book Killing Rommel

Zachary Stein, p. 27
Killing Rommel (2008)

Love, Life, Death, Angels

“[T]he most precious gift that a lover could bring to the beloved was not virginity but sexual experience. The union, it was felt, was the more pregnant the more each party could contribute from previous sexual and spiritual intimacy with others.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 3, “The Zenith of the Second Men” (p. 112)

Lovers

“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."”

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

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

People, Feeling, Intelligence, Universe

“I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994

Money, Pain, People, Secret

“We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.”

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

A jibe directed at Ramsay MacDonald, during a speech in the House of Commons, March 23, 1933 "European Situation" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/mar/23/european-situation#column_544. This quote is similar to a remark (“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met”) made by Abraham Lincoln. [Frederick Trevor Hill credits Lincoln with this remark in Lincoln the Lawyer (1906), adding that ‘History has considerately sheltered the identity of the victim’.] <br class="br">The 1930s

“Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which are transitory or fluctuating so as to develop a logical way of thinking about the latter, and of understanding the time sequences to which they give rise in particular cases.
Good economists are scarce because the gift for using "vigilant observation" to choose good models, although it does not require a highly specialised intellectual technique, appears to be a very rare one.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Letter to Roy Harrod (4 July 1938), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XIV (1971), p. 297

World, Art, Way, Understanding

“peace is possible. It needs to be implored from God as his gift, but it also needs to be built day by day with his help, through works of justice and love.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Message for the celebration of XXXIII World Day of Peace, 8 December 1999 <br class="br">Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_08121999_xxxiii-world-day-for-peace_en.html

Love, God, Peace, Justice