Quotes about mine
page 9

George S. Patton IV photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Robert Hunter photo
Norman Vincent Peale photo
Dinesh D'Souza photo
Luis de Góngora photo

“Let merchants traverse seas and lands,
For silver mines and golden sands;
Whilst I beside some shadowy rill,
Just where its bubbling fountain swells,
Do sit and gather stones and shells,
And hear the tale the blackbird tells.”

Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) Spanish Baroque lyric poet

Busque muy en hora buena
el mercader nuevos soles;
yo conchas y caracoles
entre la menuda arena,
escuchando a Filomena
sobre el chopo de la fuente.
Letrillas, "Andeme yo caliente", line 24, cited from Robert Jammes (ed.) Letrillas (Madrid: Castalia, 1980) p. 116. Translation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Poets and Poetry of Europe (New York: C. S. Francis, 1855) p. 695

Donovan photo

“I'll pick up your hand and slowly blow your little mind
'Cause I made my mind up you're going to be mine.”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

"Sunshine Superman"
Sunshine Superman (1966)

Alexander Maclaren photo
Helen Keller photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Orson Welles photo
James Thurber photo

“He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

The Years with Ross (Little Brown & Co, 1957, pg.267)

Variant: From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. “After dinner, the men moved into the living room.” I explained to the professor that this was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.

Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988); Harold Ross was the editor of The New Yorker from its inception until 1951, and well-known for the overuse of commas
From other writings

Benjamín Netanyahu photo

“Fortunately, President Obama and most world leaders understand that the idea that Iran's goal is not to develop nuclear weapons is ridiculous. Yet incredibly, some are prepared to accept an idea only slightly less preposterous: That we should accept a world in which the Ayatollahs have atomic bombs. Sure, they say, Iran is cruel, but it's not crazy. It's detestable but it's deterrable. Responsible leaders should not bet the security of their countries on the belief that the world's most dangerous regime won't use the world's most dangerous weapons. And I promise you that as Prime Minister, I will never gamble with the security of Israel. From the beginning, the Ayatollah regime has broken every international rule and flouted every norm. It has seized embassies, targeted diplomats and sent its own children through mine fields. It hangs gays and stones women. It supports Assad's brutal slaughter of the Syrian people. Iran is the world's foremost sponsor of terror. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and terrorists throughout the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Iran's proxies have dispatched hundreds of suicide bombers, planted thousands of roadside bombs, and fired over twenty thousand missiles at civilians. Through terror from the skies and terror on the ground, Iran is responsible for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans. In 1983, Iran's proxy Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 240 American servicemen. In the last decade, its been responsible for murdering and maiming American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just a few months ago, it tried to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant just a few blocks from here. The assassins didn't care that several Senators and members of Congress would have been murdered in the process. Iran accuses the American government of orchestrating 9/11, and it denies the Holocaust. Iran brazenly calls for Israel's destruction, and they work for its destruction – each day, every day. This is how Iran behaves today, without nuclear weapons. Think of how they will behave tomorrow, with nuclear weapons. Iran will be even more reckless and far more dangerous.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference http://www.aipac.org/pc/videos/2012/monday-gala-plenary/prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu (March 2012).
2010s, 2012

Svetlana Alexievich photo
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Prince photo
Kate Bush photo
Charles Cooley photo
Reggie Fils-Aimé photo
Trinny Woodall photo
Steven Erikson photo
Grant Morrison photo

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Eminem photo

“This world is mine for the taking, make me king!”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Lose Yourself".
2000s, 8 Mile (2002)

Thomas Traherne photo

“What thousands and millions of recollections there must be in us! And every now and then one of them becomes known to us; and it shows us what spiritual depths are growing in us, what mines of memory.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 407.

Raymond Poincaré photo

“Germany's population was increasing, her industries were intact, she had no factories to reconstruct, she had no flooded mines. Her resources were intact, above and below ground…In fifteen or twenty years Germany would be mistress of Europe. In front of her would be France with a population scarcely increased.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

'Inter-Allied Conference on Reparations, etc.', Miscellaneous No. 3 (1923), pp. 123-124, quoted in Étienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace, or The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 23.

Alvin C. York photo
Alison Bechdel photo
Doris Lessing photo
Theodore L. Cuyler photo
Grady Booch photo

“Solomon was a 'copper king', and all along that Araba, on both sides, we found many copper mines and smelting stations, all attributable to Solomon and his immediate successors.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: Adventures in the Nearest East (1957), Ch.1 Exploring Edom and Moab

Jesper Kyd photo
Stephenie Meyer photo
Paul Celan photo

“You opened your eyes -I saw my darkness live. I see through it down to the bed; there too it is mine and lives.”

Paul Celan (1920–1970) Romanian poet and translator

"From Darkness to Darkness," in: Donald Wesling, ‎Tadeusz Sławek (1995). Literary Voice: The Calling of Jonah. p. 54

Evagrius Ponticus photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Orson Welles photo

“Thank you, Donald, for that well-meant but rather pedestrian introduction. Regarding yourself, I quote from the third part of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Act Two, Scene One. Richard speaks, "Were thy heart as hard as steel/ As thou hast shown it flinty by thy deeds/ I come to pierce it, or to give thee mine." To translate into your own idiom, Donald; you're a yo-yo. Now I direct my remarks to Dean Martin, who is being honored here tonight… for reasons that completely elude me. No, I'm not being fair to Dean because - this is true - in his way Dean, and I know him very well, has the soul of a poet. I'm told that in his most famous song Dean authored a lyric which is so romantic, so touching that it will be enjoyed by generations of lovers until the end of time. Let's share it together. [Opens a songsheet for Dean's "That's Amore" and reads in a monotone] "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza-pie/ That's amore" Now, that's what I call 'touching', Dean. It has all the romanticism of a Ty-D-Bol commercial. "When the world seems to shine/ Like you've had too much wine/ That's amore" What a profound thought. It could be inscribed forever on a cocktail napkin. Hey, there's more. "Tippy-tippy-tay/ Like a gay tarantella" Like a gay tarantella? Apparently, Dean has a 'side Dean' we know nothing about. "When the stars make you drool/ Just like a pasta fazool…. Scuzza me, but you see/ Back in old Napoli/ That's amore" No, Dean; that's infermo, Italian for "sickened". Now, lyrics like that - lyrics like that ought to be issued with a warning: a song like that is hazardous to your health. Ladies and gentlemen… [motions to Dean] you are looking at the end result!”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given at a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. Viewable here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKR0i-51S4.

Ilana Mercer photo
P. W. Botha photo

“No more mine-laying. No more murder. No more abduction of women and children. No more attacks on headmen. No more raids across the border. So long as these conditions do not exist there will be no withdrawal [from South-West Africa] of South African troops.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As Prime Minister to the House of Assembly, 8 March 1979, as cited in PW Botha in his own words, Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, p. 65

George Eliot photo
George S. Patton photo

“Sometimes I think your life and mine are under the protection of some supreme being or fate, because, after many years of parallel thought, we find ourselves in the positions we now occupy.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower (May 1942), as quoted in Eisenhower : A Soldier's Life (2003) by Carlo D'Este, p. 301

Ayumi Hamasaki photo

“I thought Mommy's life was strange, not mine.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Interview with TIME, 2002 http://web.archive.org/web/20020403141617/http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/ayumi_hamasaki/int_ayumi2.html

Aretha Franklin photo

“Speak your name
And I'll feel a thrill.
You said I do,
And I said I will.I tell you that I'll stay true,
And give you just a little time.
Wait on me baby,
I want you to be all mine.
I just get so blue.Since you've been gone, baby”

Aretha Franklin (1942–2018) American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist

why'd you do it? why'd you have to do it?
"(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone", written with Teddy White, from Lady Soul (1968)
Song lyrics

Julian of Norwich photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Giordano Bruno photo
John Wallis photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“You won't feel under-dressed when with your naked heart you come to me, for mine is past the point to dress for company.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

"Eeeeeee"
Rewards of Passion (Sheer Poetry) (1981)

Tim McGraw photo

“She's my kind of rain, hey, hey-hey.
Like love from a drunken sky-aye-yai-yai.
Confetti falling down on mine.
She's my kind of rain.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

She's My Kind of Rain
Song lyrics, Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors (2002)

Frederick Douglass photo

“His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine - it was as the burning sun to my taper light - mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Regarding John Brown, address at the 14th anniversary of Storer College http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/bbspr05-0032.html (30 May 1881)
1880s, Address at the Anniversary of Storer College (1881)

Anita Dunn photo

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers - Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say, "Why not?". You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here's the deal: These are your choices, they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Zedong said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine." And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don't have to follow other peoples choices and paths. Ok? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war, you lay out your own path, you figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definition define how good you are internally, you fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”

Anita Dunn (1958) American political strategist

Speech at the Washington National Cathedral for St. Andrews Episcopal High School's (of Bethesda Maryland) graduation on June 5, 2009. It was broadcast on the Glenn Beck Show, Oct 15, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi1zg2NOCn8 http://www.saes.org/academics/lower_school/newsletter.aspx?StartDate=6/2/2009

Otis Redding photo

“These arms of mine,
They are lonely.
Lonely and feeling blue.
These arms of mine,
They are yearning.
Yearning from wanting you.
And if you would let them hold you,
Oh how grateful I will be.”

Otis Redding (1941–1967) American singer, songwriter and record producer

These Arms of Mine.
Song lyrics, Pain in My Heart (1964)

“And all of what little joy in the world
Seemed suddenly simple and endlessly mine.”

Nice and Blue, Pt 2.
Brother, Sister (2006)

Vita Sackville-West photo

“And what have I to give my friends in the last resort?
An awkwardness, a shyness, and a scrap,
No thing that's truly me, a bootless waste,
A waste of myself and them, for my life is mine
And theirs presumably theirs, and cannot touch.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"Days I enjoy" quoted in Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (1993) by Suzanne Raitt, p. 89

Silius Italicus photo

“My attendants are Honour and Praise, Renown and Glory with joyful countenance, and Victory with snow-white wings like mine.”
Mecum Honor ac Laudes et laeto Gloria vultu et Decus ac niveis Victoria concolor alis.

Book XV, lines 98–99; spoken by Virtue.
Punica

David Hume photo
Edmund Blunden photo
Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Sarah Fuller Flower Adams photo

“He sendeth sun, he sendeth shower,-
Alike they’re needful to the flower;
And joys and tears alike are sent
To give the soul fit nourishment.
As comes to me or cloud or sun,
Father! thy will, not mine, be done.”

Sarah Fuller Flower Adams (1805–1848) English poet, hymnwriter

"He sendeth Sun, he sendeth Shower", reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 282; and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

John Davidson photo

“Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair
That went before me still and made the pace.
The earth is full of graves, and mine was there
Before my life began; my resting-place.”

John Davidson (1857–1909) Scottish poet

"The Last Journey", from The Testament of dick peter (London: Grant Richards, 1908) p. 146

Henry Fountain Ashurst photo

“There has never been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

"Arizona's Pioneer Senator". New York Times (June 1, 1962)

Jack Benny photo

“Don Wilson: Because I had to give him mine.”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

Karl Pilkington photo

“If you had 5 photos of anuses, I could not point mine out”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Moaning of Life, Karl on Happiness

Alexander Calder photo
Mike McCormack photo

“You always think that if you're going to spend seven years on a book, it should be Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses or something, but mine is just a 200-page book that took a long time.”

Mike McCormack (1965) Irish novelist and writer

McKeon, Belinda. Metaphysics gets a Mayo accent http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/metaphysics-gets-a-mayo-accent-1.441635, The Irish Times (13 May 2005)

“the distance
between this pigeon's brain
and mine
is minute compared to that
between mine
and Bodhi's
Wisdom
Compassion”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 137

George Moore (novelist) photo

“My experience of the original Edison phonograph goes back to the period when it was first introduced into this country. In fact, I have good reason to believe that I was among the very first persons in London to make a vocal record, though I never received a copy of it, and if I did it got lost long ago. It must have been in 1881 or 1882, and the place where the deed was done was on the first floor of a shop in Hatton Garden, where I had been invited to listen to the wonderful new invention. To begin with, I heard pieces both in song and speech produced by the friction of a needle against a revolving cylinder, or spool, fixed in what looked like a musical box. It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct.”

Herman Klein (1856–1934) British musical critic journalist and singing teacher

The Gramophone magazine, December 1933

Peter Cain photo
Louis-ferdinand Céline photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“.. Now there is in the South of Belgium, in Hainault, in the neighborhood of Mons.... a district called the Borinage, that has a peculiar population of laborers who work in the numerous coal mines... I should very much like to go there as an evangelist.... St. Paul was three years in Arabia before he began to preach..”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In his letter to brother Theo, from Laeken, near Brussels, 15 Nov. 1878, (letter 126); as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 18
1870s

Thomas Carlyle photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Elizabeth Prentiss photo
Dave Attell photo
Larry Niven photo

“And that’s another reason I don’t want contact between your species and mine. You’re all Crazy Eddies. You think every problem has a solution.”

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 37 “History Lesson” (p. 370; spoken by an alien to an earthman)

Benoît Mandelbrot photo
Noel Gallagher photo
John Keats photo
Jane Roberts photo
Albert Einstein photo

“In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.”

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

Letter to Carl Seelig (25 October 1953), p. 22
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Albert Camus photo
James Russell Lowell photo

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.