Quotes about moment
page 32

Richie Sambora photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo
Ayn Rand photo
Bill Bryson photo
Max Ernst photo
Ogden Nash photo

“Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"The Hippopotamus" http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/848.html

Carl Friedrich Gauss photo

“It is beyond doubt that the happiness which love can bestow on its chosen souls is the highest that can fall to mortal's lot. But when I imagine myself in the place of the man who, after twenty happy years, now in one moment loses his all, I am moved almost to say that he is the wretchedest of mortals, and that it is better never to have known such happy days. So it is on this miserable earth: 'the purest joy finds its grave in the abyss of time.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

What are we without the hope of a better future?
As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911. "Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century" https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/44/mode/2up, Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 44-45

Michael Chabon photo

“Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The Recipe for Life http://www.fiu.edu/~weitzb/Golem-Recipe-for-Life.htm, The Washington Book World (2000)

M. S. Golwalkar photo
Giorgio Morandi photo
Ingmar Bergman photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Anatole France photo

“For the moment the peril was nowhere and yet everywhere. The majority remained solid; but the leaders became stiff and exacting.”

Book VII : Modern Times, Ch. IX : The Final Consequences
Penguin Island (1908)

Merce Cunningham photo
John Crowley photo
Robert Owen photo
Camille Pissarro photo

“Just a moment, children — what does "pledge" mean?”

"Teacher" (played by Jame's Clavell's daughter Michaela Clavell, credited as Michaela Ross).
The Children's Story (1982)

Kenneth Goldsmith photo
Robert Skidelsky photo
Ted Cruz photo
George Howard Earle, Jr. photo
Teresa of Ávila photo
Walter Benjamin photo

“The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: (1940), V

Dan Fogelberg photo
Zygmunt Bauman photo

“Pascal suggests that people avoid looking inwards and keep running in the vain hope of escaping a face-to-face encounter with their predicament, which is to face up to their utter insignificance whenever they recall the infinity of the universe. And he censures them and castigates them for doing so. It is, he says, that morbid inclination to hassle around rather than stay put which ought to be blamed for all unhappiness. One could, however, object that Pascal, even if only implicitly, does not present us with the choice between a happy and an unhappy life, but between two kinds of unhappiness: whether we choose to run or stay put, we are doomed to be unhappy. The only (putative and misleading!) advantage of being on the move (as long as we keep moving) is that we postpone for a while the moment of that truth. This is, many would agree, a genuine advantage of running out of rather than staying in our rooms—and most certainly it is a temptation difficult to resist. And they will choose to surrender to that temptation, allow themselves to be allured and seduced—if only because as long as they remain seduced they will manage to stave off the danger of discovering the compulsion and addiction that prompts them to run, screened by what is called “freedom of choice” or “self-assertion.””

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

But, inevitably, they will end up longing for the virtues they once possessed but have now abandoned for the sake of getting rid of the agony which practicing them, and taking responsibility for that practice, might have caused.
Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 37.

Johan Cruyff photo
Richard Matheson photo
Paulo Coelho photo

“On 11 November 1997, Veronika decided that the moment to kill herself had — at last!”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

arrived.
Veronika Decides to Die (1998)

Thomas Kettle photo
David C. McClelland photo
Lee Kuan Yew photo

“Of course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses. Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and big houses? How does telling a Malay bus driver that he should support the party of his Malay director (UMNO) and the Chinese bus conductor to join another party of his Chinese director (MCA) - how does that improve the standards of the Malay bus driver and the Chinese bus conductor who are both workers in the same company? If we delude people into believing that they are poor because there are no Malay rights or because opposition members oppose Malay rights, where are we going to end up? You let people in the kampongs believe that they are poor because we don't speak Malay, because the government does not write in Malay, so he expects a miracle to take place in 1967 (the year Malay would become the national and sole official language in Malaysia). The moment we all start speaking Malay, he is going to have an uplift in the standard of living, and if doesn't happen, what happens then? Meanwhile, whenever there is a failure of economic, social and educational policies, you come back and say, oh, these wicked Chinese, Indian and others opposing Malay rights. They don't oppose Malay rights. They, the Malay, have the right as Malaysian citizens to go up to the level of training and education that the more competitive societies, the non-Malay society, has produced. That is what must be done, isn't it? Not to feed them with this obscurantist doctrine that all they have got to do is to get Malay rights for the few special Malays and their problem has been resolved.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew in the Parliament of Malaysia, 1965 http://maddruid.com/?p=645
1960s

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Paul Saffo photo
Max Horkheimer photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Frederick Buechner photo
Nicholas Rescher photo
Jussi Halla-aho photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“I knew that the moment the great governing spirit strikes the blow to divide all humanity into just two opposing factions, I would be on the side of the common people.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

As quoted in Becoming Che : Guevara's Second and Final Trip through Latin America (2005) by Carlos "Calica" Ferrer, as translated by Sarah L. Smith (2006), p. 170

Will Eisner photo
Margaret Cho photo
H. Havelock Ellis photo

“There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

The Task of Social Hygiene, ch. 10

P.G. Wodehouse photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo

“I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.”

Haunted (2005)
Variant: I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.

Colum McCann photo
Thomas S. Monson photo
Howell Cobb photo
Adi Da Samraj photo
Horatio Nelson photo

“It is warm work; and this day may be the last to any of us at a moment. But mark you! I would not be elsewhere for thousands.”

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) Royal Navy Admiral

At the Battle of Copenhagen (2 April 1801) [citation needed]
1800s

Dean Acheson photo
Boniface Mwangi photo
Drake photo

“Don't ever forget the moment you began to doubt, transitioning from fitting in to standing out.”

Drake (1986) Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor

"Say What's Real," So Far Gone (2009)
2000s

William Gibson photo

“The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.”

Source: All Tomorrow's Parties‎ (2003), Ch. 4 : Formal Absences of Precious Things, p. 21

Edward Carpenter photo
George Santayana photo

“The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

"Dickens"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

A.A. Milne photo
Mitt Romney photo

“The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Walter Benjamin photo

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

Variant translation:
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
As translated by Dennis Redmond (2001)
Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
Context: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Kage Baker photo

“Edward holds up a hand for silence. “If you please, Captain: he’s thinking. Let us savor the exquisite rarity of the moment.””

Source: The Sons of Heaven (2007), Chapter 26, Section 2 “One Week Later, Linear Time” (p. 319)

Sören Kierkegaard photo
John McCain photo

“At the moment of conception.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Question: "At what point is a baby entitled to human rights?"
Saddleback Civil Forum with Pastor Rich Warren, 18 August 2008 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0808/16/se.02.html
2000s, 2008

“What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don't construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

Quoted in Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-schwartz/in-the-beginning-there-was-not_b_1703387.html

Elaine Paige photo

“I never for a moment considered not doing the show. When I did the show I became very emotional. Some of the lyrics suddenly took on an entirely different meaning. Words like, 'as if we never said goodbye' became more real.”

Elaine Paige (1948) English singer and actress

Regarding Paige's battle with cancer; as quoted in "Elaine's close curtain call" by Rebecca Hardy in The Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/womenfamily.html?in_article_id=301138&in_page_id=1799 (8 May 2004)

Peter Blake photo

“My dealer was a friend of the Beatles and the Stones, and he suggested they used a fine artist. I talked to the Beatles at length about what the cover would be. I worked out it would show the moment after they had played in a bandstand in the park. My big contribution was the life-size cutouts, the magic crowds.”

Peter Blake (1932) British artist

Charlotte Higgins, "It was 37 years ago today – and Sgt Pepper cover has still failed to pay", http://www.guardian.co.uk/thebeatles/story/0,,1230411,00.html The Guardian, 2004-06-03
Sgt. Pepper's cover

Joseph Campbell photo
Dave Eggers photo
Ernest Bevin photo
Thich Nhat Hanh photo

“The present moment
contains past and future.
The secret of transformation,
is in the way we handle this very moment.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Understanding Our Mind (2006) Parallax Press ISBN 978-81-7223-796-7

John Stuart Mill photo
Orison Swett Marden photo
Colum McCann photo
Aphra Behn photo

“Each moment of the happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.”

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer

The Younger Brother, Act III, sc. ii (published posthumously 1696).

Antoni Tàpies photo

“At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

quote from 1988
1981 - 1990
Source: Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003, Achim Sommer, Kunsthalle Emden, Altana 2004, p. 26

Marissa Mayer photo
Walker Percy photo
Russell Brand photo
John C. Wright photo
Johnny Mercer photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Theodor Mommsen photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Truman Capote photo

“Very proud of this moment that I'm going to be taking on my first job as a head coach. Yeah, so, of course, some apprehension but not in a nervous kind of way, more in a really-excited-to-get-started way.”

Paul Clement, INTERVIEW I PAUL CLEMENT EXCLUSIVE ON DERBY APPOINTMENT https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=169&v=1KMy_5vdeCc, Youtube.co.uk, 31 May 2015

Shaun Ellis photo