Quotes about passing
page 17

Henry John Stephen Smith photo
Patrick Modiano photo
Thornton Wilder photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“When we have passed beyond humanity, then we shall be the Man. The Animal was the helper; the Animal is the bar.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Brigham Young photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Charles Krauthammer photo

“Even as the light that shifts and plays upon a lake, when Cynthia looks forth from heaven or the bright wheel of Phoebus in mid course passes by, so doth he shed a gleam upon the waters; he heeds not the shadow of the Nymph or her hair or the sound of her as she rises to embrace him. Greedily casting her arms about him, as he calls, alack! too late for help and utters the name of his mighty friend, she draws him down; for her strength is aided by his falling weight.”
Stagna vaga sic luce micant ubi Cynthia caelo prospicit aut medii transit rota candida Phoebi, tale iubar diffundit aquis: nil umbra comaeque turbavitque sonus surgentis ad oscula nymphae. illa avidas iniecta manus heu sera cientem auxilia et magni referentem nomen amici detrahit, adiutae prono nam pondere vires.

Source: Argonautica, Book III, Lines 558–564

Charles Reade photo
Walter Benjamin photo

“The critic does not pass judgment on the work; rather, art itself passes judgment, either by taking up the work in the medium of criticism or by rejecting it and thereby appraising it as beneath all criticism.”

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

Source: The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1919), p. 161

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Washington Irving photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Jesse Ventura photo
David Attenborough photo
Gulzarilal Nanda photo

“I passed an entire night in mental turmoil. Ultimately, I decided to take the plunge without even informing my family.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

India Today in: "Gulzarilal Nanda: Profile in austerity".
When he joined the Freedom Movement in 1921 after he met Mahatma Gandhi.

Josiah Quincy III photo

“If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of the Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation,—amicably if they can, violently if they must.”

Josiah Quincy III (1772–1864) American politician

Regarding the admission of Orleans Territory as a U.S. State. Abridged Cong. Debates, Jan. 14, 1811. Vol. iv. p. 327. This was later famously paraphrased by Henry Clay: The gentleman [Mr. Quincy] cannot have forgotten his own sentiment, uttered even on the floor of this House, "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must." Speech, Jan. 8, 1813.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Dafydd ap Gwilym photo

“Welkin's wind, way unhindered,
Big blusterer passing by,
A harsh-voiced man of marvels,
World-bold, without foot or wing.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Yr wybrwynt helynt hylaw
Agwrdd drwst a gerdda draw,
Gŵr eres wyd garw ei sain,
Drud byd heb droed heb adain.
"Y Gwynt" (The Wind), line 1; translation by Joseph P. Clancy, from Gwyn Jones (ed.) The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (Oxford: OUP, 1977) p. 38.

Adolph Freiherr Knigge photo

“Without inspiration, which fills the soul with a healthy warmth, nothing great can ever be brought to pass.”

Adolph Freiherr Knigge (1752–1796) German writer and Freemason

Ohne Begeisterung, welche die Seele mit einer gesunden Wärme erfüllt, wird nie etwas Großes zustande gebracht.
As quoted in ‪30 Minuten für intelligente Schlagfertigkeit‬ (2004) by Stephané Etrillard, p. 55.

Peter L. Berger photo
Patrick Swift photo
Edward Everett photo

“The admission to Harvard College depends upon examinations; and if this boy passes the examinations, he will be admitted; and if the white students choose to withdraw, all the income of the college will be devoted to his education.”

Edward Everett (1794–1865) American politician, orator, statesman

On admission of the first black student to Harvard University, as quoted in Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman (1925) by Paul Revere Frothingham, p. 299.

Michael von Faulhaber photo
Ivan Turgenev photo
Alice Cooper photo

“If you confine it, you're confining a whole thing. If you make it spontaneous, so that anything can happen, like we don't want to confine or restrict anything. What we can do, whatever we can let happen, you just let it happen…. we're taking sex, which is probably another half of American entertainment, sex and violence, and we're projecting it, and we're saying this is the way everything is right now. Biologically, everyone is male and female, so many male genes and so many female. And so what it is is we're saying "OK, what's the big deal. Why is everybody so up tight about sex?" About faggots, queers, things like that. That's the way they are…. People don't accept that they are both male and female, and people are afraid to break out of their sex thing because that's a big insecurity that's doing that. Consequently, people will make fun of us. We don't mind that, that's making them accept more, making fun that we accept that. The thing is this is the way we are. We think it's a gas…. We like reactions — a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction. Reaction's applauding, passing out or throwing up, and all of that is a reaction, and as much of that we can get, the better. I don't care how they react, as long as they react.”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

Interview in Poppin (September 1969).
Poppin (1969)

Seneca the Younger photo

“For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.”
In hoc enim fallimur, quod mortem prospicimus: magna pars eius iam praeterit; quidquid aetatis retro est mors tenet.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter I: On Saving Time

Paul Simon photo

“Hang on to your hopes, my friend.
That's an easy thing to say,
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend that you can build them again.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

A Hazy Shade of Winter
Song lyrics, Bookends (1968)

Xun Zi photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Quoted in Money and Men by Robert McCann Rice (1941) but no prior source is extant.
Misattributed

Maimónides photo

“That which is produced with intention has passed over from non-existence to existence.”

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.13

Báb photo
Henry Taylor photo
Babe Ruth photo

“There's one thing in baseball that always gets my goat and that's the intentional pass. It isn't fair to the batter. It isn't fair to his club. It's a raw deal for the fans and it isn't baseball. By "baseball," I mean good square American sportsmanship because baseball represents America in sport. If we get down to unfair advantages in our national game we are putting out a mighty bad advertisement.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

From "Babe Speaks His Mind Anent the Deliberate Pass," http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1920/08/14/page/7/ by Ruth (as told to Pegler), in The Chicago Tribune (August 14, 1920), p. 7; reprinted as "The Intentional Pass," https://books.google.com/books?id=SAAlxi-0EZYC&pg=PA32 in Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball, p. 32

Colin Wilson photo
Robert Murray M'Cheyne photo
Patrick Modiano photo
Laurence Sterne photo
Gerald Ford photo
Frances Bean Cobain photo

“saddened to hear the passing of a true artistic master, H. R. Giger. Ur legacy will live on through ur innovative & stimulating originality”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

13 May 2014 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/466293929432723456
Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Jean Tinguely photo

“I wanted something ephemeral, that would pass like a falling star and, most importantly, that would be impossible for museums to reabsorb. I didn't want it to be 'museumised'. The work had to pass by, make people dream and talk, and that would be all, the next day nothing would be left, everything would go back to the garbage bins.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

Quote of Tinguely in a radio interview (1982), as cited in: 'Violand-Hobi', Heidi G. Jean Tinguely: Life and Work (NY: Prestel, 1995), p. 36 ; Talking about his Homage to New York; Cited in: John D. Powell. (2009, p. 31).
Quotes, 1980's

William Hazlitt photo
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley photo
Albert O. Hirschman photo
Émile Durkheim photo

“Opinion is steadily inclining towards making the division of labor an imperative rule of conduct, to present it as a duty. Those who shun it are not punished precise penalty fixed by law, it is true; but they are blamed. The time has passed when the perfect man was he who appeared interested in everything without attaching himself exclusively to anything, capable of tasting and understanding everything finding means to unite and condense in himself all that was most exquisite in civilization. … We want activity, instead of spreading itself over a large area, to concentrate and gain in intensity what it loses in extent. We distrust those excessively mobile talents that lend themselves equally to all uses, refusing to choose a special role and keep to it. We disapprove of those men whose unique care is to organize and develop all their faculties, but without making any definite use of them, and without sacrificing any of them, as if each man were sufficient unto himself, and constituted an independent world. It seems to us that this state of detachment and indetermination has something anti-social about it. The praiseworthy man of former times is only a dilettante to us, and we refuse to give dilettantism any moral value; we rather see perfection in the man seeking, not to be complete, but to produce; who has a restricted task, and devotes himself to it; who does his duty, accomplishes his work. “To perfect oneself,” said Secrétan, “is to learn one's role, to become capable of fulfilling one's function... The measure of our perfection is no longer found in our complacence with ourselves, in the applause of a crowd, or in the approving smile of an affected dilettantism, but in the sum of given services and in our capacity to give more.””

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

[Le principe de la morale, p. 189] … We no longer think that the exclusive duty of man is to realize in himself the qualities of man in general; but we believe he must have those pertaining to his function. … The categorical imperative of the moral conscience is assuming the following form: Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function.
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), pp. 42-43.

William Wordsworth photo

“Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

The Borderers Act iv. Sc. 2.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Pierre Corneille photo

“True, I am young, but for souls nobly born
Valor doesn’t await the passing of years.”

Je suis jeune, il est vrai; mais aux âmes bien nées
La valeur n’attend point le nombre des années.
Don Rodrigue, act II, scene ii.
Le Cid (1636)

Ben Jonson photo
Martin Brundle photo
Claude Bernard photo

“The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Source: Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865)

Lewis Pugh photo

“When you are walking up a mountain to attempt something that nobody’s ever tried before, and you pass people bringing corpses down, it becomes very clear that if you get it wrong, the consequences could be fatal.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 234, describing his swim on Mt Everest (2010)
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)

John Stuart Mill photo
George W. Bush photo
Abba Eban photo

“If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”

Abba Eban (1915–2002) Israeli diplomat and politician

Comment about the United Nations General Assembly, as quoted in The Guardian (3 February 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1137594,00.html.

“The day has not only passed, it has long since passed, when we could visualize a healthy psychiatrist confronting a sick patient.”

Martti Siirala (1889–1948) Finnish philosopher

Medicine in Metamorphosis (2003).

Jane Roberts photo
Russell Kirk photo

“When heaven and earth have passed away, perhaps the conservative mind and the libertarian mind may be joined in synthesis, but not until then.”

Russell Kirk (1918–1994) American political theorist and writer

Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries (1981)

Pat Conroy photo
William Hazlitt photo

“Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Ignorance of the Learned"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Nick Cave photo

“Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Cave on his interest in Eastern and nontheistic spirituality
God and religion

John Updike photo

“[Harry listening to car radio] …he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the centre of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than a courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there,… […] So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God himself.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Democritus photo

“Men achieve tranquillity through moderation in pleasure and through the symmetry of life. Want and superfluity are apt to upset them and to cause great perturbations in the soul. The souls that are rent by violent conflicts are neither stable nor tranquil. One should therefore set his mind upon the things that are within his power, and be content with his opportunities, nor let his memory dwell very long on the envied and admired of men, nor idly sit and dream of them. Rather, he should contemplate the lives of those who suffer hardship, and vividly bring to mind their sufferings, so that your own present situation may appear to you important and to be envied, and so that it may no longer be your portion to suffer torture in your soul by your longing for more. For he who admires those who have, and whom other men deem blest of fortune, and who spends all his time idly dreaming of them, will be forced to be always contriving some new device because of his [insatiable] desire, until he ends by doing some desperate deed forbidden by the laws. And therefore one ought not to desire other men's blessings, and one ought not to envy those who have more, but rather, comparing his life with that of those who fare worse, and laying to heart their sufferings, deem himself blest of fortune in that he lives and fares so much better than they. Holding fast to this saying you will pass your life in greater tranquillity and will avert not a few of the plagues of life—envy and jealousy and bitterness of mind.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Viktor Schauberger photo
Michael Swanwick photo
John Stuart Mill photo
James A. Garfield photo
Anna Quindlen photo
Ray Bradbury photo
James Hudson Taylor photo

“I have never passed a more anxious or trying month in my life, but I never felt God so present with me.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Two: Over the Treaty Wall. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1982, 192).

Frederick Douglass photo

“We all know what the negro has been as a slave. In this relation we have his experience of two hundred and fifty years before us, and can easily know the character and qualities he has developed and exhibited during this long and severe ordeal. In his new relation to his environments, we see him only in the twilight of twenty years of semi-freedom; for he has scarcely been free long enough to outgrow the marks of the lash on his back and the fetters on his limbs. He stands before us, today, physically, a maimed and mutilated man. His mother was lashed to agony before the birth of her babe, and the bitter anguish of the mother is seen in the countenance of her offspring. Slavery has twisted his limbs, shattered his feet, deformed his body and distorted his features. He remains black, but no longer comely. Sleeping on the dirt floor of the slave cabin in infancy, cold on one side and warm on the other, a forced circulation of blood on the one side and chilled and retarded circulation on the other, it has come to pass that he has not the vertical bearing of a perfect man. His lack of symmetry, caused by no fault of his own, creates a resistance to his progress which cannot well be overestimated, and should be taken into account, when measuring his speed in the new race of life upon which he has now entered.”

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

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Ellen G. White photo

“The Saviour would have passed through the agony of Calvary that one might be saved in His kingdom. He will never abandon one for whom He has died.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

The Desire of Ages http://egwdatabase.whiteestate.org/nxt/gateway.dll/egw-comp/section00000.htm/book01247.htm/chapter01301.htm, Ch. 52, p. 480)
Conflict of the Ages series

Julian of Norwich photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Michael Shea photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things. First, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mister Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. Though Mister Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, 'Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether', gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the south was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought that it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go.”

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

About Abraham Lincoln https://web.archive.org/web/20150302203311/http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4071#_ftnref57.
1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Paul Klee photo

“The harbor and city.... were behind us [Klee's first glimpse of Tunis], slightly hidden. First, we passed down a long canal. On shore, very close, our first Arabs. The sun has a dark power. The colorful clarity on shore full of promise. Macke too feels it. We both know that we shall work well here.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary-note, 7 April 1914; as quoted by June Taboroff, on 'AramcoWorld', May, June 1991 http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199103/travels.in.tunisia.htm
1911 - 1914, Diary-notes from Tunisia' (1914)

Gottfried Leibniz photo

“Only geometry can hand us the thread [which will lead us through] the labyrinth of the continuum’s composition, the maximum and the minimum, the infinitesimal and the infinite; and no one will arrive at a truly solid metaphysic except he who has passed through this [labyrinth].”
Nam filum labyrintho de compositione continui deque maximo et minimo ac indesignabili at que infinito non nisi geometria praebere potest, ad metaphysicam vero solidam nemo veniet, nisi qui illac transiverit.

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Dissertatio Exoterica De Statu Praesenti et Incrementis Novissimis Deque Usu Geometriae (Spring 1676)
Source: Leibniz, Leibnizens Mathematische Schriften, Herausgegeben Von C.I. Gerhardt. Bd. 1-7. 1850-1863. Halle. The quotation is found in vol. 7. on page 326 in ”Dissertatio Exoterica De Statu Praesenti et Incrementis Novissimis Deque Usu Geometriae”. Link https://archive.org/stream/leibnizensmathe12leibgoog
Source: Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz's Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space by Vincenzo de Risi. Page 123. Link https://books.google.no/books?id=2ptGkzsKyOQC&lpg=PA123&ots=qz2aKxAYtp&dq=Dissertatio%20Exoterica%20De%20Statu%20Praesenti%20et%20Incrementis%20Novissimis%20Deque%20Usu%20Geometriae%E2%80%9D&hl=no&pg=PA123#v=onepage&q&f=false

Sherwood Anderson photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Frida Kahlo photo
Leonid Hurwicz photo

“There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened, I didn’t expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Quoted in: William Grimes, " Leonid Hurwicz, Nobel Economist, Dies at 90 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/business/26hurwicz.html?_r=0" at nytimes.com, June 26, 2008.

Lee Ritenour photo
Robert M. Price photo

“Various hearers of Jesus may well be imagined as unwittingly embellishing their Lord’s teachings as they meant to do nothing but pass them along. I cannot be too severe with the man in Monty Python's Life of Brian (of Nazareth) who thought he had heard Jesus say, “Blessed are the cheese makers,” nor of his neighbor who glossed the saying to include “any manufacturers of dairy products.””

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, James K. Beilby, Paul Rhodes Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views, https://books.google.com/books?id=O33P7xrFnLQC&lpg=PA227&pg=PA227#v=onepage&q&f=false, 4 February 2010, InterVarsity Press, 978-0-8308-7853-6, 227, Response to James D. G. Dunn]

Edwin Booth photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Philip Plait photo