Quotes about peak

A collection of quotes on the topic of peak, mountain, likeness, life.

Quotes about peak

Oprah Winfrey photo

“It makes no difference how many peaks you reach if there was no pleasure in the climb.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist
Peter Singer photo
Paulo Coelho photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Thomas Boston photo
Statius photo

“The wood that crowns the peak of Nesis set fast in ocean.”
Silvaque quae fixam pelago Nesida coronat.

i, line 148 (tr. J. H. Mozley)
Silvae, Book III

Su Shi photo

“From the side, a whole range; from the end, a single peak;
far, near, high, low, no two parts alike.
Why can't I tell the true shape of Lu-shan?
Because I myself am in the mountain.”

Su Shi (1037–1101) Chinese writer

"Written on the Wall at West Forest Temple" (《题西林壁》) (1084), in Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o, trans. Burton Watson (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1994), p. 108

Yehuda Ashlag photo
Angelus Silesius photo

“God, being a great abyss, to men his depth reveals
Who climb the highest peak of the eternal hills”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

Erwin Schrödinger photo
Karl Marx photo

“The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 7.

Saul Bellow photo
Scott Jurek photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I am Providence, and Providence is myself—together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (16 May 1926), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 192
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Cate Blanchett photo

“I can be a real pessimist. You know that when you win an Oscar and you walk offstage and your first thought is: "Oh God, I've peaked."”

Cate Blanchett (1969) Australian actress

Cate Blanchett: 'You know you're a pessimist when you win an Oscar and think, "Oh God, I've peaked"', The Guardian, 30 November 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/30/cate-blanchett-actor-pessimist-oscar,

Friedrich Schiller photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Mikhail Lermontov photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo

“Atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to tell that he hath looked upon them.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)
Context: Atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they left their old peaks they took with them all signs of themselves, save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called Ngranek. … They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.

Morihei Ueshiba photo
Jordan Peterson photo
Janet Evanovich photo
Nancy Mitford photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Candace Bushnell photo
David Lynch photo

“In a Town like Twin Peaks noone is innocent”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor
Rick Riordan photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.”

Variant: People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you can forget, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Siri Hustvedt photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Jonathan Carroll photo
Fidel Castro photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
John Muir photo
Felix Adler photo

“As the light of morning strikes now one peak and then another, some being illuminated while others are in the shadow, so the light of the essential moral principle shines now upon one duty and then upon another, while others are in the shadow.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Hunter S. Thompson photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Angela Davis photo
Karl Denninger photo
Trip Hawkins photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“And I say to you this morning in conclusion that I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in things. I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in gadgets and contrivances. As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow, but to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Not in the little gods that can be with us in a few moments of prosperity, but in the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death, and causes us to fear no evil. That's the God. Not in the god that can give us a few Cadillac cars and Buick convertibles, as nice as they are, that are in style today and out of style three years from now, but the God who threw up the stars to bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity. Not in the god that can throw up a few skyscraping buildings, but the God who threw up the gigantic mountains, kissing the sky, as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blues. Not in the god that can give us a few televisions and radios, but the God who threw up that great cosmic light that gets up early in the morning in the eastern horizon, (who paints its technicolor across the blue—something that man could never make. I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in the little gods that can be destroyed in an atomic age, but the God who has been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come, and our shelter in the time of storm, and our eternal home. That's the God that I'm putting my ultimate faith in.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

Han-shan photo
Joseph L. Mankiewicz photo

“I have a lot to be sad about. Not bitter in any way. But I think it can be fairly said that I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture.”

Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) American film director, screenwriter, and producer

"Joseph Mankiewicz, Master of the Movies," interview by Paul Attanasio, Washington Post (1986-06-01)

Martin Niemöller photo

“In Erlangen, for instance, in January 1946 he spoke of meeting a German Jew who had lost everything — parents, brothers, and sisters too. 'I could not help myself', said Niemöller, 'I had to tell him, "Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin."' Niemöller's stance was by no means entirely welcome to the 1,200 students to whom he was preaching. They shouted and jeered as he preached that Germany must accept responsibility for the five or six million murdered Jews. Students in Marburg and Göttingen similarly heckled him. But Niemöller insisted that "We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries. No doubt others made mistakes too, but the wave of crime started here and here it reached its highest peak. The guilt exists, there is no doubt about that — even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns containing the ashes of incinerated Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done."”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Sermons in Erlangen, Marburg, Göttingen and Frankfurt (January 1946), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 177

Edward R. Murrow photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam photo
Edmund Hillary photo
Viktor Schauberger photo
Brett Favre photo

“It's fun leading this offense. I don't think we've hit our peak.”

Brett Favre (1969) former American football quarterback

AP Interview: Favre indicates he'll play in '04, ESPN.com, November 7, 2003, 2007-11-12 http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?id=1656411,

Daniel Levitin photo

“Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

Australian Broadcasting Corporation http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/5009818 (October 11, 2013)

Homér photo

“As stars in the night sky glittering
round the moon's brilliance blaze in all their glory
when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm…
all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs
and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts
the boundless, bright air and all the stars shine clear
and the shepherd's heart exults.”

VIII. 551–555 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Alexander Pope's translation:
: As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole,
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
And tip with silver every mountain's head;
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Jacopone da Todi photo
Norman Spinrad photo

“Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammatic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form.
Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s striving to transcend the realm of time and form, lay that which could not be encompassed by the artifice of man. From nothing are we born, to nothing do we go; the universe we know is but the void looped back upon itself, and form is but illusion’s final veil.
We touch that which lies beyond only in those fleeting rare moments when the reality of form dissolves—through molecule and charge, the perfection of the meditative trance, orgasmic ego-loss, transcendent peaks of art, mayhap the instant of our death.
Vraiment, is not the history of man from pigments smeared on the walls of caves to our present starflung age, our sciences and arts, our religions and our philosophies, our cultures and our noble dreams, our heroics and our darkest deeds, but the dance of spirit round this central void, the striving to transcend, and the deadly fear of same?”

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (p. 117)

John Muir photo

“One shining morning, at the head of the Pacheco Pass, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most divinely beautiful and sublime I have ever beheld. There at my feet lay the great central plain of California, level as a lake thirty or forty miles wide, four hundred long, one rich furred bed of golden Compositae. And along the eastern shore of this lake of gold rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, in massive, tranquil grandeur, so gloriously colored and so radiant that it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top, and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; then a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple, where lay the miners' gold and the open foothill gardens — all the colors smoothly blending, making a wall of light clear as crystal and ineffably fine, yet firm as adamant. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it, — the sunbursts of morning among the mountain-peaks, the broad noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, — it still seems to me a range of light.”

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

" The Treasures of the Yosemite http://books.google.com/books?id=ZzWgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA483", The Century Magazine, volume XL, number 4 (August 1890) pages 483-500 (at page 483)
1890s

Ba Jin photo
Surendra Pratap Singh photo
Sania Mirza photo

“On the tennis court, one needs a cool temperament, tremendous ball sense, reflexes, speed, hand-eye co-ordination, power, timing and peak physical fitness. Off the court, the player and support team need skills in planning, execution, travel, an ability to raise funds when needed, and several other talents.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Arun Sharma Sachin's my inspiration - he's also excellent at tennis: Sania Mirza http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/interviews/Sachins-my-inspiration-hes-also-excellent-at-tennis-Sania-Mirza/articleshow/26167479.cms, The Times of India, 22 November 2013

Colin Wilson photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Han-shan photo
Colin Wilson photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Jared Diamond photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo
Vitruvius photo
Henry Miller photo
David Lloyd George photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo

“However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less — and probably was much less — than a million.”

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section V, p. 83

“It is a magnificent country, lonely, grand in scale, stretching for mile upon mile, the clear blue air stabbed with peaks of snow, where the sun glints on the ice surfaces, green as sea ice, breath taking in its scope.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 8, Centennial summer, p. 196 (On Canada...)

GG Allin photo

“When you reach your peak its time to die.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin on The Jane Whitney Show July 16. 1993.
On The Jane Whitney Show

Carson Cistulli photo
Pierre Corneille photo

“Ambition displeases when it has been sated… Having reached the peak, it aspires to descend.”

L'ambition déplaît quand elle est assouvie... Monté sur le faîte, il aspire à descendre.
Auguste, act II, scene i.
Cinna (1641)

Marcus Brigstocke photo
Alison Bechdel photo

“Toni: Mamá… MAMÁ! I'm paying peak long-distance rates here. Could you save the Hail Marys until we hang up?”

#236, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1996), collected in Hot, Throbbing DTWOF (1997).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Samuel R. Delany photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Robert Sheckley photo
Amy Lowell photo
Vandana Shiva photo
John Muir photo
Rudolph Rummel photo

“The more libertarian a state, the significantly less internal violence it has, and the significantly and predictably (in variance terms) lower its possible peak violence.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Libertarianism, Violence within States, and the Polarity Principle,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jul., 1984), pp. 443-462. Published by Comparative Politics, Ph.D. Programs in Political Science, City University of New York.

Thomas Henry Huxley photo
Sid Meier photo

“The irony is we thought we were behind the curve, that the industry had already peaked, and we were just trying to catch up.”

Sid Meier (1954) Canadian-American game programmer and designer

http://www.gamespot.com/features/sidlegacy/interview.html

Sun Myung Moon photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Asger Jorn photo