Quotes about promenade

A collection of quotes on the topic of promenade, likeness, pleasure, act.

Quotes about promenade

“When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?"”

Diogenes of Sinope (-404–-322 BC) ancient Greek philosopher, one of the founders of the Cynic philosophy

Stobaeus, iii. 4. 83
Quoted by Stobaeus

People

“I started [in 1921] to write on the foundations of an approach to international trade theory that was to some extent new and for which I received the inspiration during a stroll on [the popular promenade] Unter den Linden in Berlin in 1920.”

Bertil Ohlin (1899–1979) Swedish economist and politician

Ohlin in his memoirs, as cited in: Flam, Harry, and M. June. " The Young Ohlin on the Theory of Interregional and International Trade http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:328550/FULLTEXT01.pdf." Bertil Ohlin: A Centennial Celebration, 1899-1999 10 (2002): p. 175. <br class="br">1970s

“In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. … Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

“Schopenhauer as educator” ("Schopenhauer als Erzieher"), § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Men, Hate, Bad luck, Secret

“No one's serious at seventeen,
When lindens line the promenades”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

“We should not speak of all subjects in one tone and in the same manner. We do not march at the head of a regiment as we walk on a promenade; and we should use the same style in which we should naturally speak of different things in the same way, with the same difference as we should walk, but always naturally, and as is suitable, either at the head of a regiment or on a promenade.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), VII. On Air and Manner

Way, Nature

“The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love, Life, Hate, World

“We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our window to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.
We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.
And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter 12

Men, Hunger, Pleasure, Imagination

“The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Head,” p. 107
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Is It Possible to Write a Poem”

Life, Light

“On the bank of the Nile opposite Old Cairo is the place known as The Garden, which is a pleasure park and promenade, containing many beautiful gardens, for the people of Cairo are given to pleasure and amusements. I witnessed a fete once in Cairo for the sultan's recovery from a fractured hand; all the merchants decorated their bazaars and had rich stuffs, ornaments and silken fabrics hanging in their shops for several days.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

People, Pleasure, Beauty

“The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Journal entry (20 April 1920); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 6

Sun

“I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Letter to Evert Augustus Duyckinck (3 March 1849); published in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960) edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, p. 79
Context: And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over Shakspeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk. — I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.—There, I have driven my horse so hard that I have made my inn before sundown.

God

“He came up with this very simple idea which was recognising that the location which we identified, which is an axial view straight up the main promenade of the museum at its highest point, would be the place where a simple hour glass form would offer the opportunity to invert the Jerusalem sky and built landscape. And that’s what he created – and it’s a superb thing.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Israeli sky in Anish’s steel- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum

Idea

“We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Pleasure, Help, Christmas