Quotes about pulse

A collection of quotes on the topic of pulse, heart, likeness, time.

Quotes about pulse

“Ere long intelligence—transmitted without wires—will throb through the earth like a pulse through a living organism. The wonder is that, with the present state of knowledge and the experiences gained, no attempt is being made to disturb the electrostatic or magnetic condition of the earth, and transmit, if nothing else, intelligence.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Electrical Engineer, (24 Jun 1892), 11‎, 609.

Intelligence, Knowledge

“Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Closing lines, p. 174
Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980)
Context: As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London. Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other. In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back. All in, the whippy's taken. Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.

Home, Night

“There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,
irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

Homér Iliad

XIV. 216–217 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Alexander Pope's translation:
: In this was every art, and every charm,
To win the wisest, and the coldest warm:
Fond love, the gentle vow, the gay desire,
The kind deceit, the still reviving fire,
Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs,
Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Source: The Iliad

Love, Lovers, Madness

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Memory, Time, Personality

“Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.”

Tamora Pierce book Sandry's Book

Source: Sandry's Book

Life, Food, Sea

“My soul is full of longing
For the secret of the Sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Secret of the Sea, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Secret, Soul, Heart, Sea

“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Chihuahua and Sonora: The Green Lagoons", p. 149.

Death, Music, Understanding, Thinking

“"What is care?" asked the Princess, with a smile.
"It is a god", replied the Physician, "invisible, but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse — it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair grey".”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, pt. 5, ch. 5 (1833).
Books

God, Smile, Light, Princess

“O mortals, from your fellows' blood abstain,
Nor taint your bodies with a food profane:
While corn, and pulse by Nature are bestow'd,
And planted orchards bend their willing load;
While labour'd gardens wholesom herbs produce,
And teeming vines afford their gen'rous juice;
Nor tardier fruits of cruder kind are lost,
But tam'd with fire, or mellow'd by the frost;
While kine to pails distended udders bring,
And bees their hony redolent of Spring;
While Earth not only can your needs supply,
But, lavish of her store, provides for luxury;
A guiltless feast administers with ease,
And without blood is prodigal to please.”
Parcite, mortales, dapibus temerare nefandis corpora! sunt fruges, sunt deducentia ramos pondere poma suo tumidaeque in vitibus uvae, sunt herbae dulces, sunt quae mitescere flamma mollirique queant; nec vobis lacteus umor eripitur, nec mella thymi redolentia florem: prodiga divitias alimentaque mitia tellus suggerit atque epulas sine caede et sanguine praebet.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Book XV, 75–82 (from Wikisource); on vegetarianism, as the following quote
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Food, Spring, Nature, Bee

“It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions around the world. It's a faith in other people”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, A New Beginning (June 2009)
Context: It's easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward. It is easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is one rule that lies at the heart of every religion: that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples, a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions around the world. It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today.

People, World, Faith, Heart

“LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time.”

Thomas Pynchon book Vineland

First lines
Vineland (1990)
Context: LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed.

Dreams, Light, Time, Summer

“The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy or disaster. The pulse stops apparently, and nothing can be done, and not one move made, until a “nice cup of tea” is quickly made. There is no question that it brings solace and does steady the mind. What a pity all countries are not.”

Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) German-American actress and singer

Question, Time, Country, Tea

“I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive — you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) — so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.”

Robert Browning Men and Women

"Andrea del Sarto", line 70
"Less is more" is often misattributed to architects Buckminster Fuller or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It is something of a motto for minimalist philosophy. It was used in 1774 by Christoph Martin Wieland.
Men and Women (1855)

God, Painting, Light, Dreams

“It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.”

Lydia Millet (1968) American writer

Source: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Light, Learning, Sea

“They’re not dead,” I told the goat. “They both have pulses.” “Oh.” The goat sighed. “Well, give them a few more hours and they’ll probably be dead.” “What is wrong with you?” “Everything,” said the goat.”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

Dead

“Jealous?"

"Maybe."

"No reason. I like my ladies with a pulse.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Feast of Fools

“Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Truth, Passion

“History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations”

Arthur Koestler book Darkness at Noon

Source: Darkness at Noon

History

“One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.”

Kim Edwards book The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

World, Music

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

Elena Ferrante book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Pain, Pleasure, Truth, Joy

“Let me feel how thy pulses beat.”

Thomas Middleton The Changeling

Source: The Changeling

Feeling

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude…”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)
Source: O May I Join the Choir Invisible! And Other Favourite Poems
Context: O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge men's search To vaster issues.
Context: O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues.

Dead

“Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
Into your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Hope, Sister, Country

“Mahoney: "Thirty-seven seconds. Great, well done; now we wait."

Mr. Magorium: "No, we breathe, we pulse, we regenerate. our hearts beat, our minds create, our souls ingest. Thirty-seven seconds well used is a lifetime.”

Suzanne Weyn book Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Source: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Soul, Waiting, Heart

“My heart is broken.
It really is. All the signs are there. I can't sleep- not even burgers. Every time the phone rings, my pulse leaps… But it's never for me, it's never him.”

Meg Cabot book All American Girl

Source: All-American Girl

Sleep, Time, Heart

“Today, I demand that a film express either theor the. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.”

Francois Truffaut (1932–1984) film director

Source: The Films in My Life

“For the life of her, she couldn't understand how such an obstinate, boneheaded chauvinist could make her pulse race and her insides turn to jelly.”

Joanne Fluke (1943) writer

Source: Blueberry Muffin Murder

Life, Understanding

“People think they own time. They have watches and clocks and digital pulses. But they are wrong.”

Caroline B. Cooney Both Sides of Time

Source: Both Sides of Time

People, Thinking, Time

“And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Fear, Feeling, Time

“A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev's searching fingertips. Win's heartbeat… the pulse that sustained his universe.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Seduce Me at Sunrise

Search, Universe

“But a Book is only the Heart's Portrait- every Page a Pulse.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Books, Heart

“In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

“The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

Women, Forgiveness

“In this world, everything has a pulse or a vibration. This sound is unique to each living or non-living thing and in itself creates a music that no-one can hear. I believe that this has a very powerful resonance with, and a deep effect on, our lives. What would happen if we took this further and applied it to bigger things, more powerful things; like an entire solar system or galaxy say, what would that sound like?
Musica Universalis is the ancient theory that every celestial body, the sun, the moon and the stars, has an inner music. This is a harmonic and mathematical concept derived from the movements of the planets in the solar system. The music created is inaudible to the human ear.
Music of the Spheres is my interpretation of this theory. Every planet and every star; the whole universe has music within it that no-one can hear. This is what it would sound like if it was set free. This is Music of the Spheres.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

from the introduction to Music of the Spheres

World, Music, Star, Mathematics

“[David Sylvester asked Gottlieb, he is aware of the impact of the city New York on his painting:] Definitely I am. When I was in Paris last spring, my original plan was to go for four months and to paint there, and a number of people urged me to stay. That wanted to see what would happen, how my painting would change. But I felt strongly after being there less than a month that it was necessary for me to come back to New York, because I feel a certain rhythm in New York I don't feel in Paris.... there is a tempo in the life of New York which is exhilarating and I feel that this gets into one's painting. It's the pulse, not the look. I'am not involved with the external appearance of the city; it’s the vibrations. ]”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

In an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in ‘Living Arts, June 1963; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 33
1960s

Life, People, Feeling, Spring

“I've tried to make my writing itself therapeutic—that by your act of reading it your Life Energy may be enhanced. One of the ways I have sought to achieve this is to make it singable, as best I can do. Not singable like song lyrics, rather more chantable. Encouraging you to sing along, moving with its flow, its pulse, its pulsations.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Facets of a Diamond: Reflections of a Healer (2002), p. 286

Life, Way, Singing, Reading

“The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

People, Music, Night

“And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXVI (p. 139)

Death

“As remote as the rings of Saturn… A man with his stubby million-rand finger perennially prodding the public's pulse, his eyes constantly roving the horizons of the future, Kerzner has the power of a Prometheus unbound.”

Jani Allan (1952) South African columnist and broadcaster

Description of Sol Kerzner from interview published in the Just Jani column of the Sunday Times, republished in Face Value by Jani Allan.
Sunday Times

Future

“Wherever we look the dreadful disintegration of the bridges of life, the capillaries and the bodies they have created, is evident, which has been caused by the mechanical and mindless work of man, who has torn away the soul from the Earth's blood - water. The more the engineer endeavors to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities - our work - must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism - Earth - is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulse-beat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Life, Death, People, Disease

“The harp that once through Tara's halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls
As if that soul were fled.
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory's thrill is o'er;
And hearts that once beat high for praise
Now feel that pulse no more.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, st. 1. Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

Music, Feeling, Soul, Sleep

“Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm — into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Swan, p. 29
Twilight series, New Moon (2006)

“For it stirs the blood in an old man’s heart,
And makes his pulses fly,
To catch the thrill of a happy voice
And the light of a pleasant eye.”

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) American magazine writer, editor, and publisher

Saturday Afternoon.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Light, Heart, Flying, Happiness

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 12

Secret, Flowers, Lying, Sleep

“As we read this, we stand in the plane of the present; we are the sum of all our ancestors, and the origin of all our descendents. In terms of our model, we are at an ever-changing origin, located on the boundary of past and future. As well, we are spinning with the earth, spiralling with the galaxy, and expanding or contracting with the universe. As origins, we are on the move in time and space, and all these movements have a characteristic pulse rate.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.19

Universe, Change, Time, Reading

“All the time each one of us is hovering above an unfathomable abyss of potential calamities of every kind - sensed in that ever-throbbing pulse deep down in one's heart; as long as this chasm does not open up to devour one, the floating island in any guise whatever must surely be welcome. Wrong notion of God? Asiatic pessimism?”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God, Sense, Time, Heart

“Lal Bahadur Shastri knew the pulse of the nation very well, which is why he was able to leave his imprint on the nation in such a short time. Atal Bihari Vajpayee knew the pulse of the nation, Morarjibhai [Morarji Desai] knew the pulse of the nation, Chandra Shekharji was a mass leader. We also had [H. D. ] Deve Gowdaji who had never left Karnataka, Indra Kumar Gujralji thankfully never made any claims. Manmohan Singhji is like that.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2009, "The nation is waiting for a strong, experienced leader", 2009

Time

“Is this an argument for abolition? Of course it is. But not for an abolition by fiat: for yet another political change that would come as a surprise to the passively governed. It is an invitation to think - are you serious when you say that you cannot imagine life without it? Do you prefer invented tradition, sanitised history, prettified literature, state-sponsored superstition and media-dominated pulses of cheering and jeering?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Life, Imagination, History, Literature

“They tell you, you can get everything you need from pulses and lentils and things like that. Yeah. Everything you need, except company, which is not to be had, because you are dying, bent double in a miasma of your own toxic farts.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

on Green Party
Yeah, Yeah (2011)

“It would be wrong to suppose that the man of any particular period always looks upon past times as below the level of his own, simply because they are past. It is enough to recall that to the seeming of Jorge Manrique, "Any time gone by was better."… From A. D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: "Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still?"”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Horace, Odes, III.6]
Chap. III: The Height Of The Times
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

Loss, Time, Past

“I am here the doctor [in his studio], bringing his morning visit. I feel them all [his watercolors] the pulse. One I say: Wait, I'll make you an ointment, so you will refresh completely. The other I say: Friend, you need air, and even more the light.”

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (1824–1903) Dutch painter of the Hague School (1824-1903)

version in original Dutch / citaat van J. H. Weissenbruch, in het Nederlands: ..ik ben hier [in zijn atelier] de dokter die zijn morgen-visite brengt. Ik voel ze allen [zijn aquarellen] de pols. Tegen den een zeg ik, wacht ik zal voor jou een zalfje maken, daar je helemaal van opknapt. Tegen den ander: Vrind, jij hebt lucht nodig, en nog meer licht.
Source: J. H. Weissenbruch', (n.d.), p. 50

Feeling, Light, Waiting

“Love is not to be reason'd down, or lost
In high ambition, and a thirst of greatness;
'Tis second life, it grows into the soul,
Warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act I, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Love, Life, Soul

“This strengthens a belief which I have long cherished, that in a few centuries women will be the larger, stronger sex, admired for their biceps and superfluous hair, and that men will be their toys and domestic comforters, exciting tenderness in the female breast by their small feet, pretty soft hands, and general helplessness. I do not think I have a heart, for I have never been able to locate my pulse, or any other symptom of a circulatory system, but I am willing to share any of the benefits of male delicacy.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967)

Women, Men, Sex, Thinking

“I wasn't motivated to do it [re-record Bach's Goldberg Variations] until rather recently, when it occurred to me, on one of my rare relistenings to that early recording, that it was very nice, but that it was perhaps a little bit like thirty very interesting but somewhat independent-minded pieces, going their own way, and all making a comment on the ground bass on which they are all formed and to which they all conform. And I suddenly felt, not having played it in, well, since I stopped playing concerts, about 20 years, having not played it in all that time, that maybe I wasn't savaged by any over-exposure to it, and that if I looked at it again, I could find a way of making some sort of almost arithmetical correspondence between the theme and the subsequent variations, so that there would be some sort of temporal relationship, I don't want to say just exactly 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, that kind of correspondence, but, you know what I mean, there would be a sense in which, substituting for the fact that Bach had absolutely no melodic design that is continuous but rather a base harmonic design that is continuous, there would be at least a rhythmic design that is continuous, and the sense of pulse that went through it. And that seemed to me sufficient justification […] to do it all over again.”

Glenn Gould (1932–1982) Canadian pianist

transcribed from The Glenn Gould Collection vol 13 (Sony laserdisc).

Way, Motivation, Sense, Time

“Leaving slowly, / sucking in cold air round a warm tongue, / ennui synchronized to the pulse, / reports from a coiled trachea, / It is only irregular clocks…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"The Schultz Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

“Byron, a man who gave the world a better heart and a new pulse…The man who finds new pulses in the world is the man who will enjoy immortality. Byron was, if anything, a sower of new seed that had a great germinal force…Byron found the eyes of the people sealed, and opened them, and for that reason the gratitude of the nation should be given to him.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Byron centenary luncheon (29 April 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 123-124.
1924

People, World, Heart, Gratitude

“Five separate pulses of serotonin, designed to simulate five shocks to the tail, strengthened the synaptic connection for days and led to the growth of new synaptic connections… that did involve the synthesis of new protein.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

“Marx sees Epicurus as a destroyer of the Greek myths and as a philosopher bringing to light the break-up of a tribal community. His system destroyed the visible heaven of the ancients as a keystone of political and religious life. Marx allies himself, so to speak, with Epicurean atheism, which he regards at this stage as a challenge by the intellectual é lite to the cohorts of common sense. ‘ As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: "Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd."’”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 102-3

Life, God, World, Communication

“I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind blows soft through the springing grass,
And the river floats like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!”

Paul Laurence Dunbar Sympathy

Sympathy, in the 1913 collection of his work, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar; the poem inspired the title of Maya Angelou's book, Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Pain, Feeling, Spring, Bird

“I would resign the words of praise which now
Make my cheek crimson and my pulses beat.
Could I but deem that when my heart is cold
And my lip passionless, my songs would be
Numbered 'mid the young minstrels' first delights,
And murmured by the lover where his suit
Calls upon poetry to breathe of love.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

[This passage is in Erinna, altered]
The London Literary Gazette, 1825

Love, Lovers, Heart

“I believe that there are things which humanity will never fully understand, for in the understanding of them, we will no longer be "human." One of these things is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I don't know how it works, and I don't want to know. It's a big universe and even with our limited understanding of it, it's pretty clear that the universe is in no way equipped to keep up with the bureaucracy of its particles and/or strings. There are things lurking in the dark, unwatched, unguarded recesses of reality. Things as beyond you or I as we are beyond an amoeba. It is quite obvious that Mr. Clean Magic Erasers draw their power from these unknowable horrors. They probably found it in the core of a meteor still half buried in the Earth, hideously pulsing with a light not unlike the color of blood and hate. So use your Magic Erasers while you still can, before they run out of meteor or they discover it causes cervical cancer or testicular cancer in men and women respectively.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=070106

Women, Men, Hate, Color

“Gentlemen of the Convention, your present temper may not mark the healthful pulse of our people. When your enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find below the storm and passion that calm level of public opinion from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which final action will be determined.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

People, Health, Passion

“I have the feeling there are two dates in history when the whole world seemed to be working together perfectly to achieve certain things, when it beat to the pulse of chaotic events that erupted everywhere simultaneously, as if by chance: 1969 and 1989.”

Lou Ye

Interview on summerpalacefilm.com (undated) http://www.summerpalacefilm.com

World, Feeling, History, Chance

“And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 3. She Was a Phantom of Delight http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww259.html (1804)

“Everything is flowing — going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks …. While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 277
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Beauty, Music, Star, Nature

“When panting sighs the bosom fill,
And hands by chance united thrill
At once with one delicious pain
The pulses and the nerves of twain;
When eyes that erst could meet with ease,
Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun
Ecstatic conscious unison,—
The sure beginnings, say, be these
Prelusive to the strain of love
Which angels sing in heaven above?”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

Love and Reason http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/lovereason.html, st. 1 (1844).

Love, Pain, Angels, Singing

“Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.
Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

tracking with closeups (32) “The Cool and Detached View“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Imagination, Sense, Christ

“The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

“Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 204
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Life, Star, Tree, Freedom

“And other spirits there are standing apart
Upon the forehead of the age to come;
These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings in a distant mart?
Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

" Sonnet. Addressed to the Same http://www.bartleby.com/126/27.html" (Benjamin Robert Haydon) Poems (1817)

Age, World, Distant, Heart

“I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication; vastly important developments in microwave technique, whereby present clumsy connecting leads between wall or floor sockets and electric devices like toasters and vacuum sweepers may become unnecessary; gigantic magnetrons and klystrons, or their successors, will generate megawatts in microwaves; living rooms and their occupants will be heated by high-frequency waves from walls or ceilings; short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously”

Lee De Forest (1873–1961) American inventor

"Dawn of the Electronic Age" http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/03/20/dawn-of-the-electronic-age/, Popular Mechanics, January 1952

Communication

“Nature lies disheveled, pale,
With her feverish lips apart,—
Day by day the pulses fail,
Nearer to her bounding heart;
Yet that slackened grasp doth hold
Store of pure and genuine gold;
Quick thou comest, strong and free,
Type of all the wealth to be,—
Goldenrod!”

Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) American novelist, poet

Goldenrod; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 326.

Nature, Strong, Heart, Wealth

“We start with enthusiasm — out we go each of us to our task in all the brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses; we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless unprofitableness of labour most when we have most succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of ourselves — too much, for we feel that we are better than we can accomplish; too little, for, if we have done any good at all, it has heen as we were servants of a system too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face with us; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too soon, as if the strange master-worker has no longer any work to offer us, and turns us off to idleness and to ourselves; in the silence then our hearts lift up their voices, and cry out they can find no rest here, no home. Neither pleasure, nor rank, nor money, nor success in life, as it is called, have satisfied, or can satisfy; and either earth has nothing at all which answers to our cravings, or else it is something different from all these, which we have missed finding — this peace which passes understanding — and from which in the heyday of hope we had turned away, as lacking the meretricious charm which then seemed most alluring.
I am not sermonizing of Religion, or of God, or of Heaven, at least not directly.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Life, Money, God, Pleasure

“While memory lasts and pulses beat,
The thought of Dido shall be sweet.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IV, p. 124

Memory

“All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

First lines
The Loved One (1948)

Music, Support, Sun, Heart

“I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself. … The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here. … I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me. … To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going …”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Letter to his sister Denise, as quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, pp. 270–271

Children, Age, Feeling, Time

“Prayer is the pulse of the renewed soul; and the constancy of its beat is the test and measure of the spiritual life.”

Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) English theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 458.

Life, Soul

“Give a man a girl he can love,
As I, O my love, love thee;
And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate,
At home, on land, on sea.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

Part XV
Sunday Up the River (1865)

Love, Fate, Home, Girl

“A cry went up in the airy solitude of the high plains: 'Let's Murder the moonlight!' Some ran to nearby cascades; gigantic wheels were raised, and turbines transformed the rushing waters into magnetic pulses that rushed up wires, up high poles, up to shining, humming globes.
So it was that three hundred electric moons canceled with their rays of blinding mineral whiteness the ancient green queen of loves.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1900's, Let's Murder the Moonlight!' (1909)
Source: Mario J. Valdés, ‎Daniel Javitch, ‎Alfred Owen Aldridge (1992) Comparative literary history as discourse, p. 313

Love, Solitude, Water, Cry

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Imagination, Hell, Time, Box