Quotes about stone
page 14

“Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones.
There is no prow that can cut through a cloudbank of ideas. A powerful idea, waved before the world at the proper time, can stop a squadron of iron-clad ships, like the mystical flag of the Last judgement.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Our America (1891)

World, Idea, Time, Relation ships

“You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair?
I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother.”

Smohalla (1815–1895) Native American prophet-dreamer

As quoted in The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (1890) by James Mooney on page 721; it has been sometimes also ascribed to w:Wovoka, which seems misappropriated as Mooney himself mentions Wovoka in the same book from page 765 on. "It is perhaps the most commonly cited piece of evidence documenting the Native American belief in Mother Earth. […]They rarely place the statement in the context in which Mooney presented it, that is, the history of millenarian movements spawned in part by the pressures Native American felt from the European-Americans' insatiable desire for land […] it is a direct response to 'white' pressures placed on native relationships with the land." From Mother Earth. An American Story. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5975950.html

Home, Waiting, Dead, Grass

“The actions that move the world have been prompted and inspired by dreams and visions. The search for the philosopher's stone laid the foundations of modern chemistry; modern travel and geography owe their chief advances to the search for the fabled realm of Cathay.”

Walter Raleigh (professor) (1861–1922) British academic

p. 15 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=yale.39002032470974;view=1up;seq=31 English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century (1906)

World, Travel, Dreams, Search

“Even though the gusts of zephyr
knock till eternity
on the red stone walls
behind the city of flowers,
no change will occur.
Only that they will tire themselves.”

Parveen Shakir (1952–1994) Pakistani writer and poet

Sessions of Sweet, Silent Thought: translated by Mahmudul Hasani, p.4
Poetry, The Surveillance

Flowers, Change

“Here is your road, tyingyou to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: "The Road" U.S. 1 (1938), The Book of the Dead

“Those whose minds are merged in Samadhi, are not deluded by the external jugglery. They are quite fearless. Siddhas (God realized souls) are not afraid of the world. A tiger or a cobra, when they see such a person, become calm, forgetting their ferocity. Similarly, all animals become calm at their sight. Even enemies forget their enmity and become friendly. As soon as they see a sadhu, they become stone-still. What is the cause of this? It is because of their doubting nature. At the sight of a sadhu, there is no darkness. Mind gets purified, realizing the Satwa quality.”

Bhagawan Nityananda (1897–1961) Hindu guru and saint

280
The Chidakasha Gita (1927)

Soul, God, Forgetting, Personality

“The characteristics of Sadhuguna, Satwaguna, and peace and all such qualities, come from non-attachment. When Buddhi becomes steady, it is called Satwaguna. Sat (truth) is like letters engraved in stone. The talk of the worldly is like letters engraved on a chalk slab.”

Bhagawan Nityananda (1897–1961) Hindu guru and saint

253
The Chidakasha Gita (1927)

Truth, Peace

“A man does not become a guru by simply wearing sandals and counting beads on a rosary. One who talks 'Brahma Jnana' and gives stones to his disciples is not a guru. Whatever a guru speaks in words, he must show it in action. First one must practice and after realisation, he must begin to teach others.”

Bhagawan Nityananda (1897–1961) Hindu guru and saint

28
The Chidakasha Gita (1927)

“As a white stone in the well's cool deepness,
There lays in me one wonderful remembrance.
I am not able and don't want to miss this:
It is my torture and my utter gladness. I think, that he whose look will be directed
Into my eyes, at once will see it whole.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

As a White Stone... (1916)

Thinking

“Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign'd —
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth; Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone —
For both were faiths, and both are gone.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

Forgiveness, God, Faith, Truth

“To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Miscellaneous Source: The Doctor Prescribed Violence https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/books/the-doctor-prescribed-violence.html, Adam Shatz Sept. 2, 2001, New York Times

Bird, Time

“Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls,
Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars —
They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble,
Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesy
That something new is coming to the world,
The Lord knows what! Well, it's a long time coming,
And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper
Source: A Child is Born (1942)

Soul, Time, War, Star

“I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being abides
from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned campsites
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."”

Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) poet

Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. Poems, The Layers Source: "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz [Click here for video version on YouTube as read by the author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk6xW41EFoA ]

Loss, Night, Heart, Angels

“Perfect Sufi is that in whose eye stone and ruby are alike. He who is with God Most High, is never indigent.”

Mian Mir (1550–1635) Sufi saint

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 200

Perfection, God

“Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

“Persons whom I saw thirty years ago and with whom I was intimate now appear on the page, and this compels me to declare that The Story of the Stone is a book of the deepest feelings and the truest words. Unless, however, one has in fact experienced such events or been deluded by such feelings, reading it is like "chewing wax" absentmindedly, never understanding the miraculous wonders of what one has witnessed.”

Zhiyanzhai

Comment in the 1760 manuscript of Dream of the Red Chamber, as quoted by Anthony C. Yu in Rereading the Stone (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 7

Reading, Understanding, Personality, Appearance

“I’ve built my house with the stones you’ve thrown.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

Housing

“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 14

Hurtful, Hurt, Hell

“The fall of dropping water wears away the Stone.”

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Water

“Don't leave a stone unturned. It's always something, to know you have done the most you could.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

“I am nobody's stepping stone!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Towards Chavo
"Unlike you Edge, I show respect to my opponents!"
Extreme Championship Wrestling

“Scientific theories can always be improved and are improved. That is one of the glories of science. It is the authoritarian view of the Universe that is frozen in stone and cannot be changed, so that once it is wrong, it is wrong forever.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"The Nearest Star" (1989) (reprinted in The Secret of the Universe (1992), p. 82)
General sources

Universe, Science, Change

“We must build strength and maintain vision. That requires inexorable efforts for reform and integration. Reform is a driving force behind growth, and integration is a stepping-stone for a take-off.”

Roh Moo-hyun (1946–2009) 9th President of the Republic of Korea

Excerpts from inaugural address (25 February 2003)

Effort

“Throw your stones (Wo-oh-oh-ohhh)
We can hold our own (Wo-oh-oh-ohhh)
I don't need no microphone”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"Microphone" (song) ("Microphone" on YouTube (with lyrics)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTeGbn0CDh4 Studio albums, Playing in the Shadows (2011)

“Only a persuasive tone can kill two birds with one stone.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Bird

“People are terrified of Covid-19, but a small stone can knock you out or even kill you on the spot. So, what is there to fear?”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

People, Fear

“The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Post-war years (1945–1955) Source: The Sinews of Peace https://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1946/s460305a_e.htm speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

Age, Science, Time

“And if my friends refused to listen to me, then the walls had to hear me or the stones in the fields and the trees of the forests.”

Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) German philosopher

Quoted by Harry Slochower in "Julius Bahnsen, Philosopher of Heroic Despair, 1830-1881" (1932), The Philosophical Review, 41(4), p. 371

Tree

“If I were a metaphor I'd be a truth. I am invincible, I am never defeated. I am immortal, I never die, I'm invisible, nobody can cut me, I am for eternity, I have no end, I am a stone's line, no one can erase me, the time can change, but i never change, I'm the truth, no one can deny me.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Truth, Change, Time

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Jesus (-7–30 BC) Jewish preacher and religious leader, central figure of Christianity

8:7 (King James Version)
New Testament, Gospel of John

“Let us lay down as the first foundation stone of our work the determination to seek for a World Design which is strictly in accordance with the highest spiritual principles which have been given to man down the ages, irrespective of whether we think the result possible or not.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter II Planning a Model World

Age, World, Thinking

“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown.
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin.'”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Source: Song lyrics, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964), The Times They Are A-Changin

Time, People, Water

“How I hate you. If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 15 (p. 152)

Hate

“I believe that the religious have two main tasks. On the one hand, as Ezekiel says, to behave like sentinels, not spies: when there is a threat we must warn and try to solve the problem before it explodes, it is a very big responsibility and if there are so many problems it means that the sentinels did not carry out their job well. Then we must be intercessors and when there is hostility between two groups, families or people, we have to mediate in truth. It is also essential to always keep prayer alive for the Country and for the protagonists so that God converts the heart. Now, it can be said, that the heart of many is of stone, it is up to us to make it flesh. Religions here seek a common line to promote peace.”

Jean Zerbo (1943) Malian Roman Catholic cardinal

Source: Cardinal Zerbo: Catholic sentinels and mediators among violence and conflict http://www.fides.org/en/news/68204-AFRICA_MALI_Cardinal_Zerbo_Catholic_sentinels_and_mediators_among_violence_and_conflict (24 June 2020)

Country, Problem, God, Hostility