Quotes about string

A collection of quotes on the topic of string, likeness, use, theory.

Quotes about string

“they say that time heals all things,
they say you can always forget;
but the smiles and the tears across the years
they twist my heart strings yet!”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Smile, Tear, Time, Heart

“What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

Spring, Heart

“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: Heart-Shaped Box

World, Music, Singing

“From love's plectrum arises
the song of the string of life
Love is the light of life
love is the fire of life”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Love, Life, Light

“SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN FATE, OTHERS DON’T. I DO, and I don’t. It may seem at times as if invisible fingers move us about like puppets on strings. But for sure, we are not born to be dragged along. We can grab the strings ourselves and adjust our course at every crossroad, or take off at any little trail into the unknown.”

Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002) Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer

Source: Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft

Fate, People, Time

“It is a rather unpleasant sensation to feel yourself pulled by the strings and made to do things whether you want to or not — that is quite irrelevant — but to be compelled to act because something pulls you by the strings, something which you do not even see — that is exasperating. … I knew nobody who could help me and I did not have the chance that you have, someone who can tell you: "This is what you have to do!" There was nobody to tell me that. I had to find it out all by myself. And I found it. I started at five.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

On developing her inner experiences, as narrated in later years to her disciples at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in "Birth and Girlhood", also in The Mother On Herself http://www.miraura.org/bio/herself.html

Feeling, Chance, Help

“The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

Of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue
"Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?", in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1955.

Thinking, Water, Past

“Manhood stands tall and high, and becomes madness;
The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy.
When iron sated with blood embraces love,
It turns into a bewildered sitar string.
When time robs man of love and the loved one,
He sees the beloved’s glory and his own.
How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!”

Ghani Khan (1914–1996) Pakistani poet

When Man Sits Down in Dust, l. 1-7

Love, Time, Madness

“Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10

Money, People, World, Failure

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10

Money, Self-confidence, World

“The song I came to sing
remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing
and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true,
the words have not been rightly set;
only there is the agony
of wishing in my heart…”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Singing, Time, Heart

“if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“My little girls can break my heart. They can make me cry just looking at them eating their string beans.”

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

Girl, Heart, Cry

“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Feeling, Hell, Dance

“Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Source: Van Gogh

Failure, Success

“There is a man, playing a violin, and the strings are the nerves in his own arm…”

James O'Barr (1960) Artist

“I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument
while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Singing

“Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Life

“What if a puppet could cut its own strings, and in that act of defiance and strength of will become truly alive? Become is own puppetmaster?”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: I Hunt Killers

“Yes! I'm! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am!”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

People, Books, Understanding, Reading

“I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.”

Slash (musician) book Slash

Source: Slash (2007) by Anthony Bozza & Mason Segal,, p. 29

Feeling

“Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Monday 20 April 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Happiness

“Auxiliary to all this, and working hand in hand with it, the Nebraska doctrine, or what is left of it, is to educate and mold public opinion, at least Northern public opinion, not to care whether slavery is voted down or voted up. This shows exactly where we now are; and partially, also, whither we are tending.
It will throw additional light on the latter, to go back, and run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated. Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring. The people were to be left "perfectly free," subject only to the Constitution. What the Constitution had to do with it, outsiders could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche, for the Dred Scott decision to afterward come in, and declare the perfect free freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all. Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people, voted down? Plainly enough now: the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)

People, Education, Decision, Freedom

“To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.”

Oscar Wilde book Poems

"Hélas" (1881)
Poems (1881)

Life, Wisdom, Secret, Soul

“How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark,
in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest of songs.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book New Poems

Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß
sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie
hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?
Ach gerne möchte ich sie bei irgendetwas
Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen
an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die
nicht weiterschwingt, wenn diene Tiefen schwingen.
Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,
nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,
die aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht.
Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?
Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?
O süßes Lied.
Liebes-Lied (Love Song) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907)

Soul, Drawing

“I'm not the pawn to your king
I'm not your world on a string
I'm not anyone you'll beat
I'm not anything”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"Now, Now"
Marry Me (2007)

World

“We actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.”

Michio Kaku (1947) American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

Math is the Mind of God http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/math-is-the-mind-of-god?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigthink%2Fblogs%2Fdr-kakus-universe+%28Dr.+Kaku%27s+Universe%29 (29 December 2012)

God, Music

“Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.”

Joseph Hall (1574–1656) British bishop

Christian Moderation, introduction.

“Hereafter we all have to be redeemed. The world is pulling with a thousand strings. We sin because of indifference and negligence and heap new guilt on the old original one. Our life is a chain of sin and expiation ruled by an incomprehensible providence.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Wir müssen alle einmal erlöst werden. Die Welt zieht uns mit tausend Banden. Wir fehlen aus Gleichgültigkeit und Nachsicht und häufen neue eigene Schuld auf alte ererbte. Unser Leben ist eine Kette aus Schuld und Sühne, darüber ein nach unerforschlichen Gesetzen wirkendes Schicksal waltet.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Life, World, Indifference

“Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Attributed in Instructions to Young Sportsmen (1824) by Colonel Peter Hawker

Fools, Fish, Flying

“To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

How To Tell A Story (1895)

Art, Way

“The soul, being a harmony, can never utter a note at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is composed; she can only follow, she cannot lead them? …And yet do we not now discover the soul to be doing the exact opposite—leading the elements of which she is believed to be composed; almost always opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life… threatening and reprimanding the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself…”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Fear, Way, Soul

“As I saw that they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us. Afterwards they came swimming to the boats, bringing parrots, balls of cotton thread, javelins, and many other things which they exchanged for articles we gave them, such as glass beads, and hawk's bells; which trade was carried on with the utmost good will. But they seemed on the whole to me, to be a very poor people. They all go completely naked, even the women, though I saw but one girl. All whom I saw were young, not above thirty years of age, well made, with fine shapes and faces; their hair short, and coarse like that of a horse's tail, combed toward the forehead, except a small portion which they suffer to hang down behind, and never cut. Some paint themselves with black, which makes them appear like those of the Canaries, neither black nor white; others with white, others with red, and others with such colors as they can find. Some paint the face, and some the whole body; others only the eyes, and others the nose. Weapons they have none, nor are acquainted with them, for I showed them swords which they grasped by the blades, and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron, their javelins being without it, and nothing more than sticks, though some have fish-bones or other things at the ends. They are all of a good size and stature, and handsomely formed. I saw some with scars of wounds upon their bodies, and demanded by signs the of them; they answered me in the same way, that there came people from the other islands in the neighborhood who endeavored to make prisoners of them, and they defended themselves. I thought then, and still believe, that these were from the continent. It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion. They very quickly learn such words as are spoken to them. If it please our Lord, I intend at my return to carry home six of them to your Highnesses, that they may learn our language. I saw no beasts in the island, nor any sort of animals except parrots.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

12 October 1492; This entire passage is directly quoted from Columbus in the summary by Bartolomé de Las Casas
Journal of the First Voyage

Women, People, Age, Faith

“One might ask why Senhor José needs a hundred-yard-long piece of string if the length of the Central Registry, despite successive extensions, is no more than eighty. That is the question of a person who imagines that one can do everything in life simply by following a straight line, that it is always possible to proceed from one place to another by the shortest route, perhaps some people in the outside world believe that they have done so, but here, where the living and the dead share the same space, sometimes, in order to find one of them, you have to make a lot of twists and turns, you have to skirt round mountains of bundles, columns of files, piles of cards, thickets of ancient remains, you have to walk down dark gulleys, between walls of grubby paper which, up above, actually touch, yards and yards of string will have to be unravelled, left behind, like a sinuous, subtle trail traced in the dust, there is no other way of knowing where you have to go next, there is no other way of finding your way back.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), pp. 140–141

Life, People, World, Way

“Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Novalis (1829)

Music, Nature

“One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it…. In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

Bombay Lectures (1955)

Imagination

“Erelong, he no more saw anything alone. — In great variegated images, the perceptions of his senses crowded round him; he heard, saw, touched and thought at once. He rejoiced to bring strangers together. Now the stars were men, now men were stars, the stones animals, the clouds plants; he sported with powers and appearances; he knew where and how this and that was to be found, to be brought into action; and so himself struck over the strings, for tones and touches of his own.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Pupils at Sais (1799)
Context: Over his own heart and his own thoughts he watched attentively. He knew not whither his longing was carrying him. As he grew up, he wandered far and wide; viewed other lands, other seas, new atmospheres, new rocks, unknown plants, animals, men; descended into caverns, saw how in courses and varying strata the edifice of the Earth was completed, and fashioned clay into strange figures of rocks. By and by, he came to find everywhere objects already known, but wonderfully mingled, united; and thus often extraordinary things came to shape in him. He soon became aware of combinations in all, of conjunctures, concurrences. Erelong, he no more saw anything alone. — In great variegated images, the perceptions of his senses crowded round him; he heard, saw, touched and thought at once. He rejoiced to bring strangers together. Now the stars were men, now men were stars, the stones animals, the clouds plants; he sported with powers and appearances; he knew where and how this and that was to be found, to be brought into action; and so himself struck over the strings, for tones and touches of his own.

Men, Star, Sense, Sport

“Enthusiasm is everything. It must be taut and vibrating like a guitar string.”

Pelé (1940–2022) Brazilian association football player

This quote waiting for review.

“Latin America’s right-wing has no shame in throwing itself at the highest bidder — their morals shift to match whoever’s holding the purse strings.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: 1480 AM Rock&Pop. Guadalajara, Mexico.

“I play until my fingertips are raw. Until I rip a nail and bleed on the strings. Until my hands hurt so bad I forget my heart does.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Heart, Hurt, Forgetting

“After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.”

Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance

Source: A Fine Balance

Life, Chance

“How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

Source: As I Lay Dying

Dead

“Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

V. The psychological working of Colour: Quoted in: Hajo Düchting (2000) Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944: A Revolution in Painting. p. 17
Alternative translation:
Colour is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hands which plays touching one key or another purposively to cause vibrations in the Soul; in: Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson, 1990
Source: 1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Soul

“Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.”

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

Source: The Wilderness World of John Muir

Life, Music

“At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: A History of Reading

Secret, Books, Universe, Childhood

“I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Smile

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.”

Mary Karr (1955) American writer

Source: Lit

“I am a kite in a tornado, but I have a long string.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Dreamfever

“But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Marriage

“What mattered most was knowing that love was mine to give, without strings or expectations.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Love

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

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

Source: 1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

Heart

“Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad…”

Jean Rhys book Good Morning, Midnight

Source: Good Morning, Midnight

Sadness

“I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Dance

“Knowing a person isn't like knowing a string of facts. It's more like… a feeling.”

Sophie Kinsella (1969) British writer

Source: The Wedding Girl

Feeling, Personality

“If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.”

Khaled Hosseini (1965) novelist

God, Pain

“Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.”

J. Maarten Troost (1969) American writer

Source: The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

Travel, Flying

“Sasori, your strength came because of your soul, not in spite of it… You were supposed to be a a top-class ninja puppeteer, not a worthless nobody who lets someone else pull the strings.
- Kankurou (Naruto Ch 518)”

Masashi Kishimoto book Naruto

Soul

“And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Renascence and Other Poems

Color, Sea

“It's fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Variant: It’s fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.
Source: City of Fallen Angels

Sense

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

Anniversary, Love

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.”

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

Life, World, Color, Mood

“The mother… swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Children, Angels, Time, Animals

“So that's who Finnick loves, I think. Not his string of fancy lovers in the Capitol. But a poor, mad girl back home.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Love, Home, Girl, Lovers

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in the preface of the book entitled Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie (1961)
The Golden Verses

Powerful, Music

“Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Confidence, Cooking

“Some men […] choose to seek greatness, while others are forced to it. It is always better to choose than to be forced.
A man who is forced is never completely his own master. He must dance on the strings of those who forced him.”

Robert Jordan The Great Hunt

Source: The Great Hunt

Men, Dance

“A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.”

Sam Harris book Free Will (book)

Source: Free Will

Love

“I excel at pulling strings!” said Arachne. “I’m a spider!”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

“History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Darkness That Comes Before

Source: The Darkness That Comes Before

Men, History, Thinking, Passion

“You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow. It's their finest hour. About five o'clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages.”

Tasha Tudor (1915–2008) American illustrator and writer

Source: The Private World of Tasha Tudor

Lie

“Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, pages 243-244
Source: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Life, God, Music, Tree

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Vijaya in Island (1962)

God

“God, as a loving Father, will stretch our souls at times. The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched…. God will tutor us by trying us because He loves us, not because of indifference!”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Love, God, Music, Soul

“Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

Goodbye, Past, Future

“hope is like a piece of string when you’re drowning; it just isn’t enough to get you out by itself.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Hope

“We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us--words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

Appearance

“And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.”

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Time

“Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Silence, Personality

“I wanted to tell him so. Find the right words, string them together in the ideal way, knowing that here they would have the best chance of sounding perfect.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Way, Chance, Perfection

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Feeling, Mountain, Learning, Happiness

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bomc,' I said. 'We have a protractor.'
Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Cord and Erasmas, Part 6, "Peregrin"
Source: Anathem (2008)
Context: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
“Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”
“That’d be great.”

Home

“We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Doctor Manhattan, in Watchmen #9 (referring to Doctor Manhattans's theory of time)

“We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

World, Way, Thinking

“Pull the string and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

“Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.”

Ann Brashares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Life, Truth, Perfection, Happiness

“My mother says men are different from us. She says we want to be in love, but only with the one we want; a man needs to be in love, but he will love the first woman to tie a string to his heart. - Egwene, speaking to Elayne”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Love, Men, Heart

“If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: The Tent

“It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

As quoted in The Social Dimensions Of Law And Justice In Contemporary India (1979) by V. R. Krishna Iyer
Context: It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. The fact that obedience is often a necessity in human society does not diminish our responsibility as citizens. Rather, it confers on us a special obligation to place in positions of authority those most likely to use it humanely. And people are inventive. The variety of political forms we have seen in history are only several of many possible political arrangements. Perhaps the next step is to invent and to explore political forms that will give conscience a better chance to resist errant authority.

“After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“Everything has two endings-
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.

Before a life, air.
And after.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.”

Jane Hirshfield (1953) Poet

Source: Come, Thief: Poems

Life, Silence, Horse

“There has been 32 isms since the advent of Cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

The Tigers Eye 1, Mark Tobey, 1952; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 103
1950's

Sex, Science, Parting

“Ah, deeply the Minstrel has felt all he sings,
Every passion he paints his own bosom has known;
No note of wild music is swept from the strings,
But first his own feelings have echoed the tone.”

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

(27th April 1822) The Poet
4th May 1822) Sappho see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Music, Feeling, Passion, Singing

“String 'em up and watch the piggies squeal!”

Patrick Allen (1927–2006) Film, television and voice actor

E4, Brat Camp USA' Trail

“And the world on a string doesn't mean a thing.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

World On A String
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

World

“On the rock stars: Rock stars don’t talk to each other. They’re too important to talk to another one. They’ve all got their own little palace, their own universe, of which they are the head. So how can they possibly go to somebody else’s universe? They can’t handle it. I will one day write the book that shows just how massive some of these egos are. Because I was a slow success, I was meeting people socially whose records I had at home, who were now talking to me on a what-strings-do-you-use level. And very few of them have not disappointed. [Pink Floyd’s] Dave Gilmour is the only one that [hasn’t disappointed]. That paints everyone else as a cunt. Which they are. But Gilmour is fabulous.”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

Henry Yates (2015 December 1) " An Interview With The Straight-Talking, No-F**ks-Given Chris Rea http://teamrock.com/feature/2015-12-01/chris-rea-straight-shooter" by TeamRock <br class="br">2015

People, Books, Disappointment, Home

“Themistocles said that he certainly could not make use of any stringed instrument; could only, were a small and obscure city put into his hands, make it great and glorious.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Themistocles

“The signs on Bell’s door read “J. Bell” and “M. Bell.” I knocked and was invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago. He has long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which give him a somewhat Shavian figura. On one wall of the office is a photograph of Bell with something that looks like a halo behind his head, and his expression in the photograph is mischievous. Theoretical physicists’ offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’ is somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had mastered it, and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me was the absence of Mary. “Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.” This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plaintively; “I need her. We are doing several problems together.” In recent years, the Bells have been studying new quantum mechanical effects that will become relevant for the generation of particle accelerators that will perhaps succeed the LEP. Bell began his career as a professional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary has spent her entire career in accelerator design. A couple of years ago Bell, like the rest of the members of CERN theory division, was asked to list his physics speciality. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division such as “super strings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s read “quantum engineering.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

Hope, Mathematics, Problem, Study

“The BEH mechanism operates within the context of gauge theories. Despite the fact that grand unification schemes reach scales comparable to the Planck scale, there was, a priori, no indication that Yang-Mills fields offer any insight into quantum gravity. The only approach to quantum gravity that had some success, in particular in the context of a quantum interpretation of the black hole entropies, are the superstring theory approaches and the possible merging of the five perturbative approaches (Type IIA, IIB, Type I and the two heterotic strings) into an elusive M-theory whose classical limit would be 11-dimensional supergravity.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

page 19 of [2002, A brief course in spontaneous symmetry breaking ii. modern times: The BEH mechanism, arXiv preprint hep-th/0203097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0203097.pdf]

Gauge, Success