Quotes about use

page 14

“Midlife: when the Universe grabs your shoulders and tells you “I’m not f-ing around, use the gifts you were given.”

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

“The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”

“He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.”

“Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.”

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.”

“He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity.”

“Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.”

“If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach
them how to use television.”

“In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.”

“And my parents made me want i am. So what? We get stuff from our parents, but we also get stuff from the world around us. From people around us. And at the end of the day, we're us.”

“It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

“The thinking man must … oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. True manhood is too precious a spiritual good for us to surrender any part of it to thoughtlessness.”

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more, nor less.”

“Love people, not things; use things, not people.”

“We loved, sir — used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was —
But then, how it was sweet!”

“One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.”

“Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us.”

“Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces, and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours entirely.”

“Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”

“There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.”

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”

“Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

“The use of self control is like the use of brakes on train. It is useful when you find yourself in wrong direction but merely harmful when the direction is right”

“I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.”

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.”

“Let me try once more," Milo said in an effort to explain. "In other words--"
"You mean you have other words?" cried the bird happily. "Well, by all means, use them. You're certainly not doing very well with the ones you have now.”

“The demands of Jesus are difficult because they require us to do something extraordinary. At the same time He asks us to regard these [acts of goodness] as something usual, ordinary.”

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”

“The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”

“Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,
Help us to see
That without the dust the rainbow
Would not be.”

“I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.”

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

“They done
Wrong
Like ink from a busted pen
Thrown away 'cause of someone else
Used up
But he come back
Dressed in night
Fine as a king
With his queen
The wrong
Made right
So right.”

“Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.”

“If you want God to bless you and use you greatly, you must be willing to walk with a limp the rest of your life, because God uses weak people.”

“The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.”

“If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.”

“I have no way and therefore want no eyes
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen
our means secure us, and our mere defects
prove our commodities.”

“A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”

“Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.”

“It is no use trying to sum people up.”

“Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”

“I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.”

“Solemnity, I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor. It somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. The self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That's why they see it as a threat! And so, dishonestly, they pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial.”

“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”

“Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.”

“It does not follow, that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.”

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

“If the devil cannot make us bad, he will make us busy.”

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threating to destroy the Social and the Political fabric of America. The confidence that we have always had as a people, is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book, that we read, just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea of which founded our nation and has guided us in our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else. We've always believed in a thing called, progress. We've always had a faith, that the days of our children, would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith. Fopr the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe, that the next five years, will be worse than the past five years. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor, unitl the shock of Watergate. We've got to stop crying and start sweating. Stop talking and start walking. Working together, with our common faith, we cannot fail.”

“I love him wholly and unconditionally and without reservation. I love him enough to sacrifice a friendship. I love him enough to accept my own happiness and use it, in turn, to make him happy back.”

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.”

“Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose”

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

“Let us be elegant or die!”

“You, yes, you, linger inside my heart
The same you who stopped us before we could start.”

“Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.”

“The universe is always speaking to us…. Sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.”

“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”

“With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap”

“And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?”

“There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That's a good religion.”

“The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.”

“Here we are now, entertain us.”

“What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.”

“Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become.”

“We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.”

“Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

“So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.”

“He used to say to his melancholia patients:
"You can be cured in fourteen days if you follow this prescription. Try to think every day how you can please someone.”

“A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.”

“Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”

“A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”

“Not all nine-fingered girls have hatchets, she said in Tradertalk. Some of us just tried to have a conversation with a snapping turtle.

(Sandry to Daja, referring to her conversation with Tris.)”

“God save us from gloomy saints!”

“Now ain nobody tell us it would be fair no love for my father cause the coward wasn't their" {Tu Pac Shukur}”

“What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.”

“Nice dress Zoey. It looks just like mine. Oh, wait! It used to be mine.

Aphrodite laughed a throaty, I'm-so-grown-and-you're-just-a-kid laugh.

I really hate it when girls do that. I mean, yes, she's older, but I have boobs, too.”

“When a man says to me, 'Let us work together in the great cause you have undertaken, and let me be your companion and aid, for I admire you more than I have ever admired any other woman,' then I shall say, 'I am yours truly'; but he must ask me to be his equal, not his slave.”

“The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.”

“Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?”

“Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!”

“but i've slammed the door to my inner self; if he ever wants to force the lock again, he'll have to use a harder crowbar!”

“Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.”

“There's only us, there's only this / Forget regret, or life is yours to miss / No other road, no other way / No day but today!”

“My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

“I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”