Quotes about walking
page 18

Theodore L. Cuyler photo
Glenn Beck photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Bill Engvall photo
Stanley Holloway photo

“As Sergeant walks past he was swinging his arms,
And he happened to brush against Sam,
And knocking his musket clean out of his hand,
It fell to the ground with a slam”

Stanley Holloway (1890–1982) English stage and film actor, comedian, singer, poet and monologist

Sam, Sam, Pick Oop Tha' Musket

Ron Paul photo

“…a few years back, in the 1980s, in our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the world we assisted the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and in our infinite wisdom we gave money, technology and training to Bin Laden, and now, this very year, we have declared that Bin Laden was responsible for the bombing in Africa. So what is our response, because we allow our President to pursue war too easily? What was the President's response? Some even say that it might have been for other reasons than for national security reasons. So he goes off and bombs Afghanistan, and he goes off and bombs Sudan, and now the record shows that very likely the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was precisely that, a pharmaceutical plant… As my colleagues know, at the end of this bill I think we get a hint as to why we do not go to Rwanda for humanitarian reasons… I think it has something to do with money, and I think it has something to do with oil… they are asking to set up and check into the funds that Saddam Hussein owes to the west. Who is owed? They do not owe me any money. But I will bet my colleagues there is a lot of banks in New York who are owed a lot of money, and this is one of the goals…
Dana Rohrabacher: This resolution is exactly the right formula… Support democracy. Oppose tyranny. Oppose aggression and repression… We should strengthen the victims so they can defend themselves. These things are totally consistent with America's philosophy, and it is a pragmatic approach as well… Our support for the Mujahedin collapsed the Soviet Union. Yes, there was a price to pay, because after the Soviet Union collapsed, we walked away, and we did not support those elements in the Mujahedin who were somewhat in favor of the freedom and western values. With those people who oppose this effort of pro democracy foreign policy, a pro freedom foreign policy rather than isolation foreign policy, they would have had us stay out of that war in Afghanistan. They would never have had us confronting Soviet aggression in different parts of the world… Mr. Speaker, the gentleman does not think it is proper for us to offer those people who are struggling for freedoms in Iraq against their dictatorship a helping hand?
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I think it would be absolutely proper to do that, as long as it came out of the gentleman's wallet and we did not extract it from somebody in this country, a taxpayer at the point of a gun and say, look, bin Laden is a great guy. I want more of your money. That is what we did in the 1980s. That is what the Congress did. They went to the taxpayers, they put a gun to their head, and said, you pay up, because we think bin Laden is a freedom fighter.
Dana Rohrabacher: Well, if the gentleman will further yield, it was just not handled correctly.
Ron Paul: Mr. Speaker, again reclaiming my time, the policy is flawed. The policy is flawed.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Debate on the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, October 5, 1998 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec98/cr100598.htm
1990s

Gabriele Münter photo
Richard Hovey photo

“The great white cold walks abroad!”

Richard Hovey (1864–1900) American writer

"Dartmouth Winter-song", p. 80.
Along the Trail (1898)

Robert Barron (bishop) photo
Heinrich Himmler photo

“…the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Part 2 of 'The Face Of The Third Reich' by Joachim Fest (1999)
Undated
Variant: …the curse of the great to have to walk over corpses.

James Taylor photo
William McGonagall photo
Shimon Peres photo

“India represents the new world in a unique sense. Traditionally democracies were trying to bring equality to all walks of life, today there is a change. Democracy wants to enable every country to have the equal right to be different; it's a collection of differences, not an attempt to force or impose equality on every country. I think India is the greatest show of how so many differences in language, in sects can coexist facing great suffering and keeping full freedom… Many of the countries in the Middle East should learn from you how to escape poverty. You didn't escape poverty by getting American dollars or Russian Roubles but by introducing your own internal reforms and by understanding that the new call of modernity is science. In between the spiritual wealth of Gandhi and the earthly wisdom of Nehru, you combined a great performance of spirit and practice to escape poverty…I know you still have a long way to go but you do it without compromising freedom. The temptation when you're such a large country to introduce discipline and imposition is great but you tried to do it, to make progress not with force and discipline but in an open way. Many of us were educated on the literature of India when we fell in love we read Rabindranath Tagore and when we matured we tried to understand Gandhi.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

Israeli President Shimon Peres praises India as greatest 'show of co-existence' http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-04/news/35594466_1_greatest-show-mahatma-gandhi-democracies (4 December 2012)

Georgia O'Keeffe photo

“Today I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters —... But some way or other I didn't seem to like the redness much so after I mailed the letters I walked home — and kept walking - The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and some times sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it -. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at — the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon. Well I just sat there and had a great time by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind —... I wondered what you were doing - It is absurd the way I love this country — Then when I came back — it was funny — roads just shoot across blocks anywhere — all the houses looked alike — and I almost got lost — I had to laugh at myself — I couldn't tell which house was home - I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Canyon, Texas (September 11, 1916), pp. 183-184
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

John Fante photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Conor Oberst photo
Kanō Jigorō photo
Ayumi Hamasaki photo

“Who taught me true strength?
Who taught me kindness?
Whom do I walk for?
Who did I want to stroke my hair?
Who didn't give up for me?
I'll never forget.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Who...
Lyrics, Loveppears

Thomas Carlyle photo
James M. McPherson photo
George Bird Evans photo
Heidi Klum photo

“They're photographs by Adam Fuss. He's an artist. They are beautiful, artistic photos - more silhouettes than anything else. It's not like, "Hey, Mom and Dad are naked, come check it out!" But if I go to the bathroom and my kid walks in, I'm not going to be like, "Oh my God! Close the door!"”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

They see their parents naked all the time. We are not ashamed.
Admitting that there are nude photographs of herself and Seal hanging in their bedroom and bathroom. Quoted by Jennifer Weiner in InStyle, February 2010.

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“The march, as ever, is toward the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the better way!…”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

Anton Mauve photo

“.. the longer I am here Laren, the more beautiful it becomes for me and now that I feel myself more comfortable, I can judge it better... It is touching beautiful here [ Laren ], with a delicacy of lines and lovely poetry radiates from everywhere, interior houses, roads, fields, beautiful heath and bushes, and people are of the sweetest kind to imagine... Usually after dinner we make a little walk, what I enjoy a lot. I don't know how to say it, but I would like to live here for ever.”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, uit zijn brief:) ..hoe langer ik hier nl:Laren (Noord-Holland) ben, hoe mooijer het voor mij wordt en nu ik een beetje meer op mijn gemak kom, kan ik er beter over oordelen.. .'t Is aandoenlijk mooi hier, van een fijnheid van lijnen en lieflijke poëzie straalt alles uit, binnenhuizen, wegen, akkers, prachtige heide en boschjes en de menschen is van het liefste soort dat te bedenken is.. .Wij maken doorgaans na den eten een loopje en wat ik geniet. Ik kan het niet zeggen maar ik zou hier altijd willen wonen.
Quote of Mauve in a letter, Juin 1882 to his wife Jet Carbentus; Mauve Archive of RKD, Den Haag
1880's

Simone de Beauvoir photo

“They were walking side by side, but each was alone.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Raimon to Regina, p. 53
All Men are Mortal (1946)

Michelle Obama photo
Samuel R. Delany photo
Warren Zevon photo

“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for a place called Le Ho Fooks.
Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein.”

Warren Zevon (1947–2003) American singer-songwriter

"Werewolves of London", written by Warren Zevon, LeRoy Marinell, and Waddy Wachtel; this was voted best opening line of all time in a BBC radio poll
Excitable Boy (1978)

Beck photo

“When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.”

First line. "Jones packs a hell of a lot into that first line. He tells you it's summer, he tells you it's morning, he tells you you're on an Army post with a soldier who's obviously leaving for someplace, and he gives you a thumbnail description of his hero. That's a good opening line." ~ Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) in Killer's Payoff (1958)
From Here to Eternity (1951)

Geert Wilders photo

“Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Wilders: get rid of half of Koran!, Expatica, 2007-02-13, 2008-03-24, Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/20070514083622/http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=1&story_id=36456,
2000s

Lawrence M. Schoen photo

““You didn’t do any of these things because they were necessarily good unto themselves, but because you saw them as means to shape events to serve your own ends. The entire legacy of the Matriarch is the exploitation of others like pieces in some great game.”
She laughed in his face. “You can see it that way if you like. The weak usually do, if they see it at all. But you disappoint me. Despite your study of history, you fail to understand power. It’s obvious you never will… There’s really only one choice you ever have to make in any act of creation. Will you be the instrument or the artist? If you’re only now coming to realize that you’ve been a tool all your life, there’s no one to blame for it but yourself. If you don’t like that state of affairs, then act! Impose your will upon the world and walk your own path. If you don’t, you’ll just end up being a token in someone else’s game; you’ll continue to be used as they see fit. That’s how the universe works. You don’t have to like it, but you’d do well to get used to it.”…
“No, maybe that’s the way the world looks once you’ve already decided to take your path. Or maybe it’s just you’re so jaded, or you’ve bought into your own delusions. I don’t know which, and I don’t care. Those aren’t the only choices: use of be used. There is more than being tyrant or servant. I reject both options and I reject you. You’ve been dead for centuries, Margda, it’s about time you accepted that.””

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 38, “Loose Ends” (pp. 362-363; ellipses represent elisions of descriptive sections)

Neamat Imam photo
James Thomas Fields photo

“Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch,
The owl very gravely got down from his perch,
Walked round, and regarded his fault-finding critic
(Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic.”

James Thomas Fields (1817–1881) American writer and publisher

The Owl-Critic, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Thomas Hood photo
Charlie Brooker photo
Anand Patwardhan photo
Roberto Clemente photo
John Burroughs photo
Karl Pilkington photo

“I was walking past a sex shop an' that. One, it was open early which I never understood, it was about eight o'clock in the morning. Who needs butt plugs then?”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 1 Episode 2
On Sex

Mickey Spillane photo
Craig Ferguson photo

“[to camera] Excuse me for just a second. [walks off-camera, to studio audience] Shut up!”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

2009-05-15 broadcast
The audience had collectively went "Aw…", expressing disappointment.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–2014)

Carlos Drummond de Andrade photo

“p>I'm making a song
where my mother and all mothers
will see themselves mirrored,
a song that speaks like two eyes.I'm walking on a road
that runs through many countries.
They may not see me, but I see
and salute old friends.I'm spreading a secret
like a man who loves or smiles.
Affection seeks affection
in the most natural way.My life, our lives,
form a single diamond.
I've learned new words
and made others more beautiful.I'm making a song
for waking up men
and putting children to sleep.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

<p>Eu preparo uma canção
em que minha mãe se reconheça,
todas as mães se reconheçam,
e que fale como dois olhos.</p><p>Caminho por uma rua
que passa em muitos países.
Se não me vêem, eu vejo
e saúdo velhos amigos.</p><p>Eu distribuo um segredo
como quem ama ou sorri.
No jeito mais natural
dois carinhos se procuram.</p><p>Minha vida, nossas vidas
formam um só diamante.
Aprendi novas palavras
e tornei outras mais belas.</p><p>Eu preparo uma canção
que faça acordar os homens
e adormecer as crianças.</p>
"Canção amiga" ["I'm Making a Song"]
Novos Poemas [New Poems] (1948)

David Bowie photo
Jim Morrison photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Harper Lee photo

“Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf.”

Harper Lee (1926–2016) American author

On why she has done her best creative thinking while playing golf, as quoted in Time (12 May 1980)

Jean Ingelow photo

“Man dwells apart, though not alone,
He walks among his peers unread;
The best of thoughts which he hath known
For lack of listeners are not said.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

"Afterthought", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Yoko Ono photo

“John and I felt that we were like people in an H. G. Wells story. Two people who are walking so fast that nobody else can see them.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

25 Things Even My Best Friends Didn’t Know Until Now (1 October 2009) http://imaginepeace.com/news/archives/5865

Dylan Moran photo
David Puttnam photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Logan Pearsall Smith photo

“When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, Idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

Other People.
Afterthoughts (1931)

Prem Rawat photo
Michelle Obama photo
Adrianne Wadewitz photo

“Archivists take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. You think there's a troll behind the screen and don't know what's going on, what's the accountability. She walked us through this great unknown, Wikipedia land. She put us at ease.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Liza Posas, Austry National Center librarian and archivist — quoted in: **Woo, Elaine (April 23, 2014). "Adrianne Wadewitz dies at 37; helped diversify Wikipedia" http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-adrianne-wadewitz-20140424,0,1077455.story. Los Angeles Times.
About

Donald J. Trump photo
Thomas M. Disch photo
Nancy Grace photo

“On the second Michael Jackson trial, speaking on "Larry King Live," CNN, Feb. 21, 2003: "But I'm telling you, this boy, two-thirds of this can be corroborated by other people. So why would he lie about the molestation part? It is in graphic detail. It just seems true… I think Michael Jackson walks. And I think it's a disgrace. He's guilty."”

Nancy Grace (1959) American legal commentator, television host, television journalist, and former prosecutor

"Larry King Live", CNN (Feb. 21, 2003), reported in " Jacko Not Guilty: Past Predictions https://web.archive.org/web/20061115152018/http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/court_cases/jacko_not_guilty_past_predictions_22555.asp", TVNewser.com (June 14, 2006).

W. Somerset Maugham photo

“No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk—handsome, twentytwoyearold.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Cloud in Trousers
Misattributed

Joshua Radin photo
Rollo May photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo

“This is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner. By its use the thousand abilities Man has sought to recover become his once more.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

On Scientology in Scientology: A History Of Man (1952).

Paul Bourget photo

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Stevie Nicks photo

“No one knows how I feel,
What I say unless you read between my lines,
One man walked away from me
First he took my hand, take me home.”

Stevie Nicks (1948) American singer and songwriter, member of Fleetwood Mac

Stand Back
The Wild Heart (1983)

Carole King photo
Anastacia photo
Truman Capote photo
Eric Foner photo

“South Carolina led the southern walk-out from the 1948 Democratic National Convention.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

As quoted in "The Historical Roots of Dylann Roof's Racism: South Carolina’s warped public display of its white-supremacist history confronts South Carolinians, white and black, with a stark message about who rules the state" http://www.thenation.com/article/210817/historical-roots-dylann-roofs-racism# (25 June 2015), The Nation
2010s

Gaurav Sharma (author) photo
Franz Halder photo
George Gordon Byron photo

“She walks the waters like a thing of life,
And seems to dare the elements to strife.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Canto I, stanza 3.
The Corsair (1814)

Sania Mirza photo
William James photo

“How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. …But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297. Also as quoted partially by Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925) p. 2.
1890s

Roger Moore photo

“I played it slightly tongue-in-cheek because I never quite believed that James Bond was a spy because everybody knew him, they all knew what he drank. He’d walk into a bar and it would always be, "Ah, Commander Bond, martini, shaken not stirred."”

Roger Moore (1927–2017) British actor

Spies are faceless people.
Roger Moore interview: 'I was never very confident with girls' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/roger-moore-interview-never-confident-girls/ (22 November 2016)

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Marc Chagall photo
Gene Wolfe photo

“You have a walking stick. Suppose it could walk by itself, and that it chose to walk away from you. […] It would no longer be a walking stick at all, only a stick that walked.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 3, Ch. 13
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

Margaret Cho photo
Pat Conroy photo
Bill Hybels photo
Neil Young photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
Fred Shero photo

“Win together today and we walk together forever”

Fred Shero (1925–1990) Former ice hockey player and coach

Message Shero wrote on the team's blackboard prior to Game 6 of the 1974 Stanley Cup Finals
Flyers Hall of Fame Profile, Flyers History, 2009-04-29 http://www.flyershistory.net/cgi-bin/hofprof.cgi?007,

Edgar Degas photo

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker’s dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 246-247

William S. Burroughs photo