Popular quotes about Centuries! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 16
It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.
Kim StanleyThere was an ape in the days that were earlier, Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist โ Then he was a Man and a Positivist.
Mortimer CollinsA Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
Frances MayesIt is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.
George EliotThey [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?
Umberto EcoThe effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.
Harold InnisAnd the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
Cormac McCarthyAnti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries. A book I had, written by Dr. Martin Luther, was, for instance, confiscated. Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants' dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the Prosecution.
Julius StreicherThe slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.
Wendy LesserThe symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is imbedded in the [occult] traditions of every culture...the structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals...the UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the [occult] entities that were described in centuries past.
Jacques ValleeIt's all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century can't possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries haven't got a Common Denominator. They have. It's Human Nature.
Frederick RolfeWhy do I wear tennis shoes? That's two questions. Do I wear tennis shoes? The answer to that question is, "Yes." "Why?" That's a question philosophers have been pondering for centuries.
Irwin CoreyYour being alone is important and has validity beyond any philosophy. That is the message that you are trying to give to yourself. You are each trying to rediscover for yourselves, in your terms now - after centuries of myths and distortions - the validity of your own beings.
SethI'm sympathetic to the people who go, "Whoa, we'd like to have the benevolent, wise dictator. It will all work much more efficiently," but the reason that we remain staunch democrats - with a small d - is it's a decades long, it's a centuries long, it's a country long process for being inclusive.
Reid HoffmanTrue science is at length disencumbered of the empirical determinations which had accumulated in the course of many centuries.
Franz CumontUntil then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto EcoBread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.
Margaret VisserThe processes of secularization that followed in the wake of the Reformation continue to work themselves out in complicated ways, not only in Europe but also in North America. To make a very long and complex story short, the success of the Reformation combined with the persistence and renewal of Roman Catholicism in the 16th and 17th centuries made Christianity into an enduring, disruptive problem in new ways, layered on top of problems that already affected late medieval Christianity.
Brad Stephan GregoryIf history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Howard ZinnWell, what are we waiting for? ...She said 'children.' I bet that's anyone under a couple of centuries old. Let's go.
Donita K. PaulTo be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
Richard DawkinsThe two sides that fought in World War I lived in the same century but in different places. The same is true for World War II. In World War III, both sides are almost everywhere, but they live in different centuries.
Haim HarariMany great people over the centuries have depended on their faith- it is a sign of great strength to need Jesus in your life.
Bear GryllsWomen have for centuries been recognized as talented listeners, nurturers, motivators, excellent communicators. These very qualities that we once were told were unbusinesslike are precisely the qualities that business needs most to tap human potential.
Mary Cunningham AgeeTo the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.
Thomas CarlylePhilosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over the morality of targeted assassinations - a technique that the Israelis use with some frequency - without ever reaching anything approaching consensus.
Eric AltermanSince Christ is the only way to the Father, in order to highlight His living and saving presence in the Church and the world, the International Eucharistic Congress will take place in Rome, on the occasion of the Great Jubilee. The Year 2000 will be intensely Eucharistic: in the Sacrament of the Eucharist the Savior, who took flesh in Mary's womb twenty centuries ago, continues to offer Himself to humanity as the source of Divine Life
Pope John Paul IIWhen we used to play, we thought no one can break Sunil Gavaskar's record. No one could think about 50 Test centuries at that time. This is certainly a big knock under the circumstances, better than the 200s and 300s.
Kapil DevIf memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.
Takeshi KaneshiroAs a great man's influence never ends, so also there is not definite finality, no end, to a great survey; it runs along for centuries, ever responsive to the strain of the increasing needs of a growing population and an enlarging domain.
Cleveland AbbeWe cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.
Allen W. WoodEach period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.
Wassily KandinskyAnd this is why studying the history of psi is important. People have been reporting these phenomena for millennia and studying them for centuries. Human experiences that continue to be repeated throughout history and across cultures, are not due to ignorance or lack of critical thinking, and demand a serious explanation.
Dean RadinThe Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll.
Benjamin DisraeliAncient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.
Tom HiddlestonIt is the same India which has withstood the shocks of centuries, of hundreds of foreign invasions of hundreds of upheavals of manners and customs. It is the same land which stands firmer than any rock in the world, with its undying vigour, indestructible life. Its life is of the same nature as the soul, without beginning and without end, immortal; and we are the children of such a country.
Swami VivekanandaI spent centuries I your arms. This time our joining will be controlled by me, and you will revel in the pleasure I can bring you. Throw off the shackles of your distant goddess and come to me. Be my love, truly, in body as well as soul and I will give you the world!
P. C. CastAs the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.
Anne RiceA fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries; a principle, forever.
William George JordanSome people ask: "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general-but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieWithout pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.
John GreenI love to disturb people, because only by disturbing them you can make them think. They have stopped thinking for centuries. Nobody has been there to disturb them. People have been consoling them. I am not going to console anybody... Because the more you console them, the more retarded they remain. Shog them, hit them hard, give them challenge. That challenge will bring their full capacities to the climax.
RajneeshVision is perhaps our greatest strength.. it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.
Li Ka-shing