Long Ago Quotes - Page 13

Not so long ago people believed in ideologies, systems, and institutions to save all societies. Today, they have given up such hopes and have returned to relying on the individual, on individual freedom, individual initiative, individual creativity.

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

If good preaching could save the world, it would have been done long ago.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

I was young not too long ago, and I know the last thing you want is someone preaching to you.

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

If someone with whom one is having an affair keeps on mentioning some woman whom he knew in the past, however long ago it is since they separated, one is always irritated.

Canada, having few indigenous prejudices, has been compelled to import them from elsewhere, duty-free, and it is the rare Canadian who is not shaken, at some time in the year, by "old, unhappy, far-off things / And battles long ago", like Wordsworth's solitary reaper. We are a nation of immigrants, and not happy in our minds.

Your mind must always go, even while you're shaking hands and going through all the maneuvers. I developed the ability long ago to do one thing while thinking about another.

I long ago learned that you can't expect people to interpret the songs in the way they had meant for you, as the writer.

We should feel dissonance; we are, after all, immortals trapped in mortal surroundings. We lack unity because long ago a gap fissured open between our mortal and immortal parts; theologians trace the fault line back to the Fall.

Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back to sanity.

Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

America's corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and is the right thing to do.

She heard the trace of fear in his voice. The fear that a small boy must have felt when every woman he loved had disappeared from his life, swept away by a merciless fever. She didn’t know how to reassure him, or how to console his long-ago grief.

Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.

I saw Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, which I thought was a masterpiece. Not that long ago, I listened to Blackstar by David Bowie and thought that was a masterpiece. Those are two incredibly talented people who've left their mark with us.

Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

I've long ago learned that if an idea will stand on its own, it'll stand having the light shone on it. But if you shine light on it and it kind of withers, then it probably wasn't a very good idea.

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

if i have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over - only living with the mistakes you've made. but then, caleb taught me long ago you can't build anything without some sort of foundation. maybe we learn to live our lives by understanding, firsthand, how not to live them.

Here and now was always where Tempus was, not off somewhere in the realm of Greater Good or Mortal Soul or Eternal Consequence. He'd lost the ability to determine greater good, if there was one; his mortal soul he'd given up on long ago. And as for eternal consequence - he was its embodiment.

Stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

We fully realize today that victory in war requires a mighty united effort. Certainly, victory in peace calls for, and must receive, an equal effort. Man has learned long ago, that it is impossible to live unto himself. This same basic principle applies today to nations. We were not isolated during the war. We dare not now become isolated in peace.