A Quote by Charles Horton Cooley

To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.

Charles Horton Cooley

Quote Topics

Ambition Escape Monastery Retire Sea Sharp Spur Suggestions Woods

Quote Author

Charles Horton Cooley
American - Sociologist
1866 - 1928

The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only — a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

Walter Lippmann

Bravery is often too sharp a spur.

Lajos Kossuth

There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.

Evan Osnos

The woods are never solitary — they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery — we may only wander, awed and spellbound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only — a mighty voice.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lust is a sharp spur to vice, which always putteth the affections into a false gallop.

Francis Quarles

Let love lead your soul. Make it a place to retire to, a kind of monastery cave, a retreat for the deepest core of your being.

Farid al-Din Attar

I have hardly begun to live on Staten Island yet; but, like the man who, when forbidden to tread on English ground, carried Scottish ground in his boots, I carry Concord ground in my boots and in my hat,--and am I not made of Concord dust? I cannot realize that it is the roar of the sea I hear now, and not the wind in Walden woods. I find more of Concord, after all, in the prospect of the sea, beyond Sandy Hook, than in the fields and woods.

Henry David Thoreau

Faced with today's problems and disappointments , many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.

Pope John Paul II

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

Alan Furst

Maybe wanting to retire is my ambition.

Brenda Blethyn

It is only too easy to make suggestions and later try to escape the consequences of what we say.

Jawaharlal Nehru

In our own case, we don't consider the loss of a monastery or a monument the end of our entire way of life. If one monastery is destroyed, sometimes it happens.

Dalai Lama

It is not bad living in a monastery. I've done it many times in many lives. But I think you can do a better job outside the monastery, if you have the necessary component parts.

Frederick Lenz

You might say living in a monastery cuts down the commutation time. That alone gives you a couple extra hours a day to meditate. In a monastery you lead a relatively simply life. You don't need a lot of possessions.

Frederick Lenz

People say, 'Oh, so you should retire.' Yeah, you want me to retire so you won't get knocked out. I won't retire.