How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.
Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness.
Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
A salesman called on my wife the other day and tried to sell her a freezer. You'll save a fortune on your food bills, he promised. I can't tell you how much you'll save. It'll be tremendous. Said my wife: I'm sure you're right, but we're already saving a fortune with our new car by not taking the bus. We're saving a fortune with our new washing machine by not sending out the laundry. We're saving a fortune with our new dishwasher by giving up the maid. The plain truth is that right now we just can't afford to save any more!
The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else.
I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.
nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.
Firemen don't talk about whether a burning warehouse is worth saving.
We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.
Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.
If you can't save your own life, is it even worth saving?
The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving.
We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN
For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.
Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.
Sometimes I wonder if there is really goodwill in the world to worry about saving human beings, or whether we are just using that as camouflage for our own interests, the self-centered drive for more profits.