A Quote by John Irving

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

John Irving

Quote Topics

Civilization Disagreeable Endings Infinity Last Perception Succession Tell Toward Twenty Will Years

Quote Author

John Irving
American - Novelist
Born: March 2, 1942

The last, best fruit which comes to late perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, philanthropy toward the misanthropic.

Jean Paul

At last, Mythic feeling and conscious perception no longer confront each other as antagonists but as allies. Passionate nationalism is no longer directed toward tribal, dynastic or theological loyalties, but toward that primal substance, the racially based nationhood itself. Here is the message which will one day melt away all dross, eliminate all that is base, and bring into being all that is noble.

Alfred Rosenberg

As you begin to feel this enormous shift of consciousness, called multisensory perception, emerging in your awareness, you begin to reorient yourself. It's a reorientation that occurs toward yourself as more than a mind and a body; it's a reorientation that occurs toward others; toward your life as meaningful, rather than predetermined. It's a reorientation that occurs toward the universe as alive, wise and compassionate, instead of inert (which means dead) and random.

Gary Zukav

If you are fully aligned with your soul it will be your pleasure, your joy to always move toward cooperation, toward sharing, toward reverence for life. You will not be torn.

Gary Zukav

The human field of perception is not the only band of perception. Nor is it necessarily the best; there is no such thing in infinity. Infinity does not label.

Frederick Lenz

I had a map on my wall that had a circle around Lubbock and then giant arrows pointing toward New York City and Los Angeles. Written across both arrows were the words 'Toward Civilization.' Of course, by the time I got to New York, I realized there really isn't any civilization.

Barry Corbin

You can't just go careening toward your idea without checking in with customers and people who might use it and making sure you're on to something.

Andy Jassy

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

D. A. Carson

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

Oriana Fallaci

New approaches are needed, new orientations in both thought and action. We must make the transition to a new civilization...We are talking of a transition toward a new civilization. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction... I am convinced that a new civilization will inevitably take on certain features that are characteristic of, or inherent in, the socialist ideal.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Daniel Barenboim

I've been in China enough to know that you shouldn't opine on it unless you speak Chinese and have lived there for twenty years. I wasn't pretending to be a China expert in that final chapter. I was just pointing, first to the parallels between Chinese behavior toward us and ours toward GB when we were at the same stage of development, and secondly to how much harder their development path is than ours was.

Charles R. Morris

We must move from ... the primacy of technology toward considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of organizational convenience toward the aspirations ofself realization and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and self~fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in itself.

Warren G. Bennis

A gentleman has his eyes on all those present; he is tender toward the bashful, gentle toward the distant, and merciful toward the absent.

Lawrence G. Lovasik

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.