Top 874 Rocks Quotes & Sayings - Page 13

The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself - In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable sdvice.

To me, you can't win. You can't win. There's a war in Iraq; there's no way that they're ending that. The war in Afghanistan is still going on. There's no way that's going to end anytime soon. You can complain about it, you can throw rocks at it, but you really have to come to the conclusion that this is a really twisted place sometimes and some stuff you're not going to win.

Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

The skin of the coward changes color all the time, he can't get a grip on himself, he can't sit still, he squats and rocks, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his heart racing, pounding inside the fellow's ribs, his teeth chattering. He dreads some grisly death. But the skin of a brave soldier never blanches. He's all control. Tense but no great fear.

I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.

The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?

Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw nothing but the sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned into the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before.

Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.

There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. If there is a river or fjord to cross (and we shall meet with many) you will see him plunge in at once, just as if he were amphibious, and gain the opposite bank.

Kansas has always considered itself a "rock band" - some people might say "symphonic rock band," others might say a "classical rock band," but we've kind've prided ourselves on being a rock band. Kansas rocks.

Oh! now to be alone, on some grand height, Where heaven’s black curtains shadow all the sight, And watch the swollen clouds their bosom clash, While fleet and far the living lightnings flash... And see the fiery arrows fall and rise, In dizzy chase along the rattling skies,— How stirs the spirit while the echoes roll, And God, in thunder, rocks from pole to pole!

The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you'd be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

As for myself, I do not believe in loggers, I believe in trees. I do not believe in fishermen, I believe in fish. I do not believe in miners, I believe in the rocks beneath my feet. I do not believe in pie in the sky spirituality, I believe in rainbows, rivers, mountains, and moss. I do not believe in environmentalists, I believe in the environment. I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her, those parasites who believe the Earth is here to serve human interests.

Each petty hand Can steer a ship becalm'd; but he that will Govern and carry her to her ends, must know His tides, his currents, how to shift his sails; What she will bear in foul, what in fair weathers; Where her springs are, her leaks, and how to stop 'em; What strands, what shelves, what rocks do threaten her.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

I think there are very few invisible musical instrument players out there who can claim the chops and sheer perseverance of Björn Türoque, the world's perennial second-place air guitar champion. Whoever this Dan Crane might be, he's captured the mad, seductive spirit of the arbitrary skill contest perfectly, and rocks it hard into the hot Finnish night. There is no number of umlauts that do this Jekyll and Hyde of air-rocking justice.

Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.

Millions of Americans would still despair in the eight long years of the Depression that lay ahead and many of their individual dreams would be dashed on the rocks of economic hardship. But collectively, the country was in a new place, with a new confidence that the federal government would actively try to solve problems rather than fiddle or cater to the rich. Hope was no longer for Pollyannas; the cynics about the American system were in retreat.

God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven.

However patriarchal the world, at home the child knows that his mother is the source of all power. The hand that rocks the cradlerules his world. . . . The son never forgets that he owes his life to his mother, not just the creation of it but the maintenance of it, and that he owes her a debt he cannot conceivably repay, but which she may call in at any time.

There are qualities which grow as meditation deepens. For example, you start feeling loving for no reason at all. Not the love that you know, in which you have to fall-not falling in love. But just a quality of lovingness, not only to human beings. As your meditation deepens, your lovingness will start spreading beyond humanity to animals, to trees, even to the rocks, to the mountains.

I love playing the Hard Rocks; they've got a great stage, great lighting, great sound, and not so humongous; its more intimate, so we love playing theaters and clubs where the audience has a really good chance to see and hear the group and where the acoustics are good. I like it when we can hear what we're doing.

Devoutly the teachers point out huge fumigated domes; but beneath the statues there's no love, no love beneath the eyes set in crystal. Love is there, in flesh ripped by thirst, in the tiny hut struggling against the flood; love is there, in ditches where snakes of hunger wrestle, in the sad sea that rocks dead gulls, and in the darkest stinging kiss under pillows.

Octavia Spencer rocks. But just as a human being, she's so down-to-earth. Talk about being pleasantly surprised. You walk onto set, and she's making these jokes, and she's playing around with the cast and the crew, and she invited all to her house for a dinner party. She's just a genuinely good person.

If our rocks, our homes, our streets are our heritage... our Pol is our heritage, then the lifestyle that has emerged over time...that also is our heritage and that itself...is our soul. And it is this soul that connects us.

On Leven's banks, while free to rove, And tune the rural pipe to love, I envied not the happiest swain That ever trod the Arcadian plain. Pure stream! in whose transparent wave My youthful limbs I wont to lave; No torrents stain thy limpid source, No rocks impede thy dimpling course, That sweetly warbles o'er its bed, With white, round, polish'd pebbles spread.

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it's going to be, I don't know. Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn't the point. Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?

I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience. To enveigh against things that are past and irremediable, is unpleasing; but to steer clear of the shelves and rocks we have struck upon, is the part of wisdom, equally as incumbent on political as other men, who have their own little bark, or that of others, to navigate through the intricate paths of life, or the trackless ocean, to the haven of security and rest.

Ancient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric.

'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, and makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile... 'Tis Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate, and hold in balance each contending state, To threaten bold presumptuous kings with war, and answer her afflicted neighbours' prayer... Soon as her fleets appear their terrors cease.

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?

True beauty, the kind that doesn't fade or wash off, takes time. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that creates the stalactite, the shaking of the Earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that breaks up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would have otherwise never existed.

And there's a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don't grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don't grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you've done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.

By `God` I mean godliness; the whole existence is full of godliness. And when you will come to know, you will not see a god standing before you, you will see the trees as divine, the rocks as divine, the people as divine, the animals as divine. God is spread all over the place, from the pebble to the star, from the blade of grass to the sun - it is all divine.

No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;-it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;-and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, through the miracle of creation. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to belief in miracle, or to something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science.

At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell?divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and eveningApollo and the sweet Muses of the Light? You enterprised a railroad?you blasted its rocks away? And, now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

It's a funny thing about bogs. You can fill them with rocks and sand and old logs and make a little fenced-in yard on top with a woodpile and chopping block - but bogs go right on behaving like bogs. Early in the spring they breathe ice and make their own mist, in remembrance of the time when they had black water and their own sedge blossoming untouched.

We'll get to the details of what's around here, but it looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape - angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock.... The colors - well.... There doesn't appear to be too much of a general color at all; however, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders are going to have some interesting colors to them. Over.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

So death obscures your gentle form, So memory strives to make the darkness bright; And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies, Part of the island till the planet ends, My gentle comrade, beautiful and wise, Part of this crag this bitter surge offends, While I, who pass, a little obscure thing, War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.

The world was so beautiful when regarded like this, without searching, so simply, in such a childlike way. Moons and stas were beautiful, beautiful were bank and stream, forest and rocks, goat and gold-bug, flower and butterfly. So lovely, so delightful to go through the world this way, so like a child, awake, open to what is near, without distrust.

No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life...Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: Their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light.

I didn’t fall in love with James. Falling sounds like an accident. Falling hurts. I’d fallen in love with Michael, fallen hard like slipping off a cliff and hitting the rocks below. Falling in love was something I’d vowed never to do again. I chose to love James.

Water is patient; it can stagnate and let itself be coated with scum if need be. It is as gentle as the morning's dew. It is non-confrontational, even respectful, in circumventing the rocks in a stream. It makes room for everything that enters its pools. It accommodates by assuming the shape of any vessel it is poured into. And it is humble, seeking always the lowest level. Yet along with - or rather because of these adaptive, yielding properties, it is ultimately irresistible; it carves canyons out of stone.

Don't stop. Keep right on going. Hitch up your trailer and go to Canada or down to Old Mexico. Head for Europe if you can afford it, or go to Mardi Gras. Go someplace you've heard about, where you can fish or hunt or collect rocks or just look up at the sky. Find out what's at the end of some country road. Go see what's over the next hill, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Mothers are the rocks of our families and a foundation in our communities. In gratitude for their generous love, patient counsel, and lifelong support, let us pay respect to the women who carry out the hard work of motherhood with skill and grace, and let us remember those mothers who, though no longer with us, inspire us still.

Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!

Teenagers are bored. By everything. Show a teenager an actual volcanic eruption, in progress, featuring giant billowing clouds of smoke, hot rocks raining from the sky, lava floes destroying entire villages, etc., and the teenager, eyebrows arched with sarcasm, will look at you and say, "Gee, this is swell," then return to the rental car, turn on his portable CD player, and listen to a band called Stomach Contents.

What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.'