Fall Quotes - Page 287

Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.

I do not think you can fault Abraham Lincoln for picking generals that did not work out, because, as he said to John Hay when he went back to George B. McClellan in the fall of 62, we have to work with what we have.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly? ... wearying himself with climbing upon every ascent, ... bruising himself with continual falls, and at last breaking his neck? And all this, from an imagination that it would be glorious to have the eyes of people looking up at him, and mighty happy to eat, and drink, and sleep, at the top of the highest trees in the kingdom.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

I tell you, my fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.

I knew from the minute I saw her (Hillary) that if I got involved with her I would fall in love with her.

The world was held in a savage gloom - cold and intolerable. Outside, all was quiet - quiet! From the dark room behind me, came the occasional, soft thud of falling matter - fragments of rotting stone. So time passed, and night grasped the world, wrapping it in wrappings of impenetrable blackness.

Pride goes before a fall, they say, And yet we often find, The folks who throw all pride away Most often fall behind.

Paul was Nero's prisoner, but Nero was much more God's... But how does the great apostle spend his time in prison?... We read of no dispatches sent to court to procure his liberty; but many to the churches, to help them to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free... The devil had as good have let Paul alone, for he no sooner comes into prison but he falls a preaching, at which the gates of Satan's prison fly open, and poor sinners come forth.

The Forgotten Man... works, he votes, generally he prays-but he always pays-yes, above all, he pays. He does not want an office; his name never gets into the newspaper except when he gets married or dies. He keeps production going on.... He does not frequent the grocery or talk politics at the tavern. Consequently, he is forgotten.... All the burdens fall on him, or on her, for it is time to remember that the Forgotten Man is not seldom a woman.

He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.

One of the things I have taken for granted, in terms of how technology works in the world, is the people that develop it and get it out there don't really know what we are going to do with until we have really gotten ahold of it and it has become ubiquitous. And then we wind up doing things that its inventors never dreamed of and those things become the real change drivers. That is actually where the whole technocracy thing falls apart for me, because the people who invented it can't predict what we're going to do with it.

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?

Domestic happiness, thou only bliss Of paradise that has surviv'd the fall!

The fall of waters and the song of birds, And hills that echo to the distant berds, Are luxuries excelling all the glare The world can boast, and her chief favorites share.

All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.

It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity.

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.

I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.

When Jesus wept, the falling tear in mercy flowed beyond all bound; when Jesus groaned, a trembling fear seized all the guilty world around.