a speck QUOTES

21 " Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.

('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980) "

― Mark Twain

22 " We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages. We now know that our universe or at least its most recent incarnation - is some fifteen or twenty billion years old. This is the time since a remarkable explosive event called the Big Bang. At the beginning of this universe, there were no galaxies, stars or planets, no life or civilizations, merely a uniform, radiant fireball filling all of space. The passage from the Chaos of the Big Bang to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transformation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse. And until we find more intelligent beings elsewhere, we are ourselves the most spectacular of all the transformations - the remote descendants of the Big Bang, dedicated to understanding and further transforming the Cosmos from which we spring "

― Carl Sagan , Cosmos

23 " If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a Christian that man was originally a speck of albumen, and passed through the stages of monads and monkeys, before he attained his present intellectual preeminence. If it be a received truth that the Creator has repeatedly interposed in the government of the universe and displayed his immediate agency in miraculous interpositions, it is an insult to any reader to tell him that the being slumbers on his throne and rules under a " primal arrangement in his counsels," and " by a code of laws of unbending operation. "

24 " On Loving a Stranger:Perhaps trying, despite it seeming too idealistic - to apply a speck of your imagination and generate 10 background stories a day about the people you meet - is what could help to see that it might be in fact one of the important things in life to care for. I am fully aware of how unnatural the task and believing in it could seem but my own experience has brought me to a point where i could defend this idea (and not merely an idea but also a posture in practise) tirelessly. having experienced the exuberance and richness that can be ones personal gain from looking behind facades, showing love where it's hardest to do (and yes, it can be incredibly difficult), has taught me that the task could be an incipient of ones own integral transfiguration in addition to a gentle move towards another. Remembering how undeserving we ourselves often are of this kind of gentleness (yet very much in need of, no matter what we think of ourselves or the world) makes it easier to sacrifice the time and patience to think in a considerate manner of another, even a stranger. I see this as one of the channels into the more unfathomable depths of life: every human being (i like to think that even a fragment of them) is a new story with thousands of nuances told by life itself. To see, behind hideous apperances, another human that is not too much different from ourselves may open us up to a closer understanding of other people, ourselves, situations and then help as obtain resilience useful in debilitating times. Love itself, this way, can turn into an inner resource, a little sun somewhere between your ribs, and if needed into a form of true fruitful rebellion. "

25 " I let my sword slip to the ground, and for the second time I stood unarmed in the presence of werewolves.

Kresh put his lips to my forehead, and my skin burned beneath his kiss. When his hands repositioned to take me by the waist, my breathing—already shallow—ceased entirely. Then his lips fell on mine and I was suddenly everything he claimed me to be—his mate, his wife, his world.

The taste of him seemed mysteriously new and old at the same time. Every bit of tension eased as if internally I had come home again, and yet a sense of foreignness made our connection a sweet venture. My breast was afire as he continued to grasp my hips, keeping me close. I burned for him as if vampire venom were coursing through every inch of me.

The man was a constellation of suns in my desire, unlike Thaddeus who hardly equaled a speck of stardust. The thought of that coward reminded me of grim news. It took every bit of willpower I possessed to tear my lips away from what they craved, and yet I remained a submissive puddle in this werewolf’s arms. "

― Richelle E. Goodrich ,

26 " This was all splendid stuff for Luciaphils; it was amazing how at a first glance she recognised everybody. The gallery, too, was full of dears and darlings of a few weeks' standing, and she completed a little dinner-party for next Tuesday long before she had made the circuit. All the time she kept Stephen by her side, looked over his catalogue, put a hand on his arm to direct his attention to some picture, took a speck of alien material off his sleeve, and all the time the entranced Adele felt increasingly certain that she had plumbed the depth of the adorable situation. Her sole anxiety was as to whether Stephen would plumb it too. He might--though he didn't look like it--welcome these little tokens of intimacy as indicating something more, and when they were alone attempt to kiss her, and that would ruin the whole exquisite design. Luckily his demeanour was not that of a favoured swain; it was, on the other hand, more the demeanour of a swain who feared to be favoured, and if that shy thing took fright, the situation would be equally ruined. . . . To think that the most perfect piece of Luciaphilism was dependent on the just perceptions of Stephen! As the three made their slow progress, listening to Lucia's brilliant identifications, Adele willed Stephen to understand; she projected a perfect torrent of suggestion towards his mind. He must, he should understand. . . .Fervent desire, so every psychist affirms, is never barren. It conveys something of its yearning to the consciousness to which it is directed, and there began to break on the dull male mind what had been so obvious to the finer feminine sense of Adele. Once again, and in the blaze of publicity, Lucia was full of touches and tweaks, and the significance of them dawned, like some pale, austere sunrise, on his darkened senses. The situation was revealed, and he saw it was one with which he could easily deal. His gloomy apprehensions brightened, and he perceived that there would be no need, when he went to stay at Riseholme next, to lock his bedroom-door, a practice which was abhorrent to him, for fear of fire suddenly breaking out in the house. Last night he had had a miserable dream about what had happened when he failed to lock his door at The Hurst, but now he dismissed its haunting. These little intimacies of Lucia's were purely a public performance." Lucia, we must be off," he said loudly and confidently. " Pepino will wonder where we are. "

27 " trailed off as her attention moved from Will taking his juice from the bartender to the glass behind the bartender. There were red dots on the glass. Alessandro brushed her shoulder again and Bree followed a row of red dots from the glass mirror to the wall. Some of the red dots danced over the guests and as an icy cloak of understanding fell over Bree, it seemed to grip Alessandro as well. Then she turned to face him and there were red dots on his chest, as well as her shoulder, which he had been brushing, thinking it was a speck of dust. “GET DOWN!” he screamed to everyone grabbing Bree by the waist and throwing her down while and trying to be heard over the music. Chaos erupted as gunfire drowned out the sound of music and people fell screaming on top of each other as pieces of the wall and glass from the doors and the mirrors rained down on them. The gunfire raged on and on for what seemed like an eternity. Then there was silence. "

― E. Jamie , The Betrayal (Blood Vows, #2)

28 " Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority. "

― Craig D. Lounsbrough

29 " It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. "

― Lauren Groff , Fates and Furies

30 " So, if you don't summon a book and a light before dawn,
If you don't set your mind on honest aims and pursuits,
On waking, you'll be tortured by envy or lust.
Why so quick to remove a speck from your eye, when
If it's your mind, you put off the cure till next year?
Who's started has half finished: dare to be wise: begin! "

― Horatius

31 " Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unneces "

32 " Because if indestructible is every atom of a speck of dust, so must be immortal the spirit of a man. And if every wave of the wind creates eternity, so must the consequences of our acts. So every one of us would leave on a big Hajj to our Creator. "

― , Роксоляна

33 " I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it. "

― Kathryn Stockett , The Help

34 " Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it. "

― Kathryn Stockett , The Help

35 " Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death. It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes. "

― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

36 " Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work. "

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