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1 " Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it’s only faith that gives love its strength and its joy. "
― Sergei Lukyanenko , Night Watch (Watch #1)
2 " I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds you together when nothing else can. "
― Jennifer Donnelly , Revolution
3 " Andrew Ross makes sense of this sad artifice [decreasing academic pay] by explaining that academics of all ranks, along with artists, are uniquely willing to tolerate exploitation in the workplace. Ross claims that scholars' readiness " to accept a discounted wage out of 'love for their subject' has helped not only to sustain the cheap labor supply but also to magnify its strength and volume. Like artists and performers, academics are inclined by training to sacrifice earnings for the opportunity to exercise their craft." (p. 64) "
4 " Awake! arise! the hour is late! Angels are knocking at thy door!They are in haste and cannot wait, And once departed come no more.Awake! arise! the athlete's arm Loses its strength by too much rest;The fallow land, the untilled farm Produces only weeds at best. "
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
5 " The onus on humanity is so great that we turn to love and kindness in order to survive. Love, therefore, is not fulfillment, but a lifetime support for the higher purposes that drive and mark our lives and make the world a better place. The soul derives its strength for pursuits and passion from the love it receives. "
6 " I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world. "
― Robin Hobb , Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)
7 " Wisdom is the spine of a business, money is its oxygen, and God is its strength and life. "
8 " In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen " Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me. "
9 " On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning. "
― Eudora Welty , On Writing
10 " A tree's beauty lies in its branches, but its strength lies in its roots. "
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11 " Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. "
― Sigmund Freud , New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
12 " Words need to be sown like seeds. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when in lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size. "
― Seneca , Letters from a Stoic
13 " Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new. "
― G.K. Chesterton , Saint Thomas Aquinas
14 " People say hate is like a poison — but they're wrong. It's like a drug. You never forget your first hit, how it seduces you with its strength and power, and takes you completely by storm. It colors your world in light and meaning, until you wonder how you ever managed to get by without it. And then, eventually, you get to a point where you can't. It takes over your life, until hating becomes your reason for living. "
― Nenia Campbell , Cease and Desist (The IMA, #4)
15 " The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'. "
― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion
16 " How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings was very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried. "
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
17 " After an eternity she tries to rise. When was it that she had slunk and crouched on the tiles like a haggard waif? Black crows fly down to feast on her eyes. Trembling, her body summons its strength to stand against the swirling mass around her. A long strand of hair falls across her face. She does not bother to brush it back. Instead it stays there like a fly stuck in ointment, strands glued to her tear stained face. Steadying herself on the kitchen bench she edges her way toward the sink to fill a glass of water. Breathe Lisa! Her troubled mind instructs. "
― Felicity Chapman , Connected
18 " Mental energy is powerful. Direct its strength towards our positive aspirations rather than empowering unsubstantiated fears. "
19 " The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence. "
― Alexis de Tocqueville , Democracy in America
20 " In almost every detail, when one examines it closely, it is not Democracy which makes the system work, but the Individual democrats who, in it, use their powers correctly and in the way that they were intended to be used. If those in power were not essentially democrats, the whole situation would collapse. Its strength is not in itself, but in its members. Any “say” that the citizen has in ruling himself is due to the goodwill and the honesty of those to whom he has entrusted the power to rule him. "
