seizes QUOTES

1 " The wide awake man seizes opportunities or makes them, and thus those who are widest awake usually come to the front. "

― Charles Haddon Spurgeon

2 " ... but happiness is to joy as an electric light bulb is to the sun. Happiness always has an object, you're happy because of something, it's a condition whose existence depends on external things. Joy, on the other hand, has no object. It seizes you for no apparent reason, it's like the sun, its burning is fueled by its own heart. "

― Susanna Tamaro , Follow Your Heart

3 " The Prophecy:" The Chosen one possesses a giftThat Lucempest needs in order to make a shift.To provide pure sacred lifeAs a concession for his land's strife.If the human soloth seizes wrathThis will be the altercation restraining Lucempest fromlaunching on his wicked path.If the Chosen One learns the way,He will prevent his land from having a great debt to pay.When Ira (wrath) vanishes from Lucempest's landHealing will ensue as a component of the great plan.If Lucempest prevails in acquiring his blood as a giftIt will be the beginning of a vast rift.He will offer the Chosen One's blood to the treeWhich will allow him control, and no land to be free.If The Chosen One prevailsThe tree will offer wisdom, and Lucempest will fail.There are sextet other saligias to remove.Avarita (greed), Acedia (sloth), Superbia (pride), Luxuria (lust), Invidia (envy), and Gula (gluttony) in order to improve.These septet saligias must be replaced with septet giftsSapientia (wisdom), Intellectus (understanding), Consilio (council), Fortitudo (fortitude), Scientia (knowledge), Pietas (piety), and Timor Domini (wonder and awe), in order to create vital shifts. "

4 " Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not "

― John Keats

5 " Beauty catches your eye, joy seizes your heart, and love captures your soul. "

―

6 " Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. "

― C.G. Jung

7 " By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified - a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously? Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. The call it 'vipassana vendetta'. In the stillness tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually - but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep "

― Oliver Burkeman , The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

8 " Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me. "

― George Orwell , 1984

9 " We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. "

― George Orwell , 1984

10 " Our life is like a journey…’ – and so the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle, member of a family and clan and entangled by professional duties, by the habits of an ‘everyday life’ woven from all these circumstances, we often feel too secure, believing our house built for all the future, easily induced to believe in a constancy that makes ageing a problem for one person and each change in external circumstances a catastrophe for another. We forget that this is a process, that the earth is in constant motion and that we too are affected by ebbs and tides, earthquakes and events far beyond our visible and tangible spheres: beggars, kings, figures in the same great game. We forget it for our would-be peace of mind, which then is built on shifting sand. We forget it so as not to fear. And fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands and what affects us directly, denying the force of the fire that’s sweeping our neighbour’s house, but not yet ours. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid – the horror that sometimes seizes us, you feel it too when reading history books, time or space, it doesn’t matter what lies between us and it.
But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space – and a city with a magical, unreal name, Samarkand the Golden, Astrakhan or Isfahan, City of Rose Attar, becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath. "

― Annemarie Schwarzenbach , All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey

11 " Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all. "

― Terry Eagleton , How to Read Literature

12 " His mouth seizes mine. Consuming me. Devouring me. My body moves against his. Harder. Faster. Take me. Take all of me… "

13 " A writer seizes every opportunity to wonder. "

14 " The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: " Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat. "

15 " There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have, Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive. "

― Robin Hobb , Fool's Quest (The Fitz and The Fool, #2)

16 " Was she acting entirely consciously? No: women are always sincere, even in the midst of their most shocking duplicities, because it is always some natural emotion which dominates them. Perhaps, having given this young man such a hold on her, by having openly demonstrated her affection for him, Delphine was merely responding to a sense of personal dignity, which led her either to revoke any concessions she might have made or, at least, to enjoy suspending them. Even at the very moment when passion seizes her, it is perfectly natural for a Parisian woman to delay her final fall, as a way of testing the heart of the man into whose hands she is about to deliver herself and her future! "

― Honoré de Balzac , Père Goriot

17 " A good tree never seizes to bear good fruits. "

18 " The past is but an untraceable footfallIt appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.It’s often dark and ruthless.It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectationsAnd our shattered dreams It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.It wrecks our present and ruins our futureAnd thus should be left where it is meant to beIt should be left behind … "

19 " A glacial chill rushes through Gage. He whips around just in time to see arms clutch Summer around the middle and drag her into the dark. Panic seizes him, and he takes off after her, regardless of the chaos brewing behind him. Her cry of surprise echoes all around them, drilling into his bones. "

― Laura Kreitzer , Burning Falls (Summer Chronicles, #3)

20 " Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpess. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain -- any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes, automatically, anhedonic. Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer he gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has " control" . Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not conciousily aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he dervies no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essential negative. "

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