swifter QUOTES

1 " Our progress as a nation can be not swifter than our progress in education. "

2 " Burning fevers flee no swifter from your body if you toss under figured counterpanes and coverlets of crimson than if you must lie in rude homespun. "

― Lucretius , The Way Things Are

3 " Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration. "

― G.K. Chesterton , Orthodoxy

4 " But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by truth, as guilty of iniquity and injustice: and I abide my sentence, and so do they. These things, perhaps, ought so to be, and I think that they are for the best. "

― Plato , Apology/Crito/Phaedo

5 " The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's! "

― Aleister Crowley , The Psychology of Hashish: An Essay on Mysticism

6 " Command by instinct is swifter subtler deeper more accurate more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one's breath away. "

7 " My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. "

8 " The older we get, the swifter time seems to pass and the quicker memories seem to fade. "

9 " Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource. "