Home > Topic > the brink

the brink QUOTES

the brink QUOTES

1 " All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once...Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now. "

― Joss Whedon

2 " I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, " This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is. "

3 " Ignorance has one virtue: persistence. It will insist through dogged persistence on leading others to follow its vision no matter how misguided. Ignorance will drive the world to the brink of failure and catastrophe and beyond into the abyss with arrogance and anger because wisdom is often too polite to fight. Wisdom doesn’t like to impose its will, but that is all ignorance understands—force over free will and choice. Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done. "

― John Kramer , Blythe

4 " Say you are at the brink of killing yourself and someone tries to talk you out of it. You’ve already thought about it and your life is not worth living. Someone else comes along and tries to convince you not to kill yourself. Is there someone out there that can convince you not to kill yourself? What can they possibly say to convince you that your life, the one you have firsthand knowledge of, is worth living? There is that one answer. No one! There is that other answer. Nothing! "

― , Failure&solitude

5 " My name, sir, is Virgilia Wessex. I am a Sunday school teacher from Sussex, England, and I have given you no leave to address me as anything.”
His mouth seemed to almost smile, but if so, he caught it just on the brink and decided against it. “Well, I’ve just given the gent who found you first an obscene amount of money to address you however I please… Gillia. "

― V.S. Carnes

6 " Here lies a gentleman bold
Who was so very brave
He went to lengths untold,
And on the brink of the grave
Death had on him no hold.
By the world he set small store--
He frightened it to the core--
Yet somehow, by Fate's plan,
Though he'd lived a crazy man,
When he died he was sane once more. "

― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

7 " Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman... Which is probably the same thing! "

― Apostolos Doxiadis , Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

8 " Ready for the cheap escapeOn the brink of self destruction Widespread panic Broken glass inside my head Bleeding down these thoughts ~ "

9 " Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside. "

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

10 " This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity. "

― Ann Voskamp , One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

11 " Tim Minchin's musings on Tony, the first 'fish' ever to have feet:

Imagine what Tony would think, standing there on his brand new feet on the brink of the beginnings of mankind as we know it... if he could look forward just a few short... hundreds of millions of years... to see one of his descendants... an Israeli Jew by the name of Jesus, having a nail hammered through his feet... the very feet that Tony provided him with, as a punishment for having a, sort of, schizophrenic discourse with a God who was created by Mankind to explain the existence of feet in the absence of the knowledge of the existence of Tony. "

― Tim Minchin

12 " And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost. "

― Paul Auster , The Invention of Solitude

13 " Men are mere mortals but their quest for knowledge leads them to the brink of immortality.”

Excerpt from novel You Can't Escape Love by Grace Willows "

― Grace Willows

14 " Men are mere mortals but their quest for knowledge leads them to the brink of immortality. "

― Grace Willows

15 " Once you reach the brink of your will power, you have two options - either give up, or keep going. That decision decides whether you'll reach your goal. "

16 " Even humanity's lack of concern for its rampant overpopulation problem now made a terrible kind of sense. What difference did it make if our planet was capable of supporting all seven billion of us in the long term when a far greater threat to our numbers was waiting in the wings? And despite the overwhelming odds, humanity had done what was necessary to ensure its own survival. It filled me with a strange new sense of pride in my own species. We weren't a bunch of primitive monkeys teetering on the brink of self-destruction after all—this appeared ti be an altogether different kind of destruction we were teetering on the brink of. "

― Ernest Cline , Armada

17 " My heart is on the brink of a world so foreign that it feels like a fantasy. Blessed do I feel when I think of your heart which is so warm that it melts the frozen world we live in. Blessed I am with all of you that I hold near and dear to my heart. "

― Imania Margria , Secrets of My Heart

18 " Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet... "

― Stephen King , The Dark Tower

19 " The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact." Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad. "

20 " I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink (…) That was a very different thing from wanting to die. "

― Jon Krakauer , Into the Wild