Quotes About Grasp

I could not hope to touch the sky with my two arms

Life is short. You've got to take what you can while you can.

It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she'd insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company.

They were very considerate, I must say. Every time I felt I was about to slip out of these fingers and would yell for help, they'd let me down and re-organize things.

Time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arm outstretch'd, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer.

The greater the man, the more he is soaked in the atmosphere of his time; only thus can he get a wide enough grasp of it to be able to change substantially the pattern of knowledge and action.

Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise

That stab in the heart she felt when she woke, and the panicky doubt that her life was in her grasp, not fraud or failure, not entirely - that was a brief misery and one she could set aside by putting the light on and reading for a while. She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.

In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers.

When you're alone you can long so hard for something like an embrace that you mine it from the air. You find it in meanings that you might not otherwise grasp, for which it is helpful to arise early in the morning, when the mind is clear and the heart is gentle.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

At first Widmerpool and I were unable to grasp the root of the trouble, partly because Monsieur Lundquist's lobbing technique was sufficiently common for none of the rest of us specially to have noticed it that afternoon: partly because at that age I was not yet old enough to be aware of the immense rage that can be secreted in the human heart by cumulative minor irritation.

Exactly, Watson. Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.

It is incontestable that the void which we grasp with the pincers of contradiction is from on high, for we grasp it the better the more we sharpen our natural faculties of intelligence, will and love. The void which is from below is that into which we fall when we allow our natural faculties to become atrophied.

Fear of facing the grasp of death changes one's outlook on every little thing.

If you want to be picked by the opportunity then you have to pick the opportunity first.

In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away.

I had love once in the palm of my hand. See the lines there. — John Wieners, from "A Poem for Painters," Selected poems, 1958-1984 (Black Sparrow Books, 1986)

The moment you grasp God's promises by faith and say, I am the lost sheep that Jesus came to save, a new life will take possession of you, and you will receive strength to resist the tempter.—In Heavenly Places, p. 116.

Live for each second without hesitation

The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion.

There is this peculiarity about the pleasure derived from the beautiful, that when raised to the highest pitch it sharpens into pain, acute and exquisite—pain which is itself a delight, produced by the strain of the soul to grasp and assimilate the perfect.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.