Quotes About Engagement

There was no innovation, no plan for the future, no attempt to meaningfully engage the West. Only the occasional flexing of military muscle to stir the people's nationalism and blind them to the fact that they had no more hope now than they did under the communists.

Queaque ipsa miserrima vidi,et quorum pars magna fui. (And those terrible things I saw, and in which I played a great part.)

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.

madam, the man cried, leaping to the ground, you're hurt! I'm dead, sir! she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.

to teach without zest is a crime.

What I value is the naked contact of a mind.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

One must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment.

to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.

The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude.

I wonder why men always talk about politics? Mary speculated. I suppose, if we had votes, we should, too. I

He became engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel.

The only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests.

It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog's ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other.

But if I find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke rings - see how phrases at once begin to wreathe off my lips.

There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule. I

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom—or rather the movement towards it—that counts.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.

Waiting for Godot] has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.