Quotes About Ravages

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Let us subdue the ravages of the baser-self, and aspire to the higher calling of exalting joy through compassion, for that is the one true purpose of humanity.

I'm strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity—taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages.

Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings sprouting on Cosette.

Brilliant little irruptions Brilliant little connections Brilliant little illusions Brilliant little lips Brilliant little altercations Very brilliant little honey combs Brilliant little adversities Very brilliant little ravages Brilliant little cogs Brilliant little circumvolutions Around a vertical axis Why has the deficiency of the mentally deficient become a cultural fact, whereas the very much more terrible fact of ordinary stupidity strikes no one as very odd?

The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.

Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.

Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.

Fine food is poison. It can be as bitter as antimony and bitter almonds and as repulsive as swallowing live toads. Like the poison the emperor took every day to stop himself being poisoned, fine food must be taken daily until the system becomes immune to its ravages and the taste buds beaten and abused to the point where they not only accept but savour every vile concoction under the sun.

Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life.

If sacred places are spared the ravages of war... then make all places sacred. And if the holy people are to be kept harmless from war... then make all people holy.

No further use now for this language, this learning, this whole education through which I was taught to exert myself at the heart of the world. Mirage or mirror, a great enchantment glows in this darkness and leans against the door-jam of ravages in the classic pose assumed by death immediately after shedding her shroud. O my image of bone, here I am: let everything finally decompose in the palace of illusions and silence.

As Albert Camus wrote, "We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and others.

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

How long, O Lord, will You look on? Rescue my soul from their ravages, my precious life from these lions.