Rare Quotes
More Rare Quotes
I am finding the inherent politeness of this place quite destabilising. Having come from a House where politeness is about as rare as an orderly queue at a London bus stop, the culture shock on entering your Lordships' House has been profound. Indeed, such relentless politeness is not merely destabilising, but positively exhausting.
lord stratford— Maiden speech to the House of Lords, 20 July 2005; quoted by United Kingdom Parliament World Wide Web Service
— contrasting the House of Lords with the House of Commons.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
erica jong— "The Artist as Housewife", in The First Ms. Reader (1972).
The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.
Henry James— Criticism
If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
walt whitman— Walt Whitman (1892). "III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme". Complete Prose Works. Philadelphia: David McKay. p. 324.
Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
mark twain— (1899), Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
Her cheeks so rare a white was on, No daisy makes comparison; (Who sees them is undone); For streaks of red were mingled there, Such as are on a Cath'rine pear, (The side that's next the Sun).
Sir John Suckling— A Ballad Upon a Wedding, Stanza 10.
It is all too rare today to hear the clear, clean ring of a really original insult.
Jim Richard carrigan— 1987 In Time, 28 Aug.
I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti— 1973 'Mock Confessional'.
It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers! They are always implying 'I am capable of higher things.'
ronald firbank— Vainglory
Let us award a just, a brilliant homage to those rare men whom nature has endowed with the precious privilege of arranging a thousand isolated facts, of making seductive theories spring from them; but let us not forget to state, that the scythe of the reaper had cut the stalks before one had thought of uniting them into sheaves!
françois arago— Joseph Fourier, p. 409
[T]he rare earth elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us mocking, mystifying and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities.
william crookes— As quoted in Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements (New Edition) by John Emsley (page 266)
Happy the man with a book-length grievance — and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing.
wilfrid sheed— "Unnecessary Roughness" (1971), p. 150
From what little was known about the subject, insincerity itself was regarded as another form of psychosis but one which was exceedingly rare.
raymond smullyan— Planet Without Laughter (1980)
"Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks, to draw [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal."
iannis xenakis— Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, ISBN 1576470792
Alvin had met true evil in his life, but he still persisted in thinking it was awful rare, and the word was bandied about too much by those who didn’t understand what real badness was.
orson scott card— Chapter 10 (Alvin Journeyman (1995))
And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays: Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, grasping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.
james russell lowell— Prelude to Pt. I, st. 5.
In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, 'independent' regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.
ilana mercer— "Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go Poof", WorldNetDaily.com, January 3, 2014
The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!
friedrich nietzsche— KSA 9,11 [201]
Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.
Simone Weil— p. 193 (The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941))
On woman Nature did bestow two eyes, Like Hemian's bright lamps, in matchless beauty shining, Whose beams do soonest captivate the wise And wary heads, made rare by art's refining.
Robert Greene— Robert Greene, Philomela, Sonnet.
Padmanabha Swamy temple located inside the East Fort, this Vaishnava temple is very famous attracting devotees from all parts. Dedicated to Lord Vishnu sleeping on Anantha, the serpent king, this temple is a rare blend of Dravidian architecture and the Kerala style.
— Biju Mathew, in Pilgrimage to Temple Heritage, 2013. p.65
And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race.
james russell lowell— James Russell Lowell, Under the Old Elm, Part VII, Stanza 3.
Light-leaved acacias, by the door, Stood up in balmy air, Clusters of blossomed moonlight bore, And breathed a perfume rare.
George MacDonald— George MacDonald, Song of the Spring Nights, Part I.
How pure the joy, when first my hands unfoldThe small, rare volume, black with tarnished gold!
john ferriar— Illustrations of Sterne, Bibliomania, line 137, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.
barbara tuchman— p. 459 (A Distant Mirror (1978))
The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)
stephen jay gould— "The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education.
william osler— "Teaching and Thinking" in The Montreal Medical Journal (1895)
But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.
— Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), English poet and lexicographer. The Rambler, No. 175, 19th November 1751
It is the characteristic way of the wise to speak indirectly, to talk in figures, proverbs, and puzzles. All the sages of pre-modern cultures seem to share a belief in the ineffectiveness of open statements, the superficiality of direct communication. Wisdom, it seems, would not be so rare and difficult a thing if it could simply be “told” by one person to another.
— Arthur Melzer, “On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, Issue 4, November 2007, p. 1017
