Speck Quotes
More Speck Quotes
Let menot, even inmyownmind, committheinjustice of taking a speck for the whole.
Maria Edgeworth— 1812 The Absentee, ch.11.
When folks git ole en strucken wid de palsy, dey mus' speck ter be laff'd at.
joel chandler harris— 1883 Nights with Uncle Remus,'Mr. Man Has Some Meat'.
Can a little speck in the vast universe truly address the Infinite? The answer is that Prayer is precisely what converts that little speck into an entity of inestimable and cosmic significance.
jeffrey cohen— Chapter III, p.23
And he looks down where the soil has been dug and there's a sparkle, and there's a glint in the morning light, and he reaches down and he picks it up with his stubby dirty fingers, and the last thing in the world he might have expected, and here is this, this speck of the future, this tiny little shock that's going to reverberate right to today -- literally till now! He picks it up, and he says, you know, he says, 'My God!' And he yells out, he said, 'My God, I think I've found gold!'
j. s. holliday— About James W. Marshall discovering gold in 1848
How beautiful is night!A dewy freshness fills the silent air;No mist obscures; nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain,Breaks the serene of heaven:In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divineRolls through the dark blue depths;Beneath her steady rayThe desert circle spreadsLike the round ocean, girdled with the sky.How beautiful is night!
Robert Southey— Thalaba the Destroyer, Bk. I, st. 1 (1800).
Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, Outward bound.
dinah maria mulock— "Outward Bound"; Poems Since 1860.
In beauty faults conspicuous grow; The smallest speck is seen on snow.
john gay— Fable XI, "The Peacock, Turkey, and Goose".
His home! the Western giant smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it; This little speck, the British Isles? ’T is but a freckle, never mind it.
— A good Time going; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
As for me, I consider myself as a speck of the dust of the devotee's feet.
ramakrishna— p. 210 (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942))
In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.
bertrand russell— Dreams and Facts (1919).
One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.
colin wilson— p. 309 (Religion and the Rebel (1957))
His home! the Western giant smiles, And turns the spotty globe to find it; This little speck the British Isles? 'Tis but a freckle, never mind it.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., A Good Time Going.
Beware of that which becomes the slanderer's life, of magnifying every speck of evil and closing the eye to goodness, till at last men arrive at the state in which generous, universal love (which is heaven) becomes impossible, and a suspicious, universal hate takes possession of the heart, and that is hell.
— Frederick William Robertson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 402.
The Realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: There is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.
— Ken Wilber, in The Eye of Spirit : An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad (1997)
Beyond the grave! As the vision rises how this side dwindles into nothing a speck a moment and its glory and pomp shrink into the trinkets and baubles that amuse an infant for a day. Only those things, in the glory of this light, which lay hold of immortality, seem to have any value.
— Randolph Sinks Foster, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 212
This speck of life in time's great wilderness This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas, The past, the future, two eternities!
thomas moore— Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Stanza 42.
Here we may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her Cost and Finery upon this small speck of Dirt.
christiaan huygens— Book.1, p.10
God … created this speck of Dirt and the human Species for his glory: and with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our Species miserable forever, for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian Theologians in general: ten to one.
— John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson (September 14, 1813). Published in The Quotable John Adams (Globe Pequot, 2008), p. 185ff.
She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.
john crowley— Bk. 2, Ch. 4
