Turning Quotes - 2
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What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
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More Turning Quotes
Thereareno handlestoa horse, butthe1910 model has a string to each side of its face for turning its head when there is anything you want it to see.
— 1910 Literary Lapses,'Reflections on Riding'.
There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runs time's deer is slain, And lies where it has lain.
Edwin Muir— 1937 'The Road'.
It's really a therapeutic experience for me to begin to write about the coup because I was involved in the 1987 coup and in particular the 2000 coup. For someone who was involved in all the coups it has been difficult for me to open up and write. The fact that I am able to write marks a turning point for me.
— Interview, 19 May 2005, about his book, Speight of Violence (coauthored with two others)
The turning point was the Tea Act and the resulting Tea Party in Boston in December 1773.
bernard bailyn— Chapter IV, THE LOGIC OF REBELLION, p. 118
I think it is fair to say that 2007 represents a turning point for the Irish economy.
brian cowen— Tansey, Paul and Beesley, Arthur (19 October 2007). "Tough Budget on way as growth slows down"". The Irish Times. Retrieved on 2008-05-07.
He who will establish himself on a certain height must yield according to circumstances, like the weather-cock on a church-spire, which, though it be made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it remained obstinately immovable, and did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind. But a great man will never so far contradict his own feelings as to see, or, it may be, increase, with cold-blooded indifference, the misfortunes of his fellow country-men.
Heinrich Heine— English Fragments (1828), Ch. 11 : The Emancipation
— Variant: The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.
Go where the others have gone, to the tenebrous limitfor the golden fleece of void, your ultimate prizego upright among those who are on their kneesamong those turning their backs on and those fallen to dust
zbigniew herbert— Message of Mr. Cogito
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
jawaharlal nehru— Statement to Nikita Khrushchev, as quoted in The New York Post (1 April 1959), and in The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary of Amoral Advice (1984) by Jonathon Green, p. 184
We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
hunter s. thompson— "Extreme Behavior in Aspen" (3 February 2003)
On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.
fareed zakaria— Zakaria, Fareed (May 17, 2006). "The Price of Arrogance". Newsweek. Retrieved on 2006-09-01.
As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so changes of studies a dull brain.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood, Table Talk.
“Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone. “Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him. Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
iain banks— Chapter 2 (p. 225)
Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.
Samuel Beckett— "Gnome" in Dublin Magazine Vol. 9 (1934), p. 8
"To which god must I sacrifice in order to heal?" To which of the warring serpents should I turn with the problem that now faces me? It is easy, and tempting, to choose the god of Science. Now I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is its symbol. It is a powerful god indeed but it is what the students of ancient gods called a shape-shifter, and sometimes a trickster.
Robertson Davies— Can a Doctor Be a Humanist? (1984)
The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for "peace through strength" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog.
christopher hitchens— "The State Within the State" (1991)
If in order to keep the wheels turning you have to deafen ears with propaganda, crack the whip of Terror, and keep pushing people around, then you haven't got a machine civilization no matter how numerous and ingenious your machines.
Eric Hoffer— Ch. 5: "The Readiness to Work"
When you're ready to make the change and you don't feel that you have the strength, know that you are connected with the same strength that moves the world; you just have to stop turning your back on it and connect with it.
steve maraboli— p. 83 (Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010))
The noblest are they who turning from the things the vulgar crave, seek the source of a blessed life in worlds to which the senses do not lead.
john lancaster spalding— p. 164 (Aphorisms and Reflections (1901))
Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster.
larry wall— Usenet article <199709291631.JAA08648@wall.org> (1997)
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
edith wharton— "A First Word"
I have very often had occasion to say, that acquiescence is founded on knowledge, and that a man cannot be said to acquiesce in a transaction if he is not proved to have had knowledge of it. I think that this principle requires to be attended to in all cases turning upon acquiescence.
— Sir G. J. Turner, L.J., Stewart's Case (1866), L. R. 1 Ch. Ap. Ca. 587.
There is a cunning which we in England call the turning of the cat in the pan.
Francis Bacon— Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Cunning.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot— Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919).
turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming", lines 1–8, in ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1957), pp. 401–2.
More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.
— Ronald Fisher 1959 "Natural selection from the genetical standpoint". Australian Journal of Science 22, 16-17, .
He upbraided Macro, in no obscure and indirect terms, "with forsaking the setting sun and turning to the rising".
— Book VI, 52, referring to Tiberius.
I look upon the Guadalcanal and Tulagi operations as the turning point from offensive to defensive, and the cause of our setback there was our inability to increase our forces at the same speed as you.
— Japanese Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of Naval Staff, to American officers after the war.
turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
— Book IV, Chapter X. (Crowds (1913))
turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
gerald stanley lee— Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds (1913), Book IV, Chapter X.
