Quotes4study

Laughing cheerfulness throws the light of day on all the paths of life; sorrow is more confusing and distracting than so-called giddiness.

_Jean Paul._

Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

OLD TESTAMENT.     _Proverbs iii. 17._

The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.

Earl Warren (born 19 March 1891

Soft peace she brings; wherever she arrives She builds our quiet as she forms our lives; Lays the rough paths of peevish Nature even, And opens in each heart a little heaven.

MATTHEW PRIOR. 1664-1721.     _Charity._

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Thomas Hardy

I augur better of a youth who is wandering on a path of his own than of many who are walking aright upon paths which are not theirs.

_Goethe._

When I see all paths leading men unto death, and no paths leading from death unto us--no traveller there ever returning--not one of ages past ever remaining--I see that I also shall assuredly go where they have gone.

John Wortabet     Arabian Wisdom

The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal.

Sri Aurobindo ~ 2013 Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Happy, because the correction is designed to bring him into paths of blessedness and peace.

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

Do not say, "I follow the one true path of the Spirit", but rather, "I have found the Spirit walking on my path", for the Spirit walks on all paths.

Khalil Gibran

Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.

Jean de La Fontaine

All religions and sects in the world have had natural reason for a guide. Christians alone have been obliged to take their rules from without themselves, and to acquaint themselves with those which Jesus Christ left to men of old time to be transmitted to the faithful. This constraint is wearisome to these good fathers. They desire like the rest of the world to have liberty to follow their imaginations. In vain we cry to them, as the prophets to the Jews of old: "Enter into the Church, enquire of the ways which men of old have left to her, and follow those paths." They have answered, as did the Jews, "We will not walk in them, but we will follow the thoughts of our hearts;" and they have said, "We will be as the nations round about us."

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

Love will find its way / Through paths where wolves would fear to prey.

_Byron._

Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.

_Bible._

He always has a purpose in His leading. He knows where the bits of green pasture are, and He would lead His flock to these. The way may be rough, but it is the right way to the pasture. "Paths of righteousness" may not be straight paths; but they are paths that lead somewhere--to the right place. Many desert paths are illusive. They start out clear and plain, but soon they are lost in the sands. They go nowhere. But the paths of righteousness have a goal to which they unerringly lead.--_J. R. Miller._

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

Steep regions cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.

_Goethe._

Florence Nightingale said: "If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything."

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.

OLD TESTAMENT.     _Jeremiah vi. 16._

If a man knows the right way, he need not trouble himself about wrong paths.

_Lessing._

They said that Love would die when Hope was gone, / And Love mourn'd long, and sorrow'd after Hope; / At last she sought out Memory, and they trod / The same old paths where Love had walk'd with Hope, / And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.

_Tennyson._

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

_Gray._

The superior man can find himself in no situation in which he is not himself. In a high situation, he does not treat with contempt his inferiors. In a low situation, he does not court the favor of his superiors. He rectifies himself, and seeks for nothing from others, so that he has no dissatisfactions. He does not murmur against Heaven, nor grumble against men. Thus it is that the superior man is quiet and calm, waiting for the appointments of Heaven, while the mean man walks in dangerous paths, looking for lucky occurrences.

Confucius

Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.

_Bible._

The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the same sort of things with the meanest, only from higher grounds and by higher paths.

_Jean Paul._

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

THOMAS GRAY. 1716-1771.     _Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Stanza 9._

Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objects of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to reach his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view of the pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,--"persistent modifications" of man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity-Language; and assuming that what is true of speech is true of the speaker--a hypothesis as questionable in science as it is in ordinary life--he may apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a searching analysis of their words and grammatical forms.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested — rulers, lawyers, clerics — have carefully enwound her. She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences.

Peter Kropotkin

God keeps a school for His children here on earth and one of His best teachers is Disappointment. My friend, when you and I reach our Father's house, we shall look back and see that the sharp-voiced, rough; visaged teacher, Disappointment, was one of the best guides to train us for it. He gave us hard lessons; he often used the rod; he often led us into thorny paths; he sometimes stripped off a load of luxuries; but that only made us travel the freer and the faster on our heavenward way. He sometimes led us down into the valley of the death-shadow; but never did the promises read so sweetly as when spelled out by the eye of faith in that very valley. Nowhere did he lead us so often, or teach us such sacred lessons, as at the cross of Christ. Dear, old, rough-handed teacher! We will build a monument to thee yet, and crown it with garlands, and inscribe on it: _Blessed be the memory of Disappointment!_--_Theodore Cuyler._

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious — that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code; film adaptation released worldwide on 19 May 2006

Of all the paths lead to a woman's love Pity 's the straightest.[198-9]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.     _The Knight of Malta. Act i. Sc. 1._

Ad astra per ardua=--To the stars by steep paths.

Motto.

It is in the path where God has bade us walk that we shall find the angels around us. We may meet them, indeed, on paths of our own choosing, but it will be the sort of angel that Balaam met, with a sword in his hand, mighty and beautiful, but wrathful too; and we had better not front him! But the friendly helpers, the emissaries of God's love, the apostles of His grace, do not haunt the roads that we make for ourselves.--_Alex. McLaren._

Various     Thoughts for the Quiet Hour

Like mighty rivers, with resistless force, / The passions rage, obstructed in their course, / Swell to new heights, forbidden paths explore, / And drown those virtues which they fed before.

_Pope._

Thus hand in hand through life we 'll go; Its checker'd paths of joy and woe With cautious steps we 'll tread.

NATHANIEL COTTON. 1707-1788.     _The Fireside. Stanza 31._

Per aspera ad astra=--over rough paths to the stars.

Motto.

In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season.

Yann Martel

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not onto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

_Bible._

The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.

John Schaar

Perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There'd never be an end, he thought — no end to anything.

Clifford D. Simak

Men of unruly lives assert that they alone follow nature, while those who are orderly stray from her paths; as passengers in a ship think that those move who stand upon the shore. Both sides say the same thing. There must be a fixed point to enable us to judge. The harbour decides the question for those who are in the vessel, but where can we find the harbour in morals?

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Anne Frank

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Robert J. Sawyer

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then?  I cannot say.

        -- J. R. R. Tolkien

Fortune Cookie

Upon the hearth the fire is red,

Beneath the roof there is a bed;

But not yet weary are our feet,

Still round the corner we may meet

A sudden tree or standing stone

That none have seen but we alone.    Still round the corner there may wait

  Tree and flower and leaf and grass,    A new road or a secret gate,

  Let them pass!  Let them pass!    And though we pass them by today

  Hill and water under sky,        Tomorrow we may come this way

  Pass them by!  Pass them by!        And take the hidden paths that run

                    Towards the Moon or to the Sun,

Home is behind, the world ahead,      Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,

And there are many paths to tread      Let them go!  Let them go!

Through shadows to the edge of night,      Sand and stone and pool and dell,

Until the stars are all alight.          Fare you well!  Fare you well!

Then world behind and home ahead,

We'll wander back to home and bed.

  Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,

  Away shall fade!  Away shall fade!

  Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,

  And then to bed!  And then to bed!

        -- J. R. R. Tolkien

Fortune Cookie

My calculator is my shepherd, I shall not want

It maketh me accurate to ten significant figures,

    and it leadeth me in scientific notation to 99 digits.

It restoreth my square roots and guideth me along paths of floating

    decimal points for the sake of precision.

Yea, tho I walk through the valley of surprise quizzes,

    I will fear no prof, for my calculator is there to hearten me.

It prepareth a log table to comfort me, it prepareth an

    arc sin for me in the presence of my teachers.

It annoints my homework with correct solutions, my interpolations are

    over.

Surely, both precision and accuracy shall follow me all the days of my

    life, and I shall dwell in the house of Texas instruments forever.

Fortune Cookie

"All the system's paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for

 conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to

 be attained in our spontaneous -- ergo, most economical -- geodesiccally

 structured thoughts."

        -- R. Buckminster Fuller [...and a total nonsequitur as far as I can tell.  -kl]

Fortune Cookie

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is

wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits

that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant?

Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?  We are a company of

ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only

be incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by

falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for

our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe

the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures

to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map

of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that

he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness...

        -- Leslie Stephen, "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876

Fortune Cookie

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Fortune Cookie

So we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness acts as our guide and

our doubts serve to reassure us.

        -- Jean-Pierre de Caussade, eighteenth-century Jesuit priest

Fortune Cookie

4:14. Be not delighted in the paths of the wicked, neither let the way of evil men please thee.

THE BOOK OF PROVERBS     OLD TESTAMENT

38:20. That thou mayst bring every thing to its own bounds, and understand the paths of the house thereof.

THE BOOK OF JOB     OLD TESTAMENT

21:13. The burden in Arabia. In the forest at evening you shall sleep, in the paths of Dedanim.

THE PROPHECY OF ISAIAS     OLD TESTAMENT

3:9. Ghimel. He hath shut up my ways with square stones, he hath turned my paths upside down.

THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAS     OLD TESTAMENT

3:11. Daleth. He hath turned aside my paths, and hath broken me in pieces, he hath made me desolate.

THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAS     OLD TESTAMENT

While thus in talk the flying hours they pass, The sun had finish'd more than half his race: And they, perhaps, in words and tears had spent The little time of stay which Heav'n had lent; But thus the Sibyl chides their long delay: "Night rushes down, and headlong drives the day: 'T is here, in different paths, the way divides; The right to Pluto's golden palace guides; The left to that unhappy region tends, Which to the depth of Tartarus descends; The seat of night profound, and punish'd fiends." Then thus Deiphobus: "O sacred maid, Forbear to chide, and be your will obey'd! Lo! to the secret shadows I retire, To pay my penance till my years expire. Proceed, auspicious prince, with glory crown'd, And born to better fates than I have found." He said; and, while he said, his steps he turn'd To secret shadows, and in silence mourn'd.

Virgil     The Aeneid

Latinus, sunk in sorrow, finds too late, A foreign son is pointed out by fate; And, till Aeneas shall Lavinia wed, The wrath of Heav'n is hov'ring o'er his head. The gods, he saw, espous'd the juster side, When late their titles in the field were tried: Witness the fresh laments, and fun'ral tears undried. Thus, full of anxious thought, he summons all The Latian senate to the council hall. The princes come, commanded by their head, And crowd the paths that to the palace lead. Supreme in pow'r, and reverenc'd for his years, He takes the throne, and in the midst appears. Majestically sad, he sits in state, And bids his envoys their success relate.

Virgil     The Aeneid

In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling, shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais! Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the mist, without even awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

I returned home not disappointed, for I have said that I had long considered those authors useless whom the professor reprobated; but I returned not at all the more inclined to recur to these studies in any shape. M. Krempe was a little squat man with a gruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits. In rather a too philosophical and connected a strain, perhaps, I have given an account of the conclusions I had come to concerning them in my early years. As a child I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley     Frankenstein

25:13. They have been rebellious to the light, they have not known his ways, neither have they returned by his paths.

THE BOOK OF JOB     OLD TESTAMENT

All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to their work along the side-paths.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape. I saw I had strayed far from the village: it was quite out of sight. The very cultivation surrounding it had disappeared. I had, by cross-ways and by- paths, once more drawn near the tract of moorland; and now, only a few fields, almost as wild and unproductive as the heath from which they were scarcely reclaimed, lay between me and the dusky hill.

Charlotte Bronte     Jane Eyre

138:23. Prove me, O God, and know my heart: examine me, and know my paths.

THE BOOK OF PSALMS     OLD TESTAMENT

3:21. Nor have they understood the paths thereof, neither have their children received it, it is far from their face.

THE PROPHECY OF BARUCH     OLD TESTAMENT

13:27. Thou hast put my feet in the stocks, and hast observed all my paths, and hast considered the steps of my feet:

THE BOOK OF JOB     OLD TESTAMENT

24:13. They have been rebellious to the light, they have not known his ways, neither have they returned by his paths.

THE BOOK OF JOB     OLD TESTAMENT

8:9. The birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, that pass through the paths of the sea.

THE BOOK OF PSALMS     OLD TESTAMENT

8:2. Standing in the top of the highest places by the way, in the midst of the paths,

THE BOOK OF PROVERBS     OLD TESTAMENT

2:20. That thou mayst walk in a good way: and mayst keep the paths of the just.

THE BOOK OF PROVERBS     OLD TESTAMENT

It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense, very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this. He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the best road.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

He ordered his horse to be saddled and, leaving his regiment on the march, rode to his father's estate where he had been born and spent his childhood. Riding past the pond where there used always to be dozens of women chattering as they rinsed their linen or beat it with wooden beetles, Prince Andrew noticed that there was not a soul about and that the little washing wharf, torn from its place and half submerged, was floating on its side in the middle of the pond. He rode to the keeper's lodge. No one at the stone entrance gates of the drive and the door stood open. Grass had already begun to grow on the garden paths, and horses and calves were straying in the English park. Prince Andrew rode up to the hothouse; some of the glass panes were broken, and of the trees in tubs some were overturned and others dried up. He called for Taras the gardener, but no one replied. Having gone round the corner of the hothouse to the ornamental garden, he saw that the carved garden fence was broken and branches of the plum trees had been torn off with the fruit. An old peasant whom Prince Andrew in his childhood had often seen at the gate was sitting on a green garden seat, plaiting a bast shoe.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future fortunes, and could not retrace the by-paths we had trodden together. I begged Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best of friends, and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but said not another word.

Charles Dickens     Great Expectations

4:2. And many nations shall come in haste, and say: Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob: and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth out of Sion, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.

THE PROPHECY OF MICHEAS     OLD TESTAMENT

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