Agitate Quotes & Sayings

Compassion brings fulfillment to the heart. Selfish desires simply agitate the heart. — Radhanath Swami

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry. — Susan B. Anthony

Agitate him and ascertain the pattern of his movement. — Sun Tzu

Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. — Saul Alinsky

I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach. — William Cobbett

We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Why after the dust settles, someone has to come by and blow at it, stirring it up into the air again? — Anthony Liccione

Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors. — Seneca The Younger

Yet hypotaxis (along with reason) has been declining for a century or more. Gone are those heady and incomprehensible sentences of Johnson, Dickens, and Austen, replaced with the cruel, brutalist parataxes of writers whose aim is to agitate and distress. The long sentence is now a ridiculed rarity, usually hidden away in the Terms and Conditions, its commas and colons, clauses and caveats languishing unread and unloved. — Mark Forsyth

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it. — Michel De Montaigne

The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal, he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him: it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does. — Mark Twain

I'm going to give you a sentence, a full sentence with a noun and a verb and a possible agitate. I don't like all these judges running around with their half baked sentences, thats how you get salmonella poisoning. — Michael Buckley

It was now twenty minutes past four in the morning, allowing for the fact that the clock in the library of his town house was four minutes slow, as it had been for as far back as he could remember.
He eyed it with a frown of concentration. Now that he came to think about it, he must have it set right one of these days.Why should a clock be forced to go throught its entire existence four minutes behind the rest of the world? It was not logical.The trouble was though, that if the clock were suddenly right, he would be forever confused and arriving four minutes early
or did he mena late?
for meals and various other appointments. That would agitate his servants and cause consternation in the kitchen.
It was probably better to leave the clock as it was. — Mary Balogh

An assembly of the states, a court of justice, shows nothing so serious and grave as a table of gamesters playing very high; a melancholy solicitude clouds their looks; envy and rancor agitate their minds while the meeting lasts, without regard to friendship, alliances, birth or distinctions. — Jean De La Bruyere

There is something in the pose of sleeping women. Something soft and slight and slenderly surreal. He understands why painters are so often challenged to attempt them, and why so seldom they succeed. It must exceed the scope of canvas - the implausibility of rendering motion within rest. She is deeply asleep, immovably asleep - and yet she moves. Tiny spasms quiver her legs and tug at her fingers. Lips purse to open, part, then softly close again. Dreaming eyes agitate the surface of their lids. Hands resting on the stomach, rise and fall in rhythm with the pulse that ticks along the valleys of her neck. Even bespeckled with bites like this, there is a beauty to this girl and in this pose well beyond the scope of two dimensions. — Scott Gardiner

When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Very often, in order to bring about stillness we have to be tirelessly active in the outer world. You might suppose this would agitate the mind. It will not, if it is the dharma. — Frederick Lenz

All prayers die in the air which they uselessly agitate. — Robert Green Ingersoll

With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city's many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air! — Suzanne Rindell

My final words of advice to you are educate, agitate and organize; have faith in yourself. With justice on our side I do not see how we can loose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy. The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There is nothing material or social in it. For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is battle for freedom. It is the battle of reclamation of human personality. — B.R. Ambedkar

It is not the lefty ass-kissers you have to agitate, but the objective left-wing ... — Gudrun Ensslin

If lies comfort, and truth disturbs - self is being agitated as a result of prideful living. — T.F. Hodge

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song. — Mary Oliver

We come from the days when rap used to agitate the mainstream. Now it's more buddy-buddy. That doesn't sit well with me. So what we need is [a bit more] street politics, bringing up issues, agitating you a little bit. And nothing can agitate you more now than a terrorist threat. — Ice Cube

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind. — Andrew Dickson White

For the Christian there is no penal death in this world, much less any second death. He is completely freed from all the punishment as well as the guilt of sin, and the power of sin is removed too. It may stand in our way, and agitate us with perpetual warfare; but sin is a conquered foe to every soul in union with Jesus. There is no sin which a Christian cannot overcome if he will only rely upon his God to do it. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls. — Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

The prosecution [of impeachments], will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust, and they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. — Alexander Hamilton

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. — Virginia Woolf

In the beginning, when you are meditating, just ignore thought. Shine it on. Then after you are comfortable sitting there, try selectively eliminating negative thoughts, thoughts that agitate the mind. — Frederick Lenz

Perhaps one reason that many working parents do not agitate for collective reform, such as more governmental or corporate child care, is that the parents fear, deep down, that to share responsibility for child rearing is to abdicate it. — Faye J Crosby

By silencing the mind, we can experience real peace. As long as various kinds of thoughts agitate the brain, we don't experience 100 percent peace. — Henepola Gunaratana

The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away. — Cesare Pavese

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart? — Sylvia Plath

Tonight
A friendly breeze
Will agitate roots of meanings.
Wonder will flap its wings.

Deep in the night, an insect
Will gnaw
At the green portion of solitude.
Morning will fall
Into the word of morning. — Sohrab Sepehri

Our duty to ourselves, to posterity, and to mankind, call on us
by every motive which is sacred or honorable, to watch over the safety of our beloved country
during the troubles which agitate and convulse the residue of the world, and to sacrifice to
that all personal and local considerations. — Thomas Jefferson

The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don't bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing - Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don't agitate my home. There's room for all of us in this neighborhood. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new monarch agitate nations with hope and fear. — Samuel Johnson

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate! — Julian Bond

Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. the same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the (best men; nobles) should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and rome in eternal convulsions ... — Thomas Jefferson

Of agitating good roads there is no end, and perhaps this is as it should be, but I think you'll agree that it is high time to agitate less and build more. [Here is] a plan whereby the automobile industry of America can build a magnificent "Appian Way" from New York to San Francisco, having it completed by May 1, 1915 and present it to the people of the United States. — Carl G. Fisher

Humility does not disturb or disquiet or agitate, however great it may be; it comes with peace, delight, and calm ... The pain of genuine humility doesn't agitate or afflict the soul; rather, this humility expands it and enables it to serve God more. — Teresa Of Avila

Pay attention to the things that agitate you. It will tell you a lot about yourself. — Terry McMillan

She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls, also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive. — Wallace Stegner

There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul. — Walter Savage Landor

Tolerance is really a better thing than understanding. Because it doesn't agitate against human nature. — Fran Lebowitz

still got power over you, even in death, if he can agitate you this much — Carolyn Brown

Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances — Vandana Shiva

When the Left agitates over government policies, it's considered righteous anger. When the Right - and much of the center - agitate, it's painted as the rantings of the criminally and violently insane. — Monica Crowley

Soaking them in buckets of seawater, to which she'd add a handful of cornmeal and a rusty nail. She'd agitate the water several times a day, and change the water after twelve hours. — Ruth Ozeki

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone. — Edward R. Murrow

The risk is enormous to Democrats. Even talking about censure or impeachment threatens to really agitate the Republican base. — Charlie Cook

It should be the likes ay us that agitate for change, but aw we dae is drugs. — Irvine Welsh

And when demigods use cell phones, the signals agitate every monster within a hundred miles. It's like sending up a flare: Here I am! Please rearrange my face! — Rick Riordan

Ghosts

Take shape under moonlight,
materialize in dreams.
Shadows. Silhouettes
of what is no more. But

ghosts don't

bother me. The day brings
bigger things to worry about
than flimsy remains of
yesterday. No, spooks don't

scare me.

Gauzy apparitions might
prank your psyche or
agitate your nightmares,
but lacking

flesh and blood

they are powerless
to hurt you-cannot hope
to inflict the kind of damage
that real, live

people do. — Ellen Hopkins

I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed... or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city's space. — Peter Zumthor

I like you. I. Like. You. I'll admit you're annoying. Sometimes you agitate me to the brink of insanity, but you can throw it back at me like no one else. When you laugh, I want to laugh. When you smile, I want to smile. Hell, I want to be the one to make you smile. — Katie McGarry

Women in general are expected to hold less power than men and there are different expectations as to the tasks we will perform and the positions we will subsequently hold. Women tend to be offered less opportunities in life and are generally treated with less respect than men. We tend to receive less reward, tangible and intangible, for the work we do and the roles we play; we are often made to feel less important and our opinions less valid. Women are encouraged to compromise rather than question; to acquiesce rather than agitate. — Gerrilyn Smith

Agitate! Agitate! Ought to be the motto of every reformer. Agitation is the opposite of stagnation - the one is life, the other death. — Ernestine Rose

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast. — Miguel De Unamuno

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
From the poem "Elm", 19 April 1962 — Sylvia Plath

If tragedy does not ensnare a man, if affliction does not agitate him, if love does not lay him down in the cradle of dreams, then his life is like a blank, white page in the book of existence. In that year I saw the — Kahlil Gibran

I don't write plot-driven stories. Plotting feels too contrived and constraining to me. I posit. I agitate. I present contradictions, and in that respect, I suppose I write belief-driven stories. The point A to point B happens when the main character questions a belief they have at the beginning only to realize at the end that they were wrong.

The wade through the mud is what interests me. — Cheryl Anne Gardner