Cecs Quotes & Sayings

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more tame and cheap ... and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angles going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy, stygian, fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the prince of Darkness was his surveyor. — Henry David Thoreau

Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going? — Eudora Welty

I can't wait for the day I learn to live in the now! — Dana Gould

There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds. — Martin Rees

Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of 'victim feminism' and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfilment and power as men, but held back by the twin myths of good-girlism and sentimental sisterhood. Though she is perhaps too sanguine about women quickly overcoming their fear of power, Wolf fills me with hope because I see her analysis as having shattered the false categories that imprisoned my generation. Women do not have to agree about everything to join in alliance with each other to promote female power. Women do not have to cast out their inner bad girl to assert their right to power. Women do not have to cast out their sexuality to be 'good sisters'. — Erica Jong

It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it. — James Hillman

When I made mistakes, people used to laugh. I could have learnt better, but I've always liked to make people laugh. — Jane Birkin

There are many more attempts to define happiness than unhappiness. It is because people know all too well what unhappiness is. — Coco Chanel

Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down. — Bill Gates

Light was the symbol I tried to give them...The Cross was the symbol they adopted. The pain of self-sacrifice was obvious to them. The subjective reward--incomprehensible. Thus they changed it all. I told them of many mansions. They chose this mansion or that--scoured each other off the earth, to set one heaven in place of the heaven of those they defeated. Holy wars! Is such a thing conceivable to God as a holy war? Alas. The words--the images--the effort is still uncomprehended. I said Light. I said truth. I said Freedom. I meant enlightenment. Yet nearly every church that uses my name is a wall against light and a rampart against enlightenment, using fear, not love, to chain the generations in terror and pain and ignorance . . . And now--this is called civilization, and in my name, also! — Philip Wylie

And Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger. — Jane Austen

Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all. Still, rather a fool than a fascist. — Hanif Kureishi

In every art the desire to practice it precedes both the full ability to do so and the possession of something worthwhile to express by its means. — Phyllis Bentley

Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into other lives, and I come back to my own with greater contentment. — Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey