Discoursing Quotes & Sayings

Equality for women is progress for all. — Ban Ki-moon

Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.

What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.

On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals. — Dexter Palmer

Machiavel, discoursing on these matters, finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of liberty, that he thinks it impossible for a corrupted people to set up a good government, or for a tyranny to be introduced if they be virtuous; and makes this conclusion, 'That where the matter (that is, the body of the people) is not corrupted, tumults and disorders do not hurt; and where it is corrupted, good laws do no good:' which being confirmed by reason and experience, I think no wise man has ever contradicted him. — Algernon Sidney

Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish. (Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point - Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.) Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly into the red-hot stove, she screamed, "Get him, Jesus! Get him!" If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would have never forgiven Jesus. — Toni Morrison

Sometimes, Dolores, sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto. — Stephen King

Everyone has beacons. Lights that guide them home. — Kimberly McCreight

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

TOPER. Yesterday I carried to wait on a Relation of ours that has a Parrot, and whilst I was discoursing about some private Business, she converted the Bird, and now it talks of nothing but the Light of the Spirit, and the Inward man. — Susanna Centlivre

I only listen to myself, I hate to say. I don't got time to listen to nobody else. There's a lot of guys out there, but I only listen to myself. — Mark Curry

Lauren truly believed she's to blame for his detachment and refusal to attach to her. But — Nako

When I hear a man discoursing of virtue, or of any sort of wisdom, who is a true man and worthy of his theme, I am delighted beyond measure: and I compare the man and his words, and note the harmony and correspondence of them. And such an one I deem to be the true musician, having in himself a fairer harmony than that of the lyre. — Plato

Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. — Karen Armstrong

When a mortal man speaks anything of that eternal blessedness of the saints in glory, he is like a blind man discoursing about the light which he has never seen, and so cannot distinctly speak anything concerning it. He also said that In a way it is akin to a man writing a travel guide for a land he has never visited or seen. It is to attempt to describe the indescribable with words which cannot come close to expressing the glory of heaven. — Charles Spurgeon

Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on - and it did a world of good which never became manifest. — Charles Dickens

The sun was clear and diaphanous like white win. Its light barely touched the moving figures, gave them no shadow, no relief: faces and hands made spots of pale gold. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Celtel established a mobile phone network in Africa at a time when investors told me that there was no market for mobile phones there. — Mo Ibrahim

The rewards had to come from the joy of puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm a world-class people watcher. I like to watch people's body movements, their expressions. It says so much about them. — Jill Scott

But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live. — Marcel Proust

I live in Derry, a little town in Ireland, and I don't have the background of Hollywood or Broadway. — Damian McGinty

Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, "Either I am much deceived,
or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse." To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: " 'Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with a
double L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad. — Michel De Montaigne

If our central concern is finding life after death, there is a chance we will not find life before death. — Michael Hidalgo

Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion. Please follow me. Trust me, for deep feeling and understanding require total committment. — Trinh T. Minh-ha

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future. — Dick Morris

Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so people come up with all sorts of ways to make a living. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor ... In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains. — George Bernard Shaw

A good pot holds memories. — Michael Pollan