Diviner Quotes & Sayings

There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty. — William Rounseville Alger

Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life. — Plutarch

No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the realization of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature. — Rufus M. Jones

Some fish get caught for biting and some fish just get caught for being in the wrong part of the pond ... I'm no diviner, but having been in the wrong part of the pond most of my life, I can usually tell which fish bite and which fish don't. I suspect you may have found yourself in the wrong part of the pond a time or two. — Clare Vanderpool

As man develops, he places a greater value upon his own rights. Liberty becomes a grander and diviner thing. As he values his own rights, he begins to value the rights of others. And when all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as you might say of a bad writer - his writing is good enough for him; and — Plato

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.
Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy. — Ouida

When I read 'The Water Diviner,' I was having the same kind of visceral reaction that I would normally have acting in something. I believed that I was the only person that could tell this story the way it needed to be told. That's the real arrogance of a director! — Russell Crowe

Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams. — William Wordsworth

The more a psychologist - a born, an unavoidable psychologist and soul-diviner - turns his attention to the more select cases and individuals, the greater is his danger of being suffocated by sympathy: he NEEDS sternness and cheerfulness more than any other man. For the corruption, the ruination of higher men, of the more unusually constituted souls, is in fact, the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Beneath the instinct to fight there lurks a diviner instinct to love. — Inazo Nitobe

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny? — Socrates

Genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But the woman, the mother, she watches, she waits, she loves. And she bears the weight of that love. She bears the loss of her son to war. She bears the story of Manifest. When everyone else is crushed by it, by the loss, the pain. When no one else can bear to remember. She is the keeper of the story. Until someone who needs to hear it comes along. When it will be time to make it known. To manifest. That's what a diviner does. — Clare Vanderpool

The writer of this legend then records
Its ghostly application in these words:
The image is the Adversary old,
Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;
Our lusts and passions are the downward stair
That leads the soul from a diviner air;
The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;
Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;
The knights and ladies all whose flesh and bone
By avarice have been hardened into stone;
The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelf
Tempts from his books and from his nobler self.
The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I did this film with Russell Crowe called 'The Water Diviner,' which took place just after WWI. It was fascinating because the weapons between WWI and WII were very different. I had to learn how to ride horses in a battle setting. It was important that we rode a certain way. — Jai Courtney

It is as if the first diviner of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent upon a combination of sacred drugs which should cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul. — Aleister Crowley

What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes. — Christopher Hitchens

The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision, and the old men's dream! — John Dryden

And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers ... well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view. — Dean Koontz

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts. — Jacques Maritain

If there's one thing all diviners share, it's curiosity. We really can't help it; it's just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, 'Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then', you'd get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in.

Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us. — Benedict Jacka

Other mages have an odd attitude towards diviners. By the standards of, say, elemental mages. We can't gate, we can't attack, we can't shield, and when it comes to physical action our magic is about as useful as a bicycle in a trampolining contest. But we can see anywhere and learn anything and there's no secret we can't uncover if we try hard enough. So when an elemental mage looks at a diviner, the elemental mage knows he could take him in a straight fight with no more effort that it would take to tie his shoes. On the other hand, the elemental mage also knows that the diviner could find out every one of his most dirty and embarrassing secrets and, should hi feel like it, post copies of them to everyone the elemental mage has ever met. It creates a mixture of uneasiness and contempt that doesn't encourage warm feelings. There's a reason most of my friends aren't mages. — Benedict Jacka

Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. — Bunker Roy

There is in stillness oft a magic power To calm the breast when struggling passions lower, Touched by its influence, in the soul arise Diviner feelings, kindred with the skies. — John Henry Newman

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded. — Carol Berg

If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven,
Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light,
Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content:
The stars pre-eminent in magnitude,
And they that from the zenith dart their beams,
(Visible though they be to half the earth,
Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness)
Are yet of no diviner origin,
No purer essence, than the one that burns,
Like an untended watch-fire on the ridge
Of some dark mountain; or than those which seem
Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees.
All are the undying offspring of one Sire:
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,
Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content. — William Wordsworth

The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves. — George Santayana

She had turned thought and feeling into life, into reality, into creation. They speak of the _creations_ of the human intellect, of the human imagination! there is nothing man can do comes half so near the making of the Maker as the ordering of his way--except one thing: the highest creation of which man is capable, is to will the will of the Father. That _has_ in it an element of the purely creative, and then is man likest God. But simply to do what we ought, is an altogether higher, diviner, more potent, more creative thing, than to write the grandest poem, paint the most beautiful picture, carve the mightiest statue, build the most worshiping temple, dream out the most enchanting commotion of melody and harmony. — George MacDonald

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself - perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force? - with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range. — Christopher Hitchens

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik