Exacts Quotes & Sayings

If you can get past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of human intelligence, and if you can go out into the night and see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats, but not from the awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do these things and still feel the next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single, intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong because this sort of vulgarity, the very vulgarity from which the Oscars are made, is the inevitable price that Hollywood exacts from each of its serfs. — Raymond Chandler

Civilized life exacts its toll. — Ivy Compton-Burnett

Whatever is enforced by command is more imputed to him who exacts than to him who performs. — Michel De Montaigne

The death penalty exacts a terrible price in dollars, lives and human decency. Rather than tamping down the flames of violence, it fuels them while draining millions of dollars from more promising efforts to restore safety to our lives. — Robert M. Morgenthau

Prosperity asks for fidelity; adversity exacts it. — Seneca The Younger

Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator. But in return, it places you at the center of the universe and assures you that you are the personal object of a heavenly plan. — Christopher Hitchens

Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family. — William Osler

Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt. — Julia Glass

God causes us to promise in time of peace what He exacts from us in time of war; He enables us to make our abandonments in joy, but He requires the fulfilment of them in the midst of much bitterness. — Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

The Inmost is one with the Inmost; yet the form of the One is not the form of the other; intimacy exacts fitness. He therefore who liveth by air, let him not be bold to breathe water. But mastery cometh by measure: to him who with labour, courage, and caution giveth his life to understand all that doth encompass him, and to prevail against it, shall be increase. "The word of Sin is Restriction": seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Iniquity, and fortify thyself to overcome it. — Aleister Crowley

Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

The fight for justice against corruption is never easy. It never has been and never will be. It exacts a toll on our self, our families, our friends, and especially our children. In the end, I believe, as in my case, the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity. — Frank Serpico

Loving isn't merging, surrendering, uniting with the other. Rather, it's a kind of solitude; of profound aloneness. It induces you to mature and become whole for the sake of your beloved ... to truly love another, you must first wholly love yourself. Love therefore exacts the most demanding claim of all; it both chooses you and pursues you, and reaches out, as if over vast distances, to call and draw you into your now and future self.
John VanDyke Wilmerding, ideas put forth inspired by ('after') Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

This may play well in certain extreme right- and left-wing political circles. But such unrest exacts a huge price on U.S. credibility abroad in all the challenging arenas summarized here, and in others yet to emerge. Political cannibalism at home will severely undercut the authority and credibility of America's role in the world. It will exacerbate U.S. efforts to manage a range of existing security issues and new ones yet unimagined. — Graham T. Allison

Do you realize this? That if you were to somehow purpose to, from this day on, perfectly please God and succeed in doing it, that that perfect obedience, from this moment, would not acquire in the remainder of your life, enough merit to atone for one past sin, because God exacts and God demands perfect obedience and there's no merit for giving him the minimal requirement. — Paris Reidhead

Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation. — Peter Kropotkin

Transformation of any kind always exacts a holy tussle. The newborn butterfly struggles to open its wings so it can conjure up the strength to fly. So, too, with artists, inventors, mystics, and entrepreneurs. — Tama J. Kieves

And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky? — Virginia Woolf

Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated — John Dewey

Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service, and pays the bitterest wages. Its service is to watch the success of one's enemy; its wages to be sure of it. — Charles Caleb Colton

The good must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is wholly clear it is too easy to reject.
What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. But if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate men ... .There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about.
The world exacts a price for calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few men follow them. The wise give men endless opportunities to discuss what is good. — Walter Kaufmann

The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts. — William Hazlitt

Task switching exacts a cost few realize they are even paying. — Gary Keller

Living too long exacts a painful price. — Mason Cooley

Non-violence exacts a very high price from one who practices it. But once you are able to meet that demand then you can do most things. — Cesar Chavez

You have to pay the price. You will find that everything in life exacts a price, and you will have to decide whether the price is worth the prize. — Sam Nunn

Regarding vengeance and arch-enemies, one must not only be timely but prideful, and pride exacts propriety. — Adam Levin

As i discovered, the path to sobriety is a precarious, complex journey. you obviously want to purge yourself of something that has been so destructive and has had such a grip on you. but in the deep recesses of your mind, you wonder if you will mourn the loss of this old friend that has been by your side for years. i know this sounds sick, but you actually find yourself wondering if your life is going to become quite boring without this crutch. of course, the yearning for true health far outweighs everything else. you know things are going to be better for you, for your loved ones, and for everyone you encounter. you will no longer have to hide things and live a lie. yes, that initial high of drugs and booze can be very, very attractive, but it's not worth the wrecked and trashed feeling you have the next morning. nor is it worth the cumulative toll it exacts from you. — Lou Gramm

Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction — Jack Donovan

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits. — Walter Bagehot

The Universe keeps track of our sins and exacts devious and repugnant punishments, like dates with unknown men. — Sue Grafton

Standing up for what you believe in comes at a price but backing down exacts a toll that your soul never stops paying — Lee Goldberg

America today is in danger of drifting from its best traditions. We have allowed false prophets of selfishness to obscure our vision. We have grown numb to a creeping cynicism about progress and public life. We crave human connection yet hide behind walls. We worship the money chase yet decry the toll it exacts on us. We allow the market to dominate our lives, relationships, yearnings and aspirations. We indulge in nostalgia and irony and addictive entertainment, then purge from our hearts any true idealism or passion, any notion that being American should mean something more than "everyday low prices" or "every man for himself." In the midst of this dislocation and disorientation, so many Americans today yearn for higher purpose, for calling
for some assurance that life matters. We wish to believe there is more to our days than is revealed on our screens. Make no mistake: this is a spiritual crisis. — Eric Liu

I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more ... — Andre Aciman

Science exacts a substantial entry fee in effort and tedium in exchange for its insights. — Carl Sagan

The god who exacts the last drop of blood from his Son so that his just anger, evoked by sin, may be appeased, is not the God revealed by and in Jesus Christ. And if he is not the God of Jesus, he does not exist. — Brennan Manning

Those who think that it is only necessary to feed and clothe the prisoner, and to act towards him in all things according to the law, are much mistaken. However much debased he may be, a man exacts instinctively respect for his character as a man. Every prisoner knows perfectly that he is a convict and a reprobate, and knows the distance which separates him from his superiors; but neither the branding irons nor chains will make him forget that he is a man. He must, therefore, be treated with humanity. Humane treatment may raise up one in whom the divine image has long been obscured. It is with the "unfortunate," above all, that humane conduct is necessary. It is their salvation, their only joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it — Margaret Atwood

I would explain to my children very simply that the defense of liberty is a cause that exacts a very high price in the history of humankind. — Mitt Romney

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. — Amelia Earhart

We live in a time when the values of courage and honesty, particularly for women writers, equate to confessing only the darkest, most painful parts of our lives. "How brave you are," my students say to each other over workshop tables, "to expose that." Meaning, to uncover this family secret or that heinous act or to openly confront the demons of alcoholism, promiscuity, substance abuse, incest, infidelity, illness, betrayal ... I have also wrestled many dark angels, and continue to do so, so I acknowledge the price such writing exacts. But more and more I have come to respect the honesty and courage required to recognize the bright angels when they appear in our memory, and to allow them equal space in our narratives. — Rebecca McClanahan

By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct. — Honore De Balzac

To love is to know the sacrifices which eternity exacts from life. — Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. — Daniel James Brown

Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes — Luigi Pirandello

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one. — Tom Hanks

Of all the items on the menu, soup is that which exacts the most delicate perfection and the strictest attention. — Auguste Escoffier

Love is needed to strengthen the weak; love becomes tyrannical when it exacts obedience from an unbeliever. — Mahatma Gandhi

A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them. — William Hazlitt

There were the days of so-called free love ... but it didn't take long to discover that love is not free. Sooner or later it exacts its price. — Flora Lewis

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius. — Amy Lowell

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst. — Thomas Hardy

A friendship that exacts oneness of opinion and conduct is not worth much. — Mahatma Gandhi

Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race - the Olympic standard - takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. A well-conditioned oarsman or oarswoman — Daniel James Brown

Mozart's music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard. — Gabriel Faure

These people are so damned proud of their hatred! Hatred is easy, and lazy to boot. It's love that demands effort, love that exacts a price from each of us. Love costs; this is its value. — Erika Johansen