H Sound Quotes & Sayings

I do not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in the very sound of it that stirs the premonition felt while we listen to noble music; we become inexplicably troubled. — H.M. Tomlinson

Why do you think I am like this?" It didn't really sound like a question; there was no regret, or sorrow, or genuine tinge of curiosity. I didn't think he expected a complex answer in any case, as I'm pretty sure we both knew that a team of neuroscientists and psychologists could work on Mad Dog for a decade and still not have all of the answers. Instead, I removed a sheet of paper from my legal folder and wrote one quatrain from a poem by W.H. Auden: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. He received this carefully and spent a moment looking it over. For the tiniest fraction of a second his face relaxed and his eyes softened and he seemed to shrink into himself as he breathed in. Then it was over, and he turned away from me, a dismissal if I ever saw one. He crumpled up my note angrily and tossed it away onto the floor. It was the last time we ever spoke. — Jean Casella

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. — M.H. Abrams

It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. — H.P. Lovecraft

If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed. — David H. Hackworth

[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it. — H.L. Mencken

...On their first day in the new house, Addams had gotten up in the dark. From the surrounding swamp came bloodcurdling screams - the sound of possums mating, Tee later speculated, though it was perhaps a fisher, the dark-colored marten who stalked the wetlands, rooting rabbits from their nests. Addams returned to bed. "Someone is murdering babies in the swamp," he said. "Oh darling," came the sleepy reply from the pillows, "I forgot to tell you about the neighbors."

"All my life I wanted to live in one of those Addams Family houses, but I've never achieved that," Addams had recently told a reporter. "I do my best to add little touches," he said. ...Still, he conceded, "it's hard to convert a ranch-type house into a Victorian monster." — Linda H. Davis

The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write. — H.G.Wells

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends
the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. — H. Rider Haggard

The worst of all things that haunt poor mortal men," said I; "and that is, in all its nakedness - 'Fear!' Fear that will not have light or sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. — H.G.Wells

Perfection"

Every oak will lose a leaf to the wind.
Every star-thistle has a thorn.
Every flower has a blemish.
Every wave washes back upon itself.
Every ocean embraces a storm.
Every raindrop falls with precision.
Every slithering snail leaves its silver trail.
Every butterfly flies until its wings are torn.
Every tree-frog is obligated to sing.
Every sound has an echo in the canyon.
Every pine drops its needles to the forest floor.
Creation's whispered breath at dusk comes
with a frost and leaves within dawn's faint mist,
for all of existence remains perfect, adorned,
with a dead sparrow on the ground.


(Poem titled : 'Perfection' by R.H.Peat) — R.H. Peat

They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth
and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. — T.H. White

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. — Eugene H. Peterson

Real love is sacrifice, unconditional, selfless and benevolent. Love is watching you from afar, happy in the knowledge that as long as you were happy, I would never tell you of my feelings. I would hold them inside and worship the feeling of knowing I felt true love. Love is craving your company, counting the thuds in my chest when you walk into a room because it's the only sound I can hear. Love is the electricity that ignites every nerve when you brush against me. Love is the million dragonflies taking flight inside my gut when I hear you giggle. If love was physical to touch, it would be your form. I sound like a pussy right now but it's not weak to love fiercely, it's powerful and a gift, the greatest there is and I'm grateful for loving you. — D.H. Sidebottom

The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man. — H.L. Mencken

Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded! — Eugene H. Peterson

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves. — William J.H. Boetcker

The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is ... In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else. — H.L. Mencken

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic. — W. H. Auden

Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane. — H.P. Lovecraft

Tardiness is next to wickedness in a society relentless in its consumption of time as both a good and a service
as tweet and Instagram, film clip and sound bite, as sporting event, investment opportunity, Tinder hookup, and interest rate
its value measured not by its texture or its substance but by the speed of its delivery, a distinction apparent to Andy Warhol when he supposedly said that any painting that takes longer than five minutes to make is a bad painting. — Lewis H. Lapham

The discipline of singing early music has a special sound - (it's) very clear. — H. John Poole

Things were rather larger, more obvious and rougher on the American side, but the issues were essentially the same. The general public voted and demonstrated, but its voting seemed to lead to nothing. It felt that things were done behind its back and over its head but it could never understand clearly how. It never seemed able to get sound news out of its newspapers nor good faith out of its politicians. It resisted, it fumbled, it was becoming more and more suspicious and sceptical, but it was profoundly confused and ill-informed. — H.G.Wells

SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one. — William H Gass

The word itself has another color. It's not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn't the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow's deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn't violet's rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green. — William H Gass

That's because you hate parties," said Trevor. I corrected him. "I hate parties with more than 16 people, remember? It's an exact science," Trevor chuckled, the sound hitting me right in the pit of my stomach."The 16 person rule, I remember now. You were always specific about that number — L. H. Cosway

The air was full of sound, a defenning and confusing conflict of noises (...) — H.G.Wells

The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them. — H.P. Lovecraft

This time I did not have to question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound - the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats. — H.P. Lovecraft

He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters. — Ben H. Winters

It is my conviction that if any professional biologist will take adequate time to examine carefully the assumptions upon which the macro-evolution doctrine rests, and the observational and laboratory evidence that bears on the problem of origins, he/she will conclude that there are substantial reasons for doubting the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, I believe that a scientifically sound creationist view of origins is not only possible, but it is to be preferred over the evolutionary one. — Dean H. Kenyon

We burnt the salt and the herbs (in America it is correct to drop the h in herbs
it does sound odd.) — Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

My argument for them is not altruistic in the least, but purely selfish. I should dislike to see them harassed by the law for two plain and sound reasons. One is that their continued existence soothes my vanity (and hence promotes my happiness) by proving to me that there are even worse fools in the world than I am. The other is that, if they were jailed to-morrow for believing in Christian Science, I should probably be jailed the next day for refusing to believe in something still sillier. Once the law begins to horn into such matters, I am against the law, no matter how virtuous its ostensible intent. No liberty is worth a hoot which doesn't allow the citizen to be foolish once in a while, and to kick up once in a while, and to hurt himself once in a while. — H.L. Mencken

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. — H.L. Mencken

Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things ... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound. — Dorothy H Cohen

Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains. — H.L. Mencken

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause. — H.L. Mencken

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on ... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric. — H.L. Mencken

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.
And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other. — H.G.Wells

For sound advice is a beacon, good teaching is a light, moral discipline is a life path. — Eugene H. Peterson

That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. — H.P. Lovecraft

He was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become and empty sound. — H.P. Lovecraft

Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them ... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. — D.H. Lawrence

A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the republic. — H.L. Mencken

I want my prayers, and the prayers of my friends, to ricochet off the rock faces of mountains, reverberate down the corridors of shopping malls, sound ocean deeps, water arid deserts, find a foothold in fetid swamps, encounter poets as they search for the accurate word, mingle their fragrance with wildflowers in Alpine Meadows, sing with the looms of Canadian lakes. — Eugene H. Peterson

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. — W. H. Auden

Give yourself to reading.' ... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,
especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The Coming of the Lord 13But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, g that you may not grieve as others do h who have no hope. 14For i since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him j those who have fallen asleep. 15For this we declare to you k by a word from the Lord, [4] that l we who are alive, who are left until m the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16For n the Lord himself will descend o from heaven p with a cry of command, with the voice of q an archangel, and r with the sound of the trumpet of God. And s the dead in Christ will rise first. 17Then we who are alive, who are left, will be t caught up together with them u in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so v we will always be with the Lord. 18Therefore encourage one another with these words. — Anonymous

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist ... He plans to be both an artist and a moralist
a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community
that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success. — H.L. Mencken

A portal is a transitionary device of sight or sound that functions as a sort of third gravitating body between the this and the that, pulling us toward itself, allowing us to bridge into the unknown from the known. — Roy H. Williams

Let a person only approach his or her own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free ... The creative spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate. — D.H. Lawrence

Yes. When I want to fill my heart with His love, I open my eyes to the creations of His hand, especially the ones that seem outrageously and uselessly beautiful--sunsets, sunrises, ice crystals, patterns in drying mud, golden cottonwood leaves against red rock cliffs, the melancholy sound of the first cricket in August, moss-covered rocks in a mountain stream, the way a baby laughs before she can do useful things such as talking or walking. — Virginia H. Pearce

Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound. — H.G.Wells

Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, "Cthulhu fhtagn". — H.P. Lovecraft

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . . — H.G.Wells

There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys out warm being. — D.H. Lawrence

The truth about injustice always sounds outrageous. — James H. Cone

Applause is the most powerful thing ... people talk about the sound of it, but what I hear is glee. — C. C. H. Pounder

She was awakened by a strange buzzing sound coming from somewhere nearby. Her stomach ached. She felt sick. Her head was spinning. Slowly, she half-opened her eyes, squinting against the sunlight streaming in through a window. She was naked apart from her socks. The weird buzzing came again. She lay on her back and looked up, seeing a large revolving ceiling fan. She tried to remember where she was. — G.H. Finn

Admiral Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy: How old do you think I am, anyway?
Lt. Commander Data: 137 years, Admiral, according to Starfleet records.
Admiral Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy: Explain how you remember that so exactly!
Lt. Commander Data: I remember every fact I am exposed to, sir.
Admiral Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy: [looking at both sides of Data's head] I don't see no points on your ears, boy, but you sound like a Vulcan.
Lt. Commander Data: No, sir. I am an android.
Admiral Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy: Hmph. Almost as bad.'
'Data: [uses a device in his arm to open a door] Open sesame! You could say I have a magnetic personality.
[laughs at his joke]
Data: Humor! I love it!'
'Lt. Commander Data: Spot, you are disrupting my ability to work.
[he puts Spot to the floor, but she jumps back on Data's desk]
Spot: Meow.
Lt. Commander Data: Vamoose, ye little varmint! — Star Trek The Next Generation

For like a rugged tree you are hard and sound at the core. — H. Rider Haggard

You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. — William J.H. Boetcker

I snorted a surprised laugh and then covered my mouth with the hand that wasn't currently touching his hip.
His answering laugh - a shocked bark likely caused by the sound of my inelegant snort - made me laugh even harder.
"What is that sound? Are you snorting?" He squeezed my shoulders as we crossed the street, his voice thick with amusement.
I snorted again - because when I laugh, I snort like the love child of a pig and an alligator unless I hold my nose, in which case I sound like I've got a terrible case of the hiccups - which made him laugh even harder. — L. H. Cosway

At day's end I'm ready for sound sleep, For you, GOD, have put my life back together. — Eugene H. Peterson

Puget Sound Community School. Like Sudbury and Big Picture, this tiny independent school in Seattle, Washington, gives its students a radical dose of autonomy, turning the "one size fits all" approach of conventional schools on its head. — Daniel H. Pink