Halcyone Literary Quotes & Sayings

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water ... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song ... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's ... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!
Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us! — Guy De Maupassant

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. — Samuel Johnson

I walk by, seeing myself walk by on a bag, someone's hands gripping the paper handles above my neck, my curved waist, my gleam of sweat, me, half a block away, and think, you don't know self-fragmentation until it's staring you in the face. — Chris Campanioni

Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?" Barbara Loe Fisher asks of the hep B vaccine. The implication behind the word innocent is that only those who are not innocent need protection from disease. All of us who grew up during the AIDS epidemic were exposed to the idea that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality, promiscuity, and addiction. But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive. When I was a child, I asked my father what causes cancer and he paused for a long moment before saying, "Life. Life causes cancer." I took this as an artful dodge until I read Siddhartha Mukherjee's history of cancer, in which he argues not only that life causes cancer but that cancer is us. "Down to their innate molecular core," Mukherjee writes, "cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves." And this, he notes, "is not a metaphor. — Eula Biss

It would be equally reasonable to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere nibble grass. — Emile Faguet

Love, once given, is forever. It canna simply go away. — Karen Marie Moning

It is absolutely impossible at the same time to be a man of understanding and not to be ashamed to gratify the body. — Clement Of Alexandria

My parents, worried that I might become popular at school, got me a book of puns at an impressionable age. — Alexandra Petri

I've had many failures in terms of technological ... business ... and even research failures. I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing. — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw