Invokes Quotes & Sayings

The evolution of the cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understanding of the evolution of death offers me helpful ways to think about my own death. — Ursula Goodenough

An invitation to a wedding invokes more trouble than a summons to a police court. — William Feather

How happy he whose toil Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams. His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve In soft repose; on him the balmy dews Of Sleep with double nutriment descend. — John Armstrong

Knowing constitutional law helps one at the opera. The trial in 'Billy Budd,' as example, invokes the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution. — Karen DeCrow

Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. What emerges is something grander precisely because it is human, to the extent that his actual life reveals itself worthy of the word 'legendary'. — Lesley Hazleton

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius. — Ameen Rihani

Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus - yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle. — Cornel West

What troubles us much, is of less importance to what troubles us much that invokes our thought, heart, spirit and body to dare to a live distinctive footprint on earth — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption. — Christopher Hitchens

The myth of redemptive violence is, in short, nationalism become absolute. This myth speaks for God; it does not listen for God to speak. It invokes the sovereignty of God as its own; it does not entertain the prophetic possibility of radical judgment by God. It misappropriates the language, symbols, and scriptures of Christianity. It does not seek God in order to change; it embraces God in order to prevent change. Its God is not the impartial ruler of all nations but a tribal god worshiped as an idol. Its metaphor is not the journey but the fortress. Its symbol is not the cross but the crosshairs of a gun. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not the unconditional love of enemies but their final elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. Its usurps the revelation of God's purposes for humanity in Jesus. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous. — Walter Wink

Justice can seem to be so very demanding. But we must learn that when we put everything as right as we can put it right, it is Justice who invokes the Atonement, orders the adversary off our property, and posts the notice that his agents will make no more collections from us. Our debt will have been paid in full by the only perfect pure person who ever lived. — Boyd K. Packer

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved. — Robert Jay Lifton

This is the part of the country that invokes terrible nostalgia, a morbid and phlegm-induced retrospective of parties, clubs, drugs, shows, people, and is the goiter of my Boston days. I wouldn't have a clue as to who I'd ever care to see in this town, though I've done time here. If it weren't for Daughters and company, I'd feel like a compete tourist in a ghostly, plot-less town...pulling hoods up and heads around, opposite directions, if I ever saw someone I thought I might have known. Young people feeling really cool in bathrooms, dancing to the same songs in the same clubs, with the same dropout students, artists, thugs, bullies, jocks, all game in the search for one's self and sex. — Wesley Eisold

A first fact should surprise us, or rather would surprise us if we were not used to it. How does it happen there are people who do not understand mathematics? If mathematics invokes only the rules of logic, such as are accepted by all normal minds ... how does it come about that so many persons are here refractory? — Henri Poincare

American boys should not be seen dying on the nightly news. Wars should be over in three days or less, or before Congress invokes the War Powers Resolution. — Evan Thomas

A gay lobbyist is a resident of San Francisco who equates Greek pederasty with consented male-on-male only pedophilia, invokes pederasty to justify his bizarre behavior, and then denies that pedophilia and homosexuality are synonyms. — Bill Gaede

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities. — Glen Duncan

In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it's a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?49 — John C. Lennox

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. — Steven Pinker

O Blessed Mary, whoever loves you honors God; whoever serves you pleases God; whoever invokes your holy name with a pure heart will infallibly receive the object of his petition. — Bernard Of Clairvaux

But that's always a certain way to recognise a facist: when he's more powerful he kills everything that's different from him, he uses only brute force while law breaks like glass under his boots. And then, when he loses and when he's weak, he invokes the law and tolerance of differences. All of a sudden, he knows by heart every single human rights convention he broke so many times before. — Andrej Nikolaidis

If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him. — Italo Calvino

While Mojo suggests any art that invokes supernatural powers, for us creators Mojovation means finding magic in what we do. — Robert Genn

Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like. — Bart Schultz

Healing invokes the power of compassion, both for yourself and for others ... At this point, the healed may become a healer. — David Hawkins

The absence of fatherhood implies the impossibility of brotherhood. It is no accident that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre, in addition to Freud, all struggled with the notion of fatherlessness. Its exalted, but unrealistic, implication is godlessness and self-deification. But its more immediate, existential implication, as we have seen, is being orphaned and abandoned. It is curious that Freud, despite his extensive knowledge of classic literature, either ignored or repressed its most trenchant moral, namely, that by equating oneself with the gods, one invokes their anger and punishment. The gods will not be mocked, and they are intolerant of hubris. — Donald DeMarco

We were such fans of Sleepy Hollow, in all of its iterations - growing up with the Disney show, and then Tim Burton's and, obviously, the most important being Washington Irving's short story. It evokes and invokes a very specific feeling and tone. — Alex Kurtzman

Commonality as a shared estate is an essential paradox; one calling dynamics within dynamics. It invokes the standard of not having standards. — Dew Platt

Lopez Obrador invokes the appeal of national unity, the revolution of 1910, and the progressive constitution of 1917. — Jeremy Corbyn

The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable, says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing. — Alfie Kohn

Chronic negative thinking and the emotions it invokes is, like many destructive behaviors, a form of addiction ... it may not be very pleasant, but it's familiar. — Lauren Mackler

Anyone who invokes authors in discussion is not using his intelligence but his memory. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I use the term "piety" in Calvin's sense as "that reverence joined with the love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces."10 One of the reasons for using "piety," especially when understood in Calvinian terms, is that such an idea invokes a concern of trusting thoughtful reflection and grateful action. — Paul R. Schaefer Jr.

The image my work invokes is the image of good - not evil; the image of order - not chaos; the image of life - not death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to. — Naum Gabo

The only religion which seems to have a function in time of war is the tribal religion which invokes a God as the exclusive protector of the nation which calls upon him. — Joseph Alexander Leighton

Questioning this most dearly held core of the Dutch sense of self not only is felt as a direct attack, it also means that the nonbeliever, the antiracist killjoy, is putting himself or herself above "us," which in itself again runs deeply counter to another strand in the Dutch sense of self: "gelijke monnikken, gelijke kappen" (literally, equal monks, equal cowls), which invokes the deep egalitarian strand in Dutch self-representation. Critical self-reflection, moreover and ironically, is a scarce commodity in a culture that delights in imagining itself as "nothing," "just normal" (Ramdas 1998), without specific characteristics, much less infused with deep racializations. The point of not knowing, racial ignorance, and innocence has long passed. — Gloria Wekker

In prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley of words, until misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first understands the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the pity of heaven! — Alexandre Dumas

Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent. — Jared Diamond

O Moon that rid'st the night to wake
Before the dawn is pale,
The hamadryad in the brake,
The Satyr in the vale,
Caught in thy net of shadows
What dreams hast thou to show?
Who treads the silent meadows
To worship thee below?
The patter of the rain is hushed,
The wind's wild dance is done,
Cloud-mountains ruby-red were flushed
About the setting sun:
And now beneath thy argent beam
The wildwood standeth still,
Some spirit of an ancient dream
Breathes from the silent hill.

Witch-Goddess Moon, thy spell invokes
The Ancient Ones of night,
Once more the old stone altar smokes,
The fire is glimmering bright.
Scattered and few thy children be,
Yet gather we unknown
To dance the old round merrily
About the time-worn stone.
We ask no Heaven, we fear no Hell,
Nor mourn our outcast lot,
Treading the mazes of a spell
By priests and men forgot. — Gerald Gardner

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline. — Christopher Hitchens

. . . I am in my hermitage perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the time. I relish and enjoy time with others. I have been called "the sociable hermit." Ironically, lengthy solitude often invokes a verbal avalanche when I find myself with a dear and treasured friend, or at a rare social occasion. . . . Solitaries, I suppose, are not always introverts. — Barbara Erakko Taylor

A true leader invokes the desire to follow in those being led. — Reverend Joaquin R. Larriba

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action
like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies. — George Eliot

Gender healing and reconciliation consciously invokes this universal love of the heart, which in the end has the capacity to overcome the very real and formidable challenges of gender oppression and injustice that have tormented human societies for literally thousands of years — William Keepin

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. — Abraham Lincoln

If the technocratic class often invokes technology, it is because these inanimate objects can take on a trajectory of their own and so cover for the manager's inability to give leadership. — John Ralston Saul

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon's: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity. — Carl Schmitt

The real measure of how passionate she is about something is whether she invokes an f-bomb. — Jessi Kirby

I don't have the words to describe my feelings.
A woman, the last thing I think of before falling asleep.
A woman, the first thing I think of when I wake.
A woman, the image that passes before my mind's eye
in a moment of clarity.
A woman, the hands we hold,
the one thing I miss most.
A woman, the laughter that warms my heart and soul.
A woman, the perfume that invokes wonderful memories.
A woman, the love, the love, the embrace, the joy,
the wonderful joy. — Jeffrey A. White

I see the relationship sincerity/humor differently. Instead of seeing a balance between them, I see them more inextricably linked, as if one is the hard candy shell that gives to the other, or one is the apparition, the ghost-image that invokes the other. — Alex Lemon

In my teen years and early twenties I was really interested in this fellaheen worlds that, of course, Kerouac invokes and wanting to go below the border and wanting to get to these other places or interstices of the culture where you were encountering the realities of these other kinds of cultures, experiences, language, I think of jazz culture of course. — Anne Waldman

Sitting outside on a dark night, under the stars, invites confidences amongst people of all ages, and all walks of life. It invokes an intimacy you don't find under most other circumstances. — A.B. Shepherd

The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry. — Robert Stone

We covet what is guarded; the very care invokes the thief. Few love what they may have. — Ovid