Momentous Quotes & Sayings

Many [Western Christians] habitually think and act as if there is no eternity ... We major in the momentary and minor in the momentous. — Randy Alcorn

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow. There — Amor Towles

I have so much faith in the general government of the world by Providence that I can hardly conceive a transaction of such momentous importance [as the framing of the Constitution] ... should be suffered to pass without being in some degree influenced, guided, and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent, and beneficent Ruler in whom all inferior spirits live and move and have their being. — Benjamin Franklin

If I'm finally taking a trip into the unknown; there ought to be photographs to document this momentous event. — Kristin Hannah

Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time. — Pal Brekke

I hold a vision of this blue green planet, safe and in balance. At the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, we are emerging to a new reality. We are ready to make the next leap - as momentous as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote. — Elizabeth May

It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself. — Henry David Thoreau

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books. — Thomas Carlyle

In the dying days of the Gzilt civilisation, before its long-prepared-for elevation to something better and the celebrations to mark this momentous but joyful occasion, one of its last surviving ships encountered an alien vessel whose sole task was to deliver a very special party-goer to the festivities. — Iain M. Banks

No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory. — Soseki Natsume

Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant
that is, all the children
must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates. — Horace Mann

The most significant moment will be when we stop referring to the hiring of qualified women (and racial, ethnic and religious minorities) as significant. In other words, when qualified people are hired without regard to race, gender, ethnicity, religious or other differentiating characteristics, that will be the most significant, indeed momentous, event of all. — Amy Trask

Of Congress, "party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day whilst the momentous concerns of an empire ... are but secondary considerations," that "business of a trifling nature and personal concernment withdraws their attention from matters of great national moment. — George Washington

In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid.
As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain. — Nikolai Lobachevsky

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words. — Eric Hoffer

For all founders, going public is a momentous milestone that has to be experienced to be fully understood. It is the culmination of years of hard work and personal sacrifice. — Jay Samit

Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there. — Kathleen Glasgow

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. — Shirley Hazzard

Sometimes Christians speak of each decision of their lives as though they were launching a moon-shot where a single miscalculation would send the capsule into a trackless void. Even space scientist do better than that, correcting the flight of their space-probes by radioed signals. God does much better. He knows that we are often incapable of distinguishing trivial decisions from momentous ones, and that we are foolish and imperceptive. He knows---- and keeps us in his hand. — Edmund P. Clowney

I began my tale in the hope that I might produce something to interest the young (perchance, also, the old) in a most momentous case - the total abolition of the African slave-trade. I close it with the prayer that God may make it a tooth in the file which shall eventually cut the chain of slavery, and set the black man free. — R.M. Ballantyne

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude. — Sigmund Freud

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin's book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat. — Jeff Schweitzer

Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing effects. We may be so defended against feeling the full impact of our emotional pain - whether it be grief, sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that matter, even joy or satisfaction - that we unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at all or know what we are feeling. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Monuments make momentous men immortal, but more memorable are mortal men making mere moments monumental. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Consider this: billions of people in the world, each with billions of I ams. I am a quiet observer, a champion wallflower. I am a lover of art, the Mets, the memory of Dad. I represent approximately one seven-billionth of the population; these are my momentous multitudes, and that's just for starters. — David Arnold

Promises take many shapes, and the more ... momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time. — Iain M. Banks

My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, i am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. — Samuel Beckett

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" Now let's look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. "The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas," says the science writer Dennis Overbye. — Walter Isaacson

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became. — Louis Kahn

But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all? We — John Banville

One can't realize difficulty arriving at a momentous decision until one comes to do so. — Aminu Kano

The Memorial Dedication was a momentous occasion — Tommy Hilfiger

Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. They're able to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and society and convert those changes into objects and ideas that people can understand. — Paola Antonelli

If a man really has charge of his destiny at all, he should have something to say about getting born; and I only came through by a hair's-breadth. What had I to do with this momentous first step? In the language of the lawyer, I was not even a party of the second part. — Clarence Darrow

It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected ... I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing ... I still had the childish notion that since my life was so important, all lives were so important. Since my death would be so cataclysmic, all deaths would be so cataclysmic. — Michael J. Collins

Comrades - We are living in momentous times. — James Larkin

The history of Napoleon now becomes, for 12 momentous years, the history of mankind. — John Holland Rose

You're not useful to me until you've made three momentous mistakes. — Dan Wieden

The Dead and Those About to Die is a gripping, first-hand account of the desperate battle for Omaha Beach on D-Day by the legendary 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. On the 70th anniversary of that momentous event, John C. McManus's tale of courage under fire is a vivid reminder that freedom isn't free and that when the chips are down stalwart American soldiers will always answer the call of duty. — Carlo D'Este

Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing ... — Wendell Berry

I began to sense a momentous glory radiating from every form that met my eye- every limb and leaf, every blade of grass ablaze with the unutterable grandeur and majesty. And it seemed to me that the world I saw before me was merely an outward manifestation of a vastly powerful, deeply fundamental reality that existed just out of sight. I might not discern this veiled reality directly, but I could perceive its effects. — Stephen R. Lawhead

We were alone in the dark, even though the enormous theater was filled with probably a thousand people. We were a tiny island in a sea of other people who didn't matter, who had no meaning, who were so stupid, so oblivious, so stuck in their own boring lives that they didn't even notice the huge, momentous, life-shattering event that was taking place right there in row L, between seats 102 and 104. — Claire LaZebnik

It seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. — George Eliot

I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me. — Stephen Jay Gould

The Hitler movement is a stampede. It is something beyond reason, like a pulse beating, like a rush of blood to the head, like the sap rising from the twisted roots of a family tree ... in many ways it is the most remarkable upheaval of our time, perhaps the most momentous. — Anne O'Hare McCormick

Religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions — George Eliot

Wherever people gather for selfless ends, there is a vast augmentation of their individual capacities. Something wonderful, something momentous happens. An irresistible force begins to move, which, though we may not see it, is going to change our world. In this lies the power and the meaning of spiritual companionship. — Eknath Easwaran

Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and Responsibility of our existence. — Elihu Burritt

Author Elizabeth Stone once said, Making a decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. — John Medina

I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching. — Melissa Bank

I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious statues of Right and Duty. — Henri Barbusse

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, "the home epic"- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia - not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost. — Rebecca Mead

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. — Brian Eno

The famous names throughout history-be they heroes or villains-if they accomplished anything notable, they were passionate. Passion is what drives those who accomplish momentous feats, for good or evil. — Andrew Williams

Only two or three months ago, one of the Tokyo newspapers (I can't remember which) admirably reported that a two hundred inch astronomical telescope in America was halfway toward completion. I should like to praise the editor of that newspaper. Articles about war, foreign affairs, and the stock market are not the only things that should be considered newsworthy. A two hundred inch lens can magnify our view of the cosmos considerably. The scope of human vision will expand tremendously. It will become possible to see what was once impossible to behold. It will be a momentous occasion, as though the whole human race, once blind, is granted the gift of sight. Its importance is unrivalled by any war. — Rampo Edogawa

In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest - the vast majority, tens of thousands of days - are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. — William Landay

The capacity for loving strangers, whether one thinks of them as fictional beings or stars one will never meet, is a profound reflection on the new consciousness whereby every individual leads his or life while aware of all the billions of other people on Earth. Perhaps it is a fantasy or a fallacy that we can feel for so many strangers. Perhaps it is a mask for selfishness. But no matter the modern stress on special effects, there isn't a sight in movies as momentous as shots of a face as its mind is being changed. And only movies have allowed that. — Edward Jay Epstein

It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education. — D.H. Lawrence

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, "the wrath of God," "the day of wrath," etc ... — Ambrose Bierce

Even of if a certain backlash is unavoidable, we must make the most of the momentous chance with which history has presented us so swiftly and so unexpectedly. — Moshe Sharett

Does this ... does this mean you want to be my boyfriend?" My question sounds both immature and momentous. But Josh doesn't flinch.
"Yes," he says. "I want. — Stephanie Perkins

Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot. — Scott Anderson

The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States. — Alexander Hamilton

Jung found that evidence in two sources: alchemy and Gnosticism. Interpreted psychologically, both served as hoary counterparts to his brand of psychology and therefore as evidence of its objectivity: The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology.24 — C. G. Jung

You wouldn't think the touch of someone's hand could blow your mind. It's nothing, right? People don't right songs and poems about holding hands - they write them about kisses and sex and eternal love. I mean, when you're a little kid you hold hands with your parents to cross the street. Who's going to write an ode to that?
We were alone in the dark, even though the enormous theater was filled with probably a thousand people. We were a tiny island in a sea of other people who didn't matter, who had no meaning, who were so stupid, so oblivious, so stuck in their own boring lives that they didn't even notice the huge, momentous, life-shattering event that was taking place right there in row L, between seats 102 and 104.
Derek Edwards was holding my hand. — Claire LaZebnik

This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades. - by Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam — Sol Stern

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it's gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there's a memory for them to happen in ... — Graham Swift

The business being thus closed ... dined together and took a cordial leave of each other After which I returned to my lodgings, did some business with and received the papers from the secretary of the Convention, and retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed. — George Washington

Embracing a low carbon economy will be as momentous as the previous industrial revolutions. As the shift from coal to oil did. And the shift from gas light to electric light. It has the potential to give us the competitive edge in the new global economy. The scale of the challenge is extraordinary. We will need to reinvent in the way we live our lives, the way our world works — Charles Hendry

Half of the pleasure of painting and feeling the joy of the creative act is sharing it with others and the feeling of connection. It could just be the colour. But it is something that someone other than you has seen and felt. It is momentous. It is magic. — Sara Genn

The most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was: Shall France remain here, or shall she not? — Francis Parkman

God has reserved momentous victories and great rewards for us, but we'll never make it to our milestones if we can't make it through our moments. — Beth Moore

I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else. — Jeffrey Eugenides

When I was little I always thought I was marked out, special, on the verge of something momentous. I used to tingle with anticipation. — Felicity Kendal

Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life — Karen Armstrong

Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously. — Yukio Mishima

But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. — Thomas Jefferson

I'll never turn her away, Clyde. She's my mate. I'll protect her till my dying breath. I'll even swallow my pride and ask a favor as momentous as the one I just asked of a man who has done nothing but try to drive a wedge between her and myself. — J.L. Sheppard

We are blessed to be tiny beings in this universe. We are blessed to feel momentous because we are larger than these grains of sand. — Anne Rice

I Need a Good Book

I need a good story.
I need a good book.
The kind that explodes
Off the shelf.
I need some good writing,
Alive and exciting,
To contemplate all by myself.

I need a good novel,
I need a good read.
I probably need
Two or three.
I need a good tale
Of love and betrayal
Or perhaps an adventure at sea.

I need a good saga.
I need a good yarn.
A momentous and mightily
Or slight one.
But with thousands and thousands
And thousands of books,
I need someone to tell me
The right one.

-John Lithgow — John Lithgow

The photographer discovers himself/herself being photographed and we can guess he is uncomfortable. Unsuccessfully he/she tries to recompose his posture and to look like a photographer taking photos. But no, he is and continues to be a spectator. The momentous fact of being photographed leads him to becoming an actor. And, as always, actors must assume a role, which is only an elegant way of avoiding to say they must choose sides, choose a faction, take an option. — Subcomandante Marcos

Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. — Frederic Goudy

At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition. — Jean Cocteau

In forty hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur of the moment will have to make the most momentous decisions. But I believe that one's spirit enlarges with responsibility and that, with God's help, I shall make them, and make them right. — George S. Patton

Christian worship is the most momentous, most urgent, most glorious action that can take place in human life. — Karl Barth

I sit up in bed, lean my back against the sill to better enjoy their verbal tennis match. I can feel the summery day through the window, deliciously warming my back. But when I look over at Bailey's bed, I'm leveled. How can something this momentous be happening to me without her? And what about all the momentous things to come? How will I go through each and every one of them without her? — Jandy Nelson

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel. — David Novak

Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

She longed to feel something momentous. Sometimes her life seemed so little. — Liane Moriarty

It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous. — Mona Simpson

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you ... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. — Abraham Lincoln

We have evidence all around us in our daily analytic practice and in contemporary world history that this earth-shaking archetypal event is taking place here and now. It has already started. It is manifesting itself in international relations; in the breakdown of the social structures of Western civilization; in political, ethnic, and religious groupings; as well as within the psyches of individuals- the momentous event of the coming of the self into conscious realization. — Edward F Edinger

Does it make sense to pray for guidance about the future if we are not obeying in the thing that lies before us today? How many momentous events in Scripture depended on one person's seemingly small act of obedience! Rest assured: Do what God tells you to do now, and, depend upon it, you will be shown what to do next. — Elisabeth Elliot

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later. — Mark Haddon

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before ... We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy ... to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer. — Daniel J. Boorstin

If all the months and all their days could be like June weather in New York, there would be paradise on earth. Often, in early June, momentous decisions are made, power waxes strong, quick wars are fought, and love affairs are begun and ended. — Mark Helprin

The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous ... — Sri Aurobindo

Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words. — Eric Hoffer

When an important writer recommends a work to you -- whether by openly naming the title; or by shy=covert use of it (which perhaps is the greater praise) then go right ahead and follow his [sic!, etc] momentous hint ! A man with expertise and taste has done trusty spade-work for you : {pre=reading} and winnowing 1000 volumes of antiquated chaff for you. Not to make grateful use of such a hint would mean my thoughtless=arrogant shoving aside all the precious, irreplaceable hours that a venerable predecessor spent reading for me. — Arno Schmidt

The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation. — Woodrow Wilson