Quotes & Sayings About Multitudes

Similarly, there are multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe, while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe. — George MacDonald

Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I've perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I'm forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself. — Fernando Pessoa

So many people want to die when all they need is to start living. — Anonymous

Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitudes of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing on it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization. — Max Nordau

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed. — Booker T. Washington

Matthew 7:16 tells us that by their fruits you shall know them. Donald Trump's life has borne fruit, fruit that has provided jobs to multitudes of people in addition to the many he has helped with his generosity. — Jerry Falwell Jr.

The hostile multitudes are vast as spaceWhat chance is there that all should be subdued? Let but this angry mind be overthrownAnd every foe is then and there destroyed — Shantideva

Multitudes of men and women at this moment think that they are saved from their sins when they are not. — David Platt

Most of being young, she had always thought, was playing a game of elimination with an army of different selves until you settled on one, usually by circumstance. But what made her grin, sitting across a starched white tablecloth from a man who seemed to actually listen to her, was the feeling that all those other selves weren't dead. They were still alive - multitudes of them, waiting inside her. — Ted Thompson

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best. — Henry Ward Beecher

[Multitudes] have never been born again. They will go into eternity lost - while thinking they are saved because they belong to the church, or were baptized. — Billy Graham

In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes.
I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots. — Beau Taplin

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 centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong. — Scott Berkun

In solitude, be a multitude to thyself. — George Herbert

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks. — Marvin Minsky

Molecules are moving. Universes are colliding. Generations are being born and dying simultaneously, throughout eternity. As one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman, once said: "I contain multitudes." — Frederick Lenz

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes. — Friedrich Schiller

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics ... restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this ... as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound. — John Pintard

What the multitude says, is so, or soon will be so. — Baltasar Gracian

To multitudes of sufferers on beds of pain and languishing, Jesus has been the great physician to-day; in many a weeping circle around precious dust, He has been the Divine comforter, and the tears have almost ceased to flow as this Jesus has touched the bier. Dying lips have whispered His name, and the valley of the shadow has been illumined as with the glory from the celestial shores. — Abbott Eliot Kittredge

Dar'st thou amid the varied multitude To live alone, an isolated thing? — Percy Bysshe Shelley

To see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes. — Philip Yancey

That's what separated us from the multitudes of Them. We lived harder. Knew better. But we laughed anyway. Laughed because there was nothing else to do but give up. — Michelle Hodkin

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few. — Ovid

Paul Tillich - Loneliness & Solitude: "And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain to pray: and when the evening was come, he was alone" - Matthew 14.23.
'He was there alone.' So are we. Man [humankind] is alone because he/[she] is man [human]. In some way every creature is alone ... Loneliness can be conqured only by those who can bear solitude (1973:15 & 20).
To overcome 'our' sense of aloness is a life long pursuite - let us not despair in its pursuite! — Paul Tillich

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it. — James Baldwin

As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbour multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behaviour. — Damian Thompson

The multitude is always wrong. — Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl Of Roscommon

Others are affected by what I am, and say, and do. So that a single act of mine may spread and spread in widening circles, through a nation or humanity. Through my vice I intensify the taint of vice throughout the universe. Through my misery I make multitudes sad. On the other hand, every development of my virtue makes me an ampler blessing to my race. Every new truth that I gain makes me a brighter light to humanity. — William Ellery Channing

But what most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Ideas first and last: yet it is not till these are formulated and utilized that the devotees of the common sense discern their value and advantages. The idealist is the capitalist on whose resources multitudes are maintained life long. Ideas in the head set hands about their several tasks, thus carrying forward all human endeavors to their issues. — Amos Bronson Alcott

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. — John Henry Jowett

The views of the multitude are neither bad nor good.
[Lat., Neque mala, vel bona, quae vulgus putet.] — Tacitus

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible. — Jorge Luis Borges

When a person has no need to borrow they find multitudes willing to lend. — Oliver Goldsmith

you get nothing with a fist that you can't get in multitudes with your hand open. — Paul Stanley

The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the funeral rite. — Lao-Tzu

Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning. — John W. Dawson

Vast multitudes of professing Christians fit into the category spoken of here. They call Jesus 'Lord,' but they practice lawlessness. They profess faith in Jesus, but have no regard for the divine law. — Ray Comfort

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. — Salman Rushdie

The officers of Congress, may come upon you now, fortified with all the terrors of paramount federal authority. Excisemen taxmen may come in multitudes; for the limitation of their numbers no man knows. They may, unless the general government be restrained ... go into your cellars and rooms, and search, ransack, and measure, everything you eat, drink, and wear. — Patrick Henry

The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked. — Thomas Hartwell Horne

In John 6 we read that when great multitudes went after Him, He told them three times that unless they were willing to pay the price, they could not be His followers. — Billy Graham

A very common flower adds generosity to beauty. It gives joy to the poor, to the rude, and to the multitudes who could have no flowers were nature to charge a price for her blossoms. — Henry Ward Beecher

To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters. — Voltaire

Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the one best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness. — John Stuart Mill

What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are ...
Beyond reproach, I said.
He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it. — Margaret Atwood

The surface personality is only the beginning of what we are. So as we meditate, we still that surface personality, we can see beyond it, and we see that we encompass multitudes. — Frederick Lenz

You," she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. "I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse. — Stephanie Danler

Maybe solitude is best had in the midst of multitudes. — William Goyen

The smells arose from everything, everywhere, flowing together and remaining as a sickening, tantalizing discomfort. They flowed from the delicatessen shop with its uncovered trays of pickled herrings, and the small open casks of pickled gherkins and onions, dried fish and salted meat, and sweaty damp walls and floor; from the fish shop which casually defied every law of health; from the kosher butcher, and the poulterer next door, where a fine confetti of new-plucked feathers hung nearly motionless in the fetid air; and from sidewalk gutters where multitudes of flies buzzed and feasted on the heaped-up residue of fruit and vegetable barrows. — E.R. Braithwaite

A portion of the multitude must ever be coerced. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Round a turn of the Qin Fortress winds the Wei River,
And Yellow Mountain foot-hills enclose the Court of China;
Past the South Gate willows comes the Car of Many Bells
On the upper Palace-Garden Road-a solid length of blossom;
A Forbidden City roof holds two phoenixes in cloud;
The foliage of spring shelters multitudes from rain;
And now, when the heavens are propitious for action,
Here is our Emperor ready-no wasteful wanderer. — Wang Wei

First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of subtlety and intellect - and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-I-mean? outrage: look, they don't even buy our products! (Usually referred to as "quality art.") — Tom Wolfe

Silence, when correctly timed, can speak multitudes of words to a person, without any extra effort on your part. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority ... and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species. — Edmund Burke

WARRIOR LIGHT

Jafar, Muhammad's cousin, was a warrior of concentrated light. When he rode up

to a walled city, it was no more to him than a gulp of water in his dry mouth. This

happened at Mutah. No one went out to fight him. "What's to be done?" the king asked

his clairvoyant minister. "If you strap on your sword with this one," replied

the advisor, "also wrap your shroud around you!" "But he's only one man!"

"Ignore the singularity. Look with your wisdom. He gathers multitudes, as stars

dissolve in sunlight." Human beings can embody a collective, a majesty

of spirit, which is not like having a name or a body. A herd of onagers may display

a thousand antler points; then a lion comes to the edge of their field: they scatter. — Jalaluddin Rumi

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.' — Jerry Saltz

Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people's natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they - the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate - are themselves the government. — Robert Higgs

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting 5 of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished — Homer

I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that. — Patti Smith

The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own! — Eugene O'Neill

My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes. — Steve Prefontaine

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter. — Amitav Ghosh

There is a place on earth that is a vast desolate wilderness, a place populated by shadows of the dead in their multitudes, a place where the living are dead, where only death, hate and pain exist. — Giuliana Tedeschi Brunelli

What if Beatriz Preciado is right - what if we've entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that Preciado calls the "pharma-copornographic era," whose principal economic resource is nothing other than "the insatiable bodies of the multitudes - their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neurosexual synapses ... [our] desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction, and ... pleasure"? — Maggie Nelson

A multitude of words is tiresome, unlike remaining centered. — Laozi

Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores;let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God's right to come. — Herman Melville

And I never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain. — Li-Young Lee

There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes. — Jerry Saltz

And in all of Babylonia there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, 'til the prophets bade the multitudes get a grip on themselves and shape up. — Woody Allen

It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not. — Rollo May

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for he vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy

There are multitudes of pure and holy spirits waiting to take tabernacles, now what is our duty. To prepare tabernacles for them; to take a course that will not tend to drive those spirits into families of the wicked, where they will be trained in wickedness, debauchery, and every species of crime. It is the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can.
This is the reason why the doctrine of plurality of wives was revealed, that the noble spirits which are waiting for tabernacles might be brought forth. — Brigham Young

The world is "sick" with loneliness in spite of multitudes of people living in it — Sunday Adelaja

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers. — D.H. Lawrence

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed. — Jack London

We like things to be black or white, tall or short, here or there. We like to consider two sides to every story. Unfortunately, there aren't always two sides. Sometimes there's only one; more often, there are multitudes. Many facets on the stone. Nooks and crannies in abundance. Things are usually not either black or white, but multicolored. — Barry Leiba

In the scattered settlements of this Diocese, schools and Churches are of necessity for many years few in number, and multitudes of both sexes are growing up in great ignorance. — John Strachan

Multitudes of people who expect to go to Heaven will go to a Hell of torment. Thousands of "good" people, "moral" people, church members, even church workers - yes, and, alas, even prophets, priests and preachers - will find themselves lost when they expected to be saved, condemned when they expected approval, cast out of Heaven when they expected to be received into eternal bliss. That is the explicit meaning of the words of our Lord ... (see: Matt 7:21-23.] — John R. Rice

The purpose of a spirit filled life is to demonstrate the supernatural power of our living God so that the unsaved multitudes will abandon their dead gods to call upon the name of The Lord and be delivered. — T.L. Osborn

We sought a tribal society, to be close to each other, not to sit behind a television with our families and not see our families, not just to watch the evening news and the inane comedies designed to pacify the multitudes, but rather to explore ourselves. — Frederick Lenz

Multitudes speak of their first love; seldom about their last hate. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Hurry, oh peaceful Death, and carry me from these multitudes who left me in the dark corner of oblivion because I do not bleed the weak as they do. Come, oh gentle Death, and enfold me under your white wings, for my fellowmen are not in want of me. Embrace — Kahlil Gibran

The social states of human kinds Are made by multitudes of minds, And after multitudes of years A little human growth appears Worth having, even to the soul Who sees most plain it's not the whole. — John Masefield

Servant of God, well done! well hast thou fought
The better fight, who single hast maintain'd
Against revolted multitudes the cause of truth. — John Milton

My mother is a poem that I could never write for she deserves multitudes; all of praise. — Sinovuyo Nkonki

Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others. — Jose Luis Peixoto

Your local dreams contain global elements; think global. On no account should you settle with a crowd when God has called you for multitudes! Dare to dream big! — Israelmore Ayivor

Now here is exactly the point, I am afraid, where multitudes of English people fail, and are in imminent danger of being lost for ever. They know that there is no forgiveness of sin excepting in Christ Jesus. They can tell you that there is no Saviour for sinners, no Redeemer, no Mediator, excepting Him who was born of the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, and buried. But here they stop, and get no further! They never come to the point of actually laying hold on Christ by faith, and becoming one with Christ and Christ in them. They can say, He is a Saviour, but not 'my Saviour,' - a Redeemer, but not 'my Redeemer,' - a Priest, but not 'my Priest,' - an Advocate, but not 'my Advocate:' and so they live and die unforgiven! No wonder that Martin Luther said, Many are lost because they cannot use possessive pronouns. — J.C. Ryle

Deniers build their pseudo-arguments on traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and imagery. They contend that Jews created the myth of the Holocaust in order to bilk the Germans out of billions of dollars and ensure the establishment of Israel. Once again the devious Jews have harmed innocent multitudes - Germans and Palestinians in particular - for the sake of their own financial and political ends. To someone nurtured by the soil of anti-Semitism, this makes perfect sense.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page xx — Deborah E. Lipstadt

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man. — Joyce Carol Oates

I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heathen and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words; and that the multitudes of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by these things. — Jonathan Edwards

Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil. — Winston S. Churchill

Flies trouble us not by their strength but by their multitudes. — Nancy B. Brewer