Occident Quotes & Sayings

Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something. — Gary Snyder

Depression never arrives alone in Life. It brings its friends with it despair, self-injury, and suicidal Thoughts. — Unknown

I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities - to say nothing of historical entities - such locales, regions, geographical sectors as "Orient" and "Occident" are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other. — Edward W. Said

Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God ... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them. — Jean Vanier

Failure is rarely a conscious decision and it's often out of our control, determined by things like physics and circumstance and other people. What we can always control, however, is our reaction to failure. — Kevin Hearne

I learned that you can stand up for yourself and still maintain your zen! — Doreen Virtue

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours? — Samuel Daniel

I have questioned God sometimes whether prayers have gone unanswered. But answered prayer is still harder to believe. — David Wilkerson

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature. — Edward Abbey

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity. — Robert Fisk

Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call war and commerce. These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient. — Ambrose Bierce

The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own. — Tahir Shah

Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from that of the Occident, where we see objects arrayed symmetrically on mantelpieces and elsewhere. In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. — Okakura Kakuzo

Michael Eisner contacted me once and asked me if he could change the name of Disneyland to 'Braffland.' I said no, because whenever I go to Disneyland there's always fat people everywhere wearing tight clothes. Disneyland, frankly, has a lot of improving to do before it gets my namesake. — Zach Braff

When you're no longer ill, and everyone's gotten over the fact that you've had cancer, that core of steel doesn't go away, and then I had to find other channels for it. — Sam Taylor-Wood

Genius everywhere is one. In the Orient and in the Occident the deep thinkers are kin, the poets are cousins, the pioneers of the spirit are the messengers of peace and good will to the world. Their works are the open highways between nations, and they themselves are the ever living guardians and guides. — Ameen Rihani

There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They were a stationary form of violent movement. — A.S. Byatt

A man does not fly like a bird, but one foot moves and then another and one day a man is there, and a king dies. — George R R Martin

... the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside? — Jack Kerouac

Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business. — Simon Kuper

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur. — Julius Evola

Depression has been called the world's number one public health problem. In fact, depression is so widespread it is considered the common cold of psychiatric disturbances. But there is a grim difference between depression and a cold. Depression can kill you. — David D. Burns

The only thing we'll be handing you is your head. (Fraser)
Ooo. Scary. Have you ever thought of making up children's tales? You might actually succeed in frightening a two-year-old. (Sin) — Kinley MacGregor

However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do. It's like being in a family. — Roberta Bondi

Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbour says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche