Outermost Quotes & Sayings

Watch over your child, as it struggles for breath on the outermost verge of life, or see your wife follow the child to that outermost verge, beside herself for anxiety and sleeplessness, - then love will teach you that life comes first. — Bjornstjerne Bjornson

As many as thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting, enough beyond the shock to think again, it would occur to Emilio Sandoz to wonder if perhaps that day int he Sudan was really only part of the setup for a punchline a life-time in the making. It was an odd thought, under the circumstances. He understood that, even at the time. But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rhakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God. — Mary Doria Russell

The entire function of man is to survive. The outermost limit of endeavour is creative work. Anything less is too close to simple survival until death happens along. So I am engaged in
striving to maintain equilibrium sufficient to at least realize survival in a way to astound the gods. — L. Ron Hubbard

From the radiating point of Siwenna, the forces of the Empire reached out cautiously into the black unknown of the Periphery. Giant ships passed the vast distances that separated the vagrant stars at the Galaxy's rim, and felt their way around the outermost edge of Foundation influence. — Isaac Asimov

As it turned out, the story he told wasn't about doping; it was about power. It was about an ordinary guy who worked his way up to the top of an extraordinary world, who learned to play a shadowy chess match of strategy and information at the outermost edge of human performance. It was about a corrupt but strangely chivalrous world, where you would take any chemical under the sun to go faster, but wait for your opponent if he happened to crash. — Tyler Hamilton

Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it's going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What's actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It's more about what's going to happen between the characters and what's taking place in the story. — Charlie Jane Anders

Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibers, an inextricable part of my past, but I had hoped never to have to recollect it, consciously, and in full, ever again. Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully, as the years went on and my happiness, sanity and equilibrium were assured. Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple on a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory. — Susan Hill

SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection. — Joyce Carol Oates

My philosophy: Don't get caught with a fixed philosophy, a set
of safe beliefs, a particular way of life.

Experiment! With live, with love.

Run an exploration of the real and the true degrees of freedom
of life, of love, of the human condition, inside self and in one's
style of life.

Move! Into new spaces beyond one's present concepts of possible/probable/certain real spaces.

Far vaster than I now know are the innermost/outermost realities.

Far more interesting than I now feel are the deeps of the space, the beyond within, the infinite without.

Love and loving are basic.

Hostility is redundant.

Fear is non-sense.

"Death" is a myth.

I am I. — John C. Lilly

For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs far over her head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilised her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin agonised scream. — Anna Kavan

Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols, and intelligibility to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its destination. — Michael Taussig

Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star. — Carl Sagan

As human beings, we are connected in many ways to each other, to the nature that surrounds us and to the outermost parts of the Universe. Our existence is not manifested only on the visible physical lever, but on many other levels. In the occasional excursions to our collective unconscious through dreams and altered states of mind, we realize that there is much more to our destiny than what we see when we open our eyes in the morning. The whole universe lives on life, breaths at the same speed the air of Divine Creation. — Stevan V. Nikolic

From time to time. You do not count your steps any more. For the simple reason they number each day the same. Average day in day out the same. The way being always the same. You keep count of the days and every tenth night multiply. And add. Your father's shade is not with you any more. It fell out long ago. You do not feel your footfalls any more. Unhearing unseeing you go your way. Day after day. The same way. As if there were no other any more. For you there is no other any more. You used never to halt except to make your reckoning. So as to plod from nought anew. This need removed as we have seen there is none in theory to halt any more. Save perhaps a moment at the outermost point. To gather yourself together for the return. And yet you do. As never before. — Samuel Beckett

The outermost - Jupiter XXVII - moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet was constantly capturing short-lived moons from the asteroid belt, and losing them again after a few million years. Only the inner satellites were its permanent property; the Sun could never wrest them from its grasp. — Arthur C. Clarke

Most of us are like those Russian nesting dolls, presenting a slightly different visage to the world depending on which world we're dealing with at the time. The outermost doll isn't a lie; mine still offers part of who I am, but it's not all of who I am. As I get closer to people, the nesting dolls open and the masks change. But it's a rare person whom I allow to see what's at my core: my innermost thoughts and fears, my dreams and desires, my pettiness and peevishness. — Paul Asay

The human mind is grown inside a 0.0013 cubic meters crystalline calcium phosphate box on the 149 million km2 rocky surface of a 510 million km2 planet that is falling in a straight line over curved space at 108,000 kilometres per hour inside the gravity well of a 6 trillion km2 star on a 250 million year sojourn around the centre of a galaxy containing some 400 billion stars and trillions of planets and moons. The immediate solar system appears to end at the Kuiper Belt, its outer edge a mind-stunning 7 billion kilometres away, yet the outermost reach of the Heliosphere is still another 5 billion kilometres further out. The furthest object, however, within the Sun's gravity well, Sedna, marks the solar system's diameter to in fact be a sense-jarring 287 billion kilometres in length. — John Zande

Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care — Jostein Gaarder

If God is to create or to preserve a creature, God must be present and must make and preserve God's creation both in its innermost and outermost aspects. — Martin Luther

The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier as its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. — Gilles Deleuze

Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft , to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascension of Christ - all bodily - into heaven? — Joseph Campbell

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani

I've arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I've been doing. — Alice Koller

Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things? — Philip Reeve

The leader builds dispersed and diverse leadership - distributing leadership to the outermost edges of the circle to unleash the power of shared responsibility. — Frances Hesselbein

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half, so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distances from the center of Mars; which evidently shews them to be governed by the same Law of Gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies. — Jonathan Swift

Obscurity is Japan's outermost defense. The country doesn't want to be understood. — David Mitchell

The body is the outermost layer of the mind. — David Mitchell

Moreover, the universe as a whole is infinite, for whatever is limited has an outermost edge to limit it, and such an edge is defined by something beyond. Since the universe has no edge, it has no limit; and since it lacks a limit, it is infinite and unbounded. Moreover, the universe is infinite both in the number of its atoms and in the extent of its void. — Epicurus

The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deepest things of the Creator.
He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself. — George MacDonald