Quotes & Sayings About Precipice

Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Since we can't trust the precipice, we shall trust the bridge however worn out it is and we shall cross to the other side! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Remember, our kind protects you Normals from the Pures. We are the rope tied between man and super-beast. A rope forever dangling from the precipice.
I tap Zetania's shoulder and ask, "What's a precipice?"
"A cliff's edge," she whispers.
Precipice. Must be a French word. — Daven Anderson

He suddenly found himself on the precipice of utility. — J. F. Powers

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening. — Frederick Buechner

A horse perceives eye contact as provocative, as if it and its status in the herd are not being respected. If it cannot avoid eye contact, it will react in a different way, by rebelling for example. In dressage you don't get anywhere by not showing respect, however superior your species might be. Any animal trainer can tell you that. In the mountains in Argentina there's a wild horse which will jump off the nearest precipice if any human tries to ride it. — Jo Nesbo

We watch Paracelsus in Basle as though seeing a man run headlong toward a precipice. Like an indestructible lunatic, he will do so again and again throughout his life. — Philip Ball

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late." Paul — Frank Herbert

That is what thrills me, personally. Small acts of kindness; thoughtful, large acts of kindness. I feel like we're in a bit of a precipice, and I think that any beautiful energy on the kindness continuum will just help us fall into a lovelier place. — Bellamy Young

Desire is storm, greed is whirlpool, pride is precipice, attachment is avalanche, ego is volcano. Discard desire and you are liberated. — Sathya Sai Baba

I love you," she murmured.
The words ... it was as though an entire sun had exploded in his chest.
He'd been ridiculous. His thrashing thoughts, his grand confusion and torment and helplessness
it was only love, had always been love, he supposed. It was no precipice he stood at, or rather precipices have little meaning when one finally acknowledges that one has wings. Connor stepped off.
"I love you, too."
Such grave, inadequate words for what it was he felt. — Julie Anne Long

We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like crawling back because so many techniques are lost, and so we're going to have a [small] reserve of teachers who can teach the vast number of interested students. We have these poor, hungry, starving people who want to learn something and no place to get it. It's a tragedy. — Nelson Shanks

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

The more you love,the more love you have to give.It's the only feeling we have which is infinite ... — Christina Westover

Life is the art of finding or building a bridge with a great determination every time you come across a precipice! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

For suddenly above him far and faint his song was taken up, and a voice answering called to him. Maedhros it was that sang amid his torment. But Fingon climbed to the foot of the precipice where his kinsman hung; and then he could go no farther, and he wept when he saw the cruel device of Morgoth. Maedhros therefore, being in anguish without hope, begged Fingon to shoot him with his bow; and Fingon strung an arrow, and bent his bow. And seeing no better hope he cried to Manwe, saying: 'O King to whom birds are dear, speed now this feathered shaft, and recall some pity for the Noldor in their need!' ... Now, even as Fingon bent his bow, there flew down from the high airs Thorondor, King of Eagles, mightiest of all birds that have ever been, whose outstretched wings spanned thirty fathoms; and staying Fingon's hand he took him up, and bore him to the face of the rock where Maethros hung. — J.R.R. Tolkien

As we stand on the precipice of a life of ministry, we will have to answer the question that Jesus poses to each one of us: Are you willing to count the cost? — Erica Mbasan

Precipices are the routine routes of the unroutine men. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

In good times, we all want to drop anchor, to stop in time! But man is condemned to move till the far end of the precipice! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don't
Alvin Ailey — Kathy Petrakis

There was the horror of morning, underslept, feeling she was on the precipice of something that felt like mono, the day already galloping away from her, her chasing on foot, carrying her boots. Then the brief upward respite after a second cup of coffee, when all seemed possible, when — Dave Eggers

You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I'd crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution. — Caroline Kettlewell

I am afraid if there is anything to be afraid of. A precipice cannot hurt you. Lions and tigers can. The streets of New York I consider more dangerous than the Matterhorn to a thoroughly competent and careful climber. — Annie Smith Peck

Fantastic fortune thou deceitful light,
That cheats the weary traveler by night,
Though on a precipice each step you tread,
I am resolved to follow where you lead. — Aphra Behn

We are all rushing upon a precipice, but some of us have wings — Kat Brewer

We are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government. — Zachary Quinto

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself
he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice. — Kevin Brockmeier

I took my fear to literal heights and went skydiving over a year ago. It was in that moment, gazing over the precipice of the plane, when I realized what scared me the most, the unknown. — Kathryn Budig

Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between "he"
and "I. — Linda Pastan

Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the referendum in Quebec, the very existence of Canada was on the line ... I had a responsibility to ensure that Canada never again came close to the precipice, — Jean Chretien

In this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's method of evaluating stimuli, of orienting herself or himself to every experience, that he or she cannot separate him-or herself enough from anxiety to comprehend the goal of avoidance of, or freedom from, anxiety. What Nancy sought was to be able to step cautiously from rock to rock without falling; the idea or possibility of not being on a precipice at all did not occur to her. — Rollo May

So much had changed, and so abruptly. It made me feel a little dizzy, like I was standing on an edge, a precipice somewhere much too high. — Stephenie Meyer

Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of. — Christina Westover

Few things in cultural programming in the mass media are quite as disturbing as watching Charlie Rose leaning forward, craning out over his table, peering deeply, on the very precipice of an incisive question sure to reveal a real Idea, a slim, almost excited smile starting to form on his lips as he imagines the dawning joy of the intellectual life revealed for himself and his audience, and we move with the camera, oh-so-sincerely, to his guest and see that all this expectation and anticipation is addressed to ... Lance Armstrong. Or Ron "Opie" Howard. Or Gary Shandling ... .. — Curtis White

Jo examined the work of art nearest her, idly wondering what fortuitous concatenation of circumstances needed the melodramatic illustration of an Indian in full war costume, tumbling over a precipice with a wolf at his throat, while two infuriated young gentlemen, with unnaturally small feet and big eyes, were stabbing each other close by, and a disheveled female was flying away in the background — Louisa May Alcott

It's fun talking to you ... like walking on the edge of a precipice. At first one's nervous but then courage takes over from somewhere. — Ivan Turgenev

Sometimes to see your work's rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light. What — David Bayles

When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling. — William Hazlitt

When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy. — T. S. Eliot

Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out? — Marisha Pessl

But my heart isn't simple or straightforward. It's a complicated mess of wants and needs, boys and girls: soft, rough, and everything in between, an ever-shifting precipice from which to fall. — Tess Sharpe

Life is a picnic on a precipice. — W. H. Auden

How glorious to be introduced in a drawing room to a Lady who reads Novels, with "Mr. So-and-so - Miss So-and-so; Miss So-and-so, this is Mr So-and-so, who fell off a precipice and was half-drowned." Now I refer to you, whether I should lose so fine an opportunity of making my fortune. No romance lady could resist me - none. — John Keats

What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice
the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero. — Wyndham Lewis

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it. — Blaise Pascal

When we consider the possibility that God will not be good to us, we stand on the precipice of despair and peer into the darkness below. — G.K. Chesterton

My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it. — Giacomo Casanova

Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. And if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go further, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore believing as those that deny Him. — George MacDonald

The men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame ... many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side. — Alistair MacLean

Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God's angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma's rough — Maya Angelou

Unless you jump on it, precipice can teach you many things! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Sometimes I fear that even as a People when we take one step forward, we reel backwards ten times fold. I don't even think on the Precipice of Change will we truly move forward ... It will most definitely take a Miracle. — Solange Nicole

I don't know if we're on the edge of the precipice, but we're in a very, very, very difficult situation. — Luis De Guindos

For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang. — Victoria Schwab

Even when we're standing at the scariest precipice ever, our soul still cries out for joy. — Sue Fitzmaurice

Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice. — Robinson Jeffers

There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night — Ernest Bramah

You yank my hair back even harder, creating a sudden hurt which nearly
topples me over the edge of the precipice.
Look at me whilst you beg me, little one ... — Felicity Brandon

I like playing characters who are out there on the edge, where they can explode at any moment or fall off the precipice. — Jessica Lange

It angered him that his sexuality was an issue at all. As far as he was concerned, who he decided to sleep with was his business alone. — Christina Westover

Moving forward is not always good, especially when there is a precipice ahead! Know to turn back! Know to step back! Sometimes moving backwards is moving forward! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

She had kept well behind the safety barrier her entire life, but now she was standing there at the edge of the precipice for the very first time, fumbling blindly with the realization that there were other ways to live, at how intense and rich life could be. — Katarina Bivald

Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse. — Sam Harris

The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay ... The nations backed their machines over the precipice not one of them wanted war, certainly not on this scale — David Lloyd George

A mountain climber foolishly climbing alone slips off a precipice and finds himself dangling at the end of his safety rope, a thousand feet above a ravine. Unable to climb the rope or swing to a safe resting spot, he calls out in despair: "Hallooo, hallooo! Can anybody help me?" To his astonishment, the clouds part, a beautiful light pours through them, and a mighty voice replies, "Yes, my son, I can help you. Take your knife and cut the rope!" The climber takes out his knife, and then he stops, and thinks and thinks. Then he cries out: "Can anybody else help me? — Daniel C. Dennett

Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity. — Steven Storm

There are some moments in man's life that looking back might cause him fall into the precipice! At those moments, man must just look forward! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man whom while calmly crossing a bridge over a precipice, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Aleksey Aleksandrovich had lived. — Leo Tolstoy

With a calmness born from exhaustion and terror, the shaking of his body stilled, his heart slowing. The cougars were burnished gold in the moonlight, their shapes bright against the damp grey cliff. The two cubs moved across the ragged edge of the rocky outcrop, their mother a stone's throw below. Rich gasped as the female in front jumped to a lower ledge, balancing on the small precipice. She watched him warily, her head moving back and forth as if trying to ascertain what he was, and whether he was worth the bother. — Danika Stone

I didn't want to kiss you good-bye - that was the trouble - I wanted to kiss you good night - and there's a lot of difference. - ERNEST HEMINGWAY Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story. - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD — Robyn Schneider

The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present. — Mike Norton

Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is uncomparingly the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men. — Margaret Fuller

Always know you could be on the precipice of something great. — Donald Trump

I guess we all feel we're in control and we are, until we're not. The problem is that seldom can we tell when it is that we step over the precipice of no return - and then for most of us it is to late. — Braam Malherbe

Doubt is a precipice on the way to God. Blessed is he who is freed from its bonds. He who fares without any doubt, adhere to his footprints if you do not know the way. Cleave to the footprints of the deer and advance with care that you may reach the musk-gland. By means of such trekking, even if you walk on fire, you will reach the luminous peak. — Rumi

I'm dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I'm dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved. Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the the cellar. — Yuri Herrera

The edge of a precipice is a very merciless school; over there you either learn to be serious or you die foolishly! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Precipice is the end of the horizontal road, but the road continues vertically! For the talented, roads always continue; for the capable, there is no moment where the road ends! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

She goes very still and I can count on one hand all the times we've been here before, standing at the precipice of almost and staring down into the abyss of what-if. — Kat Kruger

They collided, and rolled toward the precipice. Loose rocks shifted beneath them, causing a small avalanche that carried the two ragged enemies plunging off the edge towards the abyss below. — C.G. Faulkner

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time — Andre Breton

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss. — Richard Dooling

There it was again, the prickling sense of standing on a precipice. — Lauren Myracle

To follow Beauty even when she shall lead you to the verge of the precipice; and though she is winged and you are wingless, and though she shall pass beyond the verge, follow her, for where Beauty is not, there is nothing; — Kahlil Gibran

When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath - as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice - what assistance are a wife and child? — George Bernard Shaw

You have to run risks. There are no certainties in war. There is a precipice on either side of you - a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring. — Winston Churchill

So, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy. — Alan Watts

Home life's great, man. The kids are great, happy and healthy. I've reached this sort of wonderful precipice. — Ryan Phillippe

I knew a young lady of the last "romantic" generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. — C.S. Lewis

We all reach a point that is the limit of our understanding. When we stare over the precipice of uncertainty and into the dark unknown that we cannot explain with hard evidence, that is when we trade understanding for belief. At best, we make an educated guess. At worst, we make blind leaps of faith. — Ramsey Isler

Archbishop Mannix was possessed of the clearest intellect I have ever encountered. He prayed regularly for five hours and more each day, this in the midst of a life of intense activity. When he was well over ninety, I once asked him about the precise quality of the Faith which had sustained him. His answer? 'My Faith has always been like a thin silken thread, fraying perpetually at the brink of a precipice over which I hang. Yet the thread has never snapped. — Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria

I look at my kids and I feel I'm at the precipice of this job, like just kind of tipping over the other side. I'm very conscious of time I guess is what I want to say, and I want to be there as long as I can with my kids, and I also want to make sure I do all the things that are important to me. — Brad Pitt

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away. — Arthur Golden

I feel the ground slipping under my feet, and just as I am about to fall off the precipice, you draw out a rope and pull me into the safety net of your embrace. That's the thing - I can never trust you to rescue me, and yet you do. Unfailingly. — Rosalyn D'Mello

His youth reappeared, bringing with it all those sweet souvenirs which are rather perfumes than thoughts. Between that past and the present there was an abyss. But imagination has the angel's or lightning's wing; it clears seas in which we should certainly have been shipwrecked; it removes the darkness in which our illusions were lost, the precipice where our happiness was engulfed. — Alexandre Dumas

How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'
(Amber)
'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'
(Virgil Daly) — Christina Westover

You struggle to live the best you can but soon the whole lot disappears. We get up in the morning, but that morning doesn't actually exist any more than the night before, which everyone's already forgotten. We're all walking on the edge of a precipice, I've known that for a long time. One step forward, one step in the void. Over and over again. Going where? No one knows. No one gives a damn. — Veronique Olmi