Rare And Precious Things Quotes & Sayings

An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment. — Felix Adler

I don't have to tell you how fragile this precious gift of freedom is. Every time we hear, watch, or read the news, we are reminded that liberty is a rare commodity in this world. — Ronald Reagan

Talent is something rare and beautiful and precious,
and it must not be allowed to go to waste. — George Selden

Women don't always want to be treated like we're delicate, or rare, or somehow more precious. We want to be wanted. We want sex to be just as raw as you do. — Christina Lauren

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk ... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could've been captured in words. — Richelle E. Goodrich

True love is something, so very true and very rare to find. So, if you ever find such a thing. Treat it as if it were some treasure. Because, once you find such a thing and set free; it will not ever return. So, treat it as if its your most precious gift ... — Jynnette L. Miller

There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct. — Alan Bradley

In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious ... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful- then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What distinguishes a human being from a computer? The ability to add up numbers? The ability to understand language? The ability to be logical? It is, of course, none of the above. It is the ability to play. Computers cannot have fun. They cannot fantasize. They cannot dream, they cannot experience emotion or summon intuition. These rare, precious qualities come naturally to every child on this earth yet they tend to be seen, by well meaning adults, as faults, foibles and failings. In pushing tiny toddlers to 'perform', we rob them of the ability to imagine. — Jonathan Cainer

When a gift is difficult to give away, it becomes even more rare and precious, somehow gathering a part of the giver to the gift itself. — Cate Blanchett

What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It's almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann's the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he's great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that's internal to the text. His narrator's always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-reader" intrusions. In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare — David Foster Wallace

Good criticism is very rare and always precious. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I knew more happiness and love than I'd ever experienced in my life, and now understood how precious it was to have that love. — Raine Miller

It is after these rare calls that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoil: by anything so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably desire - on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to your neighbour's soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the probability being that he hasn't got one. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

It's one of the most beautiful memories of my life. Not everyone has a chance to meet Greta Garbo! I was so in awe of her that I recently had my assistant search online for her film Queen Christina [1933]. I cherish that rare DVD like a precious keepsake now. — Giovanna Cau

[G]rowing into your future with health and grace and beauty doesn't have to take all your time. It rather requires a dedication to caring for yourself as if you were rare and precious, which you are, and regarding all life around you as equally so, which it is. (267-268) — Victoria Moran

It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What? — Ayn Rand

I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that's becoming a very precious and rare commodity. — Robyn Davidson

Patience - the ability to put our desires on hold for a time - is a precious and rare virtue. We want what we want, and we want it now. Therefore, the very idea of patience may seem unpleasant and, at times, bitter. Nevertheless, without patience, we cannot please God; we cannot become perfect. Indeed, patience is a purifying process that refines understanding, deepens happiness, focuses action, and offers hope for peace. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

To meet someone who really hurts you is to meet a rare and precious treasure. Hold that person in high esteem, and make full use of the opportunity to eradicate your defects and make progress on the path. If you cannot yet feel love and compassion for those who treat you badly, it is a sign that your mind has not been fully transformed and that you need to keep working on it with increased application. — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The gods know, happiness is a precious and rare commodity, and indeed it seems that the more intelligent and perceptive the individual, the less happy they generally are. The cost of seeing things as they are, I expect. — Steven Erikson

The ways of sin are curious," Samuel observed. "I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up."

"Maybe that's a good thing to keep us humble. The fear of God in us."

"I guess so," said Samuel. "And I guess humility must be a good thing, since it's a rare man who has not a piece of it, but when you look at humbleness it's hard to see where its value rests unless you grant that it is a pleasurable pain and very precious.
Suffering - I wonder has it been properly looked at. — John Steinbeck

Gold when first struck is crowded with 'dirt', uncertain, might not be flashy enough to be noticed. However, if you are alert in your senses, you'd see that little glitter; if you're persistent enough, it'll be polished to be one of the finest 'possessions' you could ever acquire. The beauty about gold, though, is that in all states from uncertainty to conviction, it never for once gives up its lustre. We're sometimes too hasty and 'fly searching' that we miss the little uncertain glitters that sparkle in the corners of our eyes. In such rare moments, stop for a while, and hold on to it with the best grip you could muster. — Ufuoma Apoki

But Nature granted to gold and silver no function with which we cannot easily dispense. Human folly has made them precious because they are rare. In contrast, Nature, like a most indulgent mother, has placed her best gifts out in the open, like air, water and the earth itself; vain and unprofitable things she has hidden away in remote places. — Thomas More

It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota - the lovely, the rare, and the precious never affect it except to make it want them. — Mercedes Lackey

And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzling over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. — Hermann Hesse

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent. — George Alec Effinger

Now was the time for now. Now was one of those rare and precious moments with which one was gifted from time to time. That was all it was. A moment. But it was one to be enjoyed to the full while it lasted and treasured for a lifetime after it was over. — Mary Balogh

We need better things, not more. We should not pollute the world with meaningless, unused things when we can make and support things of rare and precious beauty. — Daphne Guinness

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it. — Sharon Salzberg

Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised. — Guy De Maupassant

He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth. — David Guterson

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things. — Max Beerbohm

So here we are, in our rare and precious lives, surrounded by gorgeous moments begging to be noticed and celebrated. Go! Celebrate! — SARK

Whenever you're struck by misfortune, either through an illness or an accident, the people around you suddenly change. There are those who scurry off the sinking ship, like rats, those who wait to see how the situation develops before making their next move, and finally those who remain loyal to their feelings and whose behavior doesn't change. Those friends are both rare and precious. He — Tahar Ben Jelloun

Love is a rare and precious thing. Squander it at your peril. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

A rare orchid that gives off its scent only at night," Nettle replied. "The petals are pure white, far more delicate even than jasmine. One cannot obtain the essence by heating the blossoms- they are too fragile."
"Cold enfleurage, then?" Lillian murmured, referring to the process of soaking the precious petals in sheets of fat until it was saturated with their fragrance, then using an alcohol-based solvent to draw out the pure essence.
"Yes."
She took another breath of the exquisite essence. "What is the orchid's name?"
"Lady of the Night."
That elicited a delighted chuckle from Daisy. "That sounds like the title of one of the novels my mother has forbidden me to read. — Lisa Kleypas

Haiku Christmas Story

New light in the sky
announces a sacred birth.
Shine brightly young star.

Hallelujah song
carries on a gentle wind,
heralding a king.

Shepherds lift their heads,
not to gaze at a new light
but to hear angels.

"Unto you is born
in the city of David
a Savior for all."

Born on straw at night
under low stable rafters,
Baby Jesus cried.

Sheep and goats and cows
gather 'round a manger bed
to awe at a babe.

Wise men come to see
a child of greater wisdom
and honor divine.

Rare and precious gifts,
gold and myrrh and frankincense,
to offer a king.

Mary and Joseph
huddle snugly together.
They cradle God's son.

On this wise He came,
the Son of God to the earth.
A humble wonder. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The Old Ones knew that life is not rare, but precious; not fragile, but vulnerable. Life is as deep as the seas in which it was born, as strong as the mountains that give it shelter, as universal as the stars themselves. — Ben Bova

There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tryant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation. — Amos Oz

So he doesn't tick any of my usual boxes, but there's something in the way he looks at me. In his eyes, there's this strange kind of appreciation that is part attraction, part something else that makes me feel rare and precious and . . . seen. — Cora Carmack

It's actually a rare and precious thing to discover what it is you love to do, and I encourage you to remain unapologetically consumed by it. Be faithful to your gift and very confident in its value. — Jonathan Ive

I do not believe, as do so many musicians, that genius should be left to fight its way to the light. Genius is too rare, too precious, to be permitted to waste the best years of life
the years of youth and lofty dreams
in a heart-breaking struggle for bread. To starve the soul with the body is to do worse than murder. Think, too, of what the public loses! — Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Now there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare. Just as having unexpectedly found a treasure in your own house, you should be happy and grateful toward your enemy for providing you that precious opportunity. Because if you are ever to be successful in your practice of patience and tolerance, which are critical factors in counteracting negative emotions, it is due to your own efforts and also the opportunity provided by your enemy. — Dalai Lama XIV

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perfume lingers to prove that once it was there, and now is flown. — Margaret George

There are few things in life as precious to us as our children. Rare is the woman or the man who wouldn't readily die for his or her offspring. — Debra Webb

He had been the recipient, he now gratefully acknowledged, of a rare and precious gift. In demanding the hand of a woman he neither understood nor was capable of knowing, he had instead received from her the chance to see himself and the opportunity to become a better man. And he had changed. He knew he had. He knew that he was not that man stalking angrily back to his chambers in Rosings Hall. What had happened to him in those intervening months? He was not sure; he could offer no complete explanation, but the man who had opened Rosings's doors, already prepared to write an angry letter, was a stranger, a man who had been walking through his entire life asleep. But now, he had awoken. — Pamela Aidan