Quotes & Sayings About Ruins

Don't fuss about trifles. Don't permit little things-the mere termites of life-to ruin your happiness. — Dale Carnegie

What good does it do you to love? — Trisha Leigh

You need to have a life. Have fun. Then ruin it by having a serious relationship — Kyle

The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down. 'Could the ship have been destroyed?' Sol asked the Consul. 'No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.' Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. 'Just as well,' he said. 'We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.' Paul — Dan Simmons

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father's behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it. — Edward St. Aubyn

He'd never played in Wrigley Field - the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid's dolly with its head blown off. Muldoon's eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. "Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant," he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park - and the city. — Harry Turtledove

Maybe he would ruin her like the waves crashes the shore, but nothing was more beautiful for her than wanting to be wrecked into his demise. In his ruins she breathed to exist. — Prachi Prangya Agasti

His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess Of glory obscur'd. — John Milton

It was like coming home to a place that he held dear and finding that the wood had burnt to the ground and the house was in ruins. — Courtney Milan

Make a lap. Near the fire. The assertive little voice rang in my mind. I looked down at him and he looked up at me. For an instant, our gazes brushed, then we both looked aside in instinctive courtesy. But he had already seen the ruins of my soul. He rubbed his cheek against my leg. Hold the cat. You'll feel better. I don't think so. He rubbed against my leg insistently. Hold the cat. I don't want to hold the cat. He reared up suddenly on his hind legs, and hooked his vicious little front claws into both flesh and leggings. Don't talk back! Pick up the cat. — Robin Hobb

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book. — Junot Diaz

Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it. — M.R. James

A city divided by religion is either already in ruins or close to it. — Giambattista Vico

He recited, "My mother was a bird of fire. She bore me swaddled over the ruined cities of my sisters. We rained a sea of flame upon our brother, and brought them aloft again. Transformed. Our mothers burned the cities. We keep the ruins. — Kameron Hurley

From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. — Albert Camus

What business does memory have with time? — Jess Walter

Upon your shattered ruins where
This vine will flourish still, as rare,
As fresh, as fragrant as of old.
Love will not crumble. — Eleanor Farjeon

I try not to say exactly what songs are about sometimes, because I feel like it ruins it for people. — Lauren Mayberry

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle. — Pablo Neruda

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If there is, to be sure, something more terrifying than the history of the fall of great empires, it is the history of the death of religions. Volney himself was overcome by this feeling as he visited the innumerable ruins of once-sacred buildings. The true believer may still escape from this impression, but with the inherent scepticism of our age all of us must sometime tremble to find so many dark gates opening out on to nothingness. — Gerard De Nerval

I made a mistake. Men and women can't be friends. Statistically, impossible. One of the friends is always a little in love with the other or at least sexually attracted to them, and sex ruins friendships. — Codi Gary

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage. — Christopher Lasch

I don't think I've ever dared to write down what I see in the ruins of me, or tell in any detail the scars and all their secrets. — Ashly Lorenzana

[N]o country can squander itself to prosperity on the ruin of its taxpayers. — Herbert Hoover

There must be religion. When that ligament is torn, society is disjointed and its members perish ... [T]he most important of all lessons is the denunciation of ruin to every state that rejects the precepts of religion. — Gouverneur Morris

When a man is just and firm in his purpose,
The citizens burning to approve a wrong
Or the frowning looks of a tyrant
Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind.
Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic,
Nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove:
Should the heavens crack and tumble down,
As the ruins crushed him he would not fear. — Horace

The Prime Minister, a specialist in calling in the locksmith after the horses had fled - the whole herd in fact - and the barn in ruins, ended the week with a great raft of ethics proposals for cabinet, leadership candidates, backbenchers and lobbyists. I think it is more than fair to ask: Why wait for the middle of his third term to institute what the public would have welcomed at the beginning of his first? — Rex Murphy

It was his [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] relationship with the administration In Washington which became poisoned by his egomania. Link upon link the bond between events on the battlefield and his own ruin was forged, and, as is essential in genuine tragedy, the gods used the victim himself to forge the links. — William Manchester

Strange, he thought, how seldom people tend to look up - Will — John Flanagan

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins. — Heinrich Heine

Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church! — Petrus Borel

Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore. I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication — Groucho Marx

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park; an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children. — John Green

Archaeology, I found, comprehended all manner of excitement and achievement. Adventure is coupled with bookish toil. Romantic excursions go hand in hand with scholarly self-discipline and moderation. Explorations among the ruins of the remote past have carried curious men all over the face of the earth ... Yet in truth, no science is more adventurous than archaeology, if adventure is thought of as a mixture of spirit and deed. — C. W. Ceram

Yeah, Jennifer, when you explain the joke, it kind of ruins the magic." "So long as you think I'm magic," she said with a wink, — Georgette St. Clair

This is my belief: that through difficulties and problems God gives us the opportunity to grow. So when your hopes and dreams and goals are dashed, search among the wreckage, you may find a golden opportunity hidden in the ruins'. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

I know that people's judgments are fast, and in a split second I will ruin it. — Kristen Stewart

The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable. — Bruce Sterling

While at the lake yesterday evening, the following thought filled my heart ...

"Loss is like a weed growing in a dry and barren land. It's beauty radiates among the ruins."

There is no right or wrong to loss. It simply supplies the griever with tears for the weed to grow and the beauty to radiate among the ruins.

Even the greatest pain will provide beauty. — Jennifer Ross

I love to write, and I love to read too, but that doesn't mean I like to write about reading - 'cause nothing ruins the fun of reading a good story like the evil English army of Discuss, Analyze, and that hideous duo Compare and Contrast. — Kevin Emerson

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar. — Timothy Snyder

Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked.
There was always a broken doll.
Why did there always have to be a damn doll? — Sarah Beth Durst

How foolish is man! He ruins the present while worrying about the future, but weeps in the future by recalling his past! — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

The ruins of time build mansions in eternity. — William Blake

We English majors ... need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one ... Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense? — Garrison Keillor

Our Butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide-and-seek. Once some foreign archaeologists arrived to do some work there and told us that in times gone by it was a place of pilgrimage, full of beautiful temples domed with gold where Buddhist kings lay buried. My father wrote a poem, "The Relics of Butkara," which summed up perfectly how temple and mosque could exist side by side: "When the voice of truth rises from the minarets, / The Buddha smiles, / And the broken chain of history reconnects. — Malala Yousafzai

His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks.
"Required reading," I say.
"It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books. — Victoria Schwab

I'm a staple in my city, you can never ruin me. — Drake

It totally ruins my voice. I quit smoking, drinking, and doing ecstasy. — Mark Hoppus

She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. — Gustave Flaubert

If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world. — Milan Kundera

This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. — Ben H. Winters

Perhaps the heroic element in our natures is exhibited to the best advantage, not in going from success to success, and so on through a series of triumphs, but in gathering, on the very field of defeat itself, the materials for renewed efforts, and in proceeding, with no abatement of heart or energy, to form fresh designs upon the very ruins and ashes of blasted hopes. Yes, it is this indomitable persistence in a purpose, continued alike through defeat and success, that makes, more than aught else, the hero. — Christian Nestell Bovee

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you. — Timothy Garton Ash

I hate going out for lunch during a workday because it slows down my pace and ruins my rhythm. I prefer to eat at my desk. Actually, I wander around the design studio with a plate in my hand as I dine on, for example, salmon sashimi and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella. I often have a bit of dark chocolate after lunch. — Tom Ford

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive ... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful' ... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness ... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed ... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92).
For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts — Maxine Hong Kingston

Gather Me


Scatter me into the digression of this noise
For, I hear not when my eyes are at peace.
I smother the audacity in my voice
Hiding behind a half-charred fleece;
Let me dwell with the fleeting score,
For, I breathe not when my heart is agog!
I strangle the remains of what you tore
Building the ruins of a deserted synagogue;
Then, gather me
From the compositions of a faded song,
From the reverberations of an unaided gong;
From the mirth of our spring sky,
From the waters where thirsts lie;
From the sleekness of white-rose petals,
From the shrieks of remorse bells;
From the digression of laughter beats,
From the silence of bloodied streets;
From the eyes of their precarious silence,
From there; thence, from there; thence,
Then, gather me. — Ashfaq Saraf

Henceforth ye may thieve with better knowledge whence lucre should be won, and learn that it is not well to love gain from every source. For thou wilt find that ill-gotten pelf brings more men to ruin than to weal. — Sophocles

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance. — James A. Baldwin

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. — Emily St. John Mandel

Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth that a bully is always a coward. Our first week at school refuted this lie, along with its corollary that a truly brave man is always gentle. It is a pernicious lie because it misses the real novelty and originality of the medieval demand upon human nature. Worse still, it represents as a natural fact something which is really a human ideal, nowhere fully attained, and nowhere attained at all without arduous discipline. It is refuted by history and Experience. Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful. He kills men as they cry for quarter or takes them prisoner to kill them at leisure. — C.S. Lewis

A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep — Deb Caletti

We all just do the best we can with what we've go. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it ruins everything — C.J. Redwine

It is not the great temptations that ruin us; it is the little ones. — John William De Forest

Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle. — Edgar Quinet

Good evening, London. I would introduce myself, but truth to tell, I do not have a name. You can call me "V". Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse. In anarchy, there is another way. With anarchy, from rubble comes new life, hope reinstated. They say anarchy's dead, but see ... reports of my death were ... exaggerated. Tomorrow, Downing Street will be destroyed, the Head reduced to ruins, an end to what has gone before. Tonight, you must choose what comes next. Lives of our own, or a return to chains. Choose carefully. And so, adieu. — Alan Moore

For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him — Jostein Gaarder

Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning. — Anselm Kiefer

Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins. — Paul Russell

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones. — Oscar Wilde

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it. — Louise Erdrich

The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Confession is for the confessor. It makes you feel good; it ruins the lives of everyone else. It's a selfish thing to do. Don't confess. — Jake Adelstein

At this stage, it was only man. Only change, carrying the world from one state to another. In time, there would be more to be done, and the changes would not be so easy. He would go to war and he would die.

His day had passed. Things would change, they would find ruin, and the ruins would settle.

There was no emotional at this, no concern, no anxiety. It simply was. — Wildbow

At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra. — Horace Walpole

Politics ruins the character — Otto Von Bismarck

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow. — Bob Dylan

He seemed constantly impressed with the idea that, at the moment of his extinction, the noble fabric which he [sewed], must infallibly sink in ruins. For this, as in every other respect, the citizens of the United States are more fortunate than the Romans, as there is every reason to believe that the benefits of the present enlightened administration will extend to other generations. The — Jon Meacham

Were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels ... — Ayn Rand

I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble. — Sam Harris

Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. — Paul Theroux

Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best. "Love Among the Ruins," Robert Browning, 1885 — Craig Johnson

We're all fallen people in a fallen world.
Where does a man find healing amid so many broken places? How does he find love in the ruins and vine-wrapped shattered pieces of his own soul?
Because love's springing up through the rocks. — Charles Martin

The Wikks are regular kids given a Galactic size challenge. Readers will follow Oliver, Tiffany, and twins, Mason and Austin as they trek through eerie catacombs, mysterious ruins, and creepy castles that defy imagination. One part Indiana Jones, a handful of Swiss Family Robinson, and some Intergalactic excitement, the Quest for Truth is a riveting tale of just how far mankind will go for the ultimate prize. — Wayne Thomas Batson

Idleness ruins the constitution — Ovid

Split the Lark - and you'll find the Music, Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled. — Emily Dickinson

You can reconstruct the picture from chaos and memory's ruins. — Kay Boyle

And how to stop the rot? How to salvage something from time's passage? How long before the map makers decide to erase this structure completely? Before it becomes a nameless ruin? And then a mere pile of stones? Mossed over. Forgotten. How long before they lift its name from their charts and from our collective memory? The only thing I can do is fill the place with music. — Richard Skelton

Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable. — Arthur Conan Doyle

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain. — Anatole France

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts. — Derek Walcott

Looking for a great teacher who can tell you what will happen in the future? Ask the ancient ruins what will happen! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

But don't forget that memory is like salt: the right amount brings out the flavour in food, too much ruins it. If you live in the past all the time, you'll find yourself with no present to remember. — Paulo Coelho

S'why I looove America: City Center's in ruins, there's a fifties creature on the loose, and a man can still get drunk. — Neil Gaiman

And here am I, budding among the ruins with only sorrow to bite on, as if weeping were a seed and I the earth's only furrow. — Pablo Neruda

Why Christians do what they do is just as important as what they do. Bad motives ruin good acts. — John Piper