Things We Carried Quotes & Sayings

Nearly twenty years before, Hudson Taylor had written in an editorial: "All God's giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them." As he looked at himself, Hudson Taylor saw nothing but weakness; but as generations of Christians have studied Taylor's life, they have become acquainted with a man who dared to believe the Word of God and, by faith, carried the gospel to inland China - and saw God work wonders! "Want of trust is at the root of almost all our sins and all our weaknesses," he wrote in that same editorial, "and how shall we escape it but by looking to Him and observing His faithfulness. The man who holds God's faithfulness will not be foolhardy or reckless, but he will be ready for every emergency. — Warren W. Wiersbe

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilizationitself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts. — Woodrow Wilson

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. — Theodor Herzl

But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shallow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really "final" truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet. — C. G. Jung

All his life, at every moment, Tolstoy possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outline, as we see only on rare occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-renewing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory.

To see things like that, our eye must be directed by passion. For it is passion that by its flash illuminates an object, intensifying its appearance.

Such passion, the passion of creative contemplation, Tolstoy constantly carried with him. It was precisely in its light that he saw everything in its pristine freshness, in a new way, as if for the first time. The authenticity of what he saw differs so much from what we are used to that it may appear strange to us. But Tolstoy was not seeking that strangeness, was not pursuing it as a goal, still less did he apply it to his works as a literary method. — Boris Pasternak

It has always happened hitherto that whenever I have begun to feel an attachment to places, persons, or things, of a merely temporary nature, I have been carried away from them. Amen! May I live as a stranger and pilgrim upon the earth. May we be brought to that better country where painful changes are known no more. — Henry Martyn

And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain! — Emile Zola

One day I saw something very strange, people walking around who looked like they had come directly from the grave, their skin was so pale. Mzungus. They carried a black machine that flashed bright when they pointed it at me. I screamed. I thought the machine was going to harm me, and so I fled. Later I learned it was a camera. Its flash and their voices terrified me. We didn't see them often, less than once in a year. But whenever I saw them, I ran and hid.
I had many ideas about them; first, I did not expect them to be smart, because they loved to take pictures of silly things like chickens on the street, shanties, and other things that were not interesting. Second, since I had seen a kid touching their skin and shouting, "How are you?," for many years I believed the name for all white people was "How are you?" I touched their skin as well and found it soft, but I was surprised and a bit disappointed because I thought touching it would leave a mark on my skin too. — Kennedy Odede

As I was trying to climb this slippery empathy wall, a subversive thought occurred to me: do we need all the new plastic the American Chemical Association is promising us? Weren't we entering into a strange cycle? Many people I was talking to carried around plastic water bottles, partly for convenience, partly out of distrust of local waters. And with cheap natural gas at hand, the American Chemical Association said it could triple the amount of feedstock needed to make plastic. But if we triple our plastics, more petrochemical companies will pollute more public waters, which will lead more people to pay for more plastic bottles filled with ever more scarce clean water. We'll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water. But I was straying from my goal, getting into the spirit of things. Two — Arlie Russell Hochschild

Crowds have one expression, cruel and fixed. You let yourself be trapped by a look. You let yourself be carried off and shut away in a place of silence. There your eyes may be ripped out, your tongue cut off, and your fingers hammered until the little bones splinter. The walls are splashed with thick clots of blood. Words are the worst kind of dog, they drag us along despite ourselves to somewhere we didn't want to go, they obsess us, they don't let us have a moment's rest, a moment's rest.

But before that? Before that is another place altogether. Memory blanks things out methodically. It has several floors, sealed off from one another and there is no passage joining them. One of them is hell. When you fall in, at the very instant you lose your footing, you forget everything, even what light is like. But once you are back in the world you retain only a faint memory of being shut up. It resonates like the dull echo of pain. — Marie Desplechin

There are a few books I have read that I've never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world.
I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know that much about you as I don't know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that's really true allows you to be intimate with ... I don't want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world.
I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. — David Foster Wallace

If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question.
Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering. — Robert Stikmanz

We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away. — Barbara Kingsolver

It's a stupid question, really, as we've all got an expiration date. I guess the real question is not if, but when. As I was walking through the South Dakota Badlands - before I knew something was wrong with me - I had this thought: What if we all carried little timers that counted down the days of our lives? Maybe the timer's a bit dramatic. Just the date would do. It could be tattooed on our foreheads like the expiration date on a milk bottle. It might be a good thing. Maybe we'd stop wasting our lives worrying about things that never happen, or collecting things that we can't take with us. We'd probably treat people better. We certainly wouldn't be screaming at someone who had a day left. Maybe people would finally stop living like they're immortal. Maybe we would finally learn how to live. I've wondered — Richard Paul Evans

We had always talked easily and well, and as we carried our drinks away, I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives - to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck. Why did it seem like our greatest failures were caused by perversions in our souls?

'Perhaps it's evolutionary,' he said. ' If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions - how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that's an inevitable part of life - maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.'

'Or maybe,' I said, 'the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it. — Sheila Heti

That thou didst love her, strikes some scores away
From the great compt: but love that comes too late,
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,
To the great sender turns a sour offence,
Crying, 'That's good that's gone.' Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust
Our own love waking cries to see what's done,
While shame full late sleeps out the afternoon.
Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her. — William Shakespeare

If I believed in God, I'd see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma's surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that. — Cheryl Strayed

The more I study the works of men in their institutions, the more clearly I see that, in their efforts after independence, they become slaves, and that their very freedom is wasted in vain attempts to assure its continuance. That they may not be carried away by the flood of things, they form all sorts of attachments; then as soon as they wish to move forward they are surprised to find that everything drags them back. It seems to me that to set oneself free we need do nothing, we need only continue to desire freedom. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Things are fragile, but we're all being carried and I think we're all on our path in that sense. As fragile as things are, we're still getting there. — Andrew McMahon

Michael watched my face closely as we carried her. "What?" I asked. "You aren't angry," he said. "That she's hurt." "Like hell I'm not," I said. "It's coming. After we take care of her. When it's time." Michael grunted. "You aren't more angry than you would be if it was me. Or Butters, here." I grunted. "She's not a delicate princess," I said. "She's a warrior. Warriors have enemies. Sometimes warriors get hurt." I felt my jaws clench. "And then their friends even things up." "Damned right they do," Butters said. — Jim Butcher

I'm glad you're here, Lila," he said. "I hope you feel that way, too."
Devon stared at me, a mix of emotions swirling through his eyes. I saw everything I had that first day at the Razzle Dazzle - the guilt, grief, sorrow, and all the other burdens he carried in his heart.
And then there was that hot spark, a little darker and dimmer than before, but still burning all the same.
"Me too," I said.
Devon smiled, and that spark brightened just for a moment, and I felt an answering bit of warmth stir in my own heart. I nodded at him, and we both went back to our food, things a little less tense between us. A few seconds later, we were laughing, along with Oscar, as Mo and Felix talked over each other nonstop.
Somewhere between those laughs and all the others that morning, I realized something.
My home. My friends. My Family.
Sometimes, good things come in threes. — Jennifer Estep

I beg your pardon, but don't cry for me, Argentina. A little rain's bound to fall on those roses of yours - a dribble, a drizzle, a deluge. Think you're the only one with wet flowers?
A tear rolls down my cheek and some of the heaviness I've been carrying trickles out with it.
Why me?
Why pain? Why suffering? Why heartache?
Because we're a forgetful bunch, always busy with the daily grind. We overlook the good things until we're confronted with the bad. There but for the grace of God...and all that jazz.
Life is how we measure it. And people have different currencies. Some are tangible. Others are carried in your heart. Like the woman beside me, I've been dwelling on what I've lost, not what I have. Her riches vanished in a moment. Mine, thankfully, remain - wonderful childhood memories, a caring husband, a baby on the way.
Wet roses? They'll dry. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the rest of my garden. — Roxy Boroughs

Then she laughed for real, and put her hands around my neck. 'I am never, ever going to make things easy for you Seaweed Brain. Get used to it.'
When she kissed me, I had the feeling my brain was melting right through my body.
I could've stayed that way forever, except a voice behind us growled, 'Well it's about time!'
Suddenly the pavilion was filled with torchlight and campers. Clarisse led the way as the eavesdroppers charged and hoisted us both onto their shoulders.
'Oh, come on!' I complained. 'Is there no privacy?'
'The lovebirds need to cool off!' Clarisse said with glee.
'The canoe lake!' Conner Stoll shouted.
With a huge cheer, they carried us down the hill, but they kept us close enough to hold hands. Annabeth was laughing, and I couldn't help laughing too, even though my face was completely red.
We held hands right up to the moment they dumped us in the water. — Rick Riordan

We often move away from pain, which is helpful only before being hurt. Once in pain, it seems the only way out is through. Like someone falling off a boat, struggling to stay above the water only makes things worse. We must accept we are there and settle enough so we can be carried by the deep. The willingness to do this is the genesis of faith, the giving over to currents larger than us. Even fallen leaves float in lakes, demonstrating how surrender can hold us up. — Mark Nepo

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things
some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor
who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. — Barack Obama

That was a dhlang!" he said. "An evil spirit! The peasants down in the valleys hang up charms against them! But I thought they were just a superstition!"
"No, they're a substition," said Susan. "I mean they're real, but hardly anyone really believes them. Mostly everyone believes in things that aren't real. Something very strange is going on. Those things are all over the place, and they've got bodies. That's not right. We've got to find the person who built the clock - "
"And, er, what are you, Miss Susan?"
"Me? I'm ... a schoolteacher."
She followed his gaze to the wrench that she still carried in her hand, and shrugged.
"It can get pretty rough at break time, can it?" said Lobsang. — Terry Pratchett

When love has carried us above all things ... we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold; because our being, without losing anything of its own personality, is united with the Divine Truth. — John Of Ruysbroeck

Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. — Carl Sagan

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — Woodrow Wilson

The prophet said, "Be ye imitators of God as dear children." How would I imitate God? Well, we are told that God calls things that are not seen as though they were seen, and the unseen becomes seen. This is the way the girl called forth praise and kindness from her employer. She carried on an imaginary conversation with her employer from the premise that he had praised her work, and he did. — Neville Goddard

The Buddha said that we should not be afraid of the past; but he did warn us not to lose ourselves in it, either. We should not feed our regret or pain over the past, and we should not get carried away by the past. We do need to study and understand the past, however, because by looking deeply into the past we learn a lot of things that can benefit the present and the future. The past is an object of our study, of our meditation, but the way to study it or meditate on it is by remaining anchored in the present moment. We — Thich Nhat Hanh

Jasper!' said Katie. 'Your machine was supposed to be making duplicate copies of all of the things that were photocopied during the week!'
Yes indeed. And so it did.' He flung open a panel. 'All ingeniously copied and transcribed onto one convenient wax roll, quite easily carried between the three of us.' He hefted one end of the wax roll; it was as big as a carpet. 'Come along. It's a mere two hundred and twenty pounds. Try to keep one hand free for making fists. We may have to bash our way out of here. — M T Anderson

We're not going to get carried away. If anything, you're in trouble with me."

"Am I?" he asked.

"I've warned you a bunch of times to stop doing things to make me fall more in love with you, but you just don't listen."

He smiled. "Yeah, me treating you well, it's a problem. — Kimberly Frost

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz. — Joe Simon

I have never talked to anone about that night. Ever..' she said. 'And now when I listen to my own words, I realise that they tell a different story from the one I have carried all these years.' The old woman closed her eyes. 'I think that if we can find the words, and if we can find someone to tell them to, then perhaps we can see things differently. But I had no words, and I had nobody. — Linda Olsson

I remember when I was growing up and there would be sick people in the church. I was always so sensitive to them sitting in the pews alone, and I would not pass by without saying hello. But even at those tender ages of 5 through 14, I felt like they carried the plague, and after seeing them I would turn around praying really hard to never experience sickness like that, ever. I'd pray that I wouldn't make God angry enough to curse me like that with really awful things, but I didn't think about grace. I did not understand that it does not work that way, that God's grace is so much bigger than our sin because of Jesus - but I do get it now. We go through what we do so that we can fulfill God's glory in our lives. — Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea. — Richard Feynman

Fearful people do not want to sit with broken people because they don't want to be slowed down - don't want to look at what is broken in themselves...

When we dare to hold those forced to the ground, dare to hold them close, the truth of holding and listening sings & we are carried into the wisdom of broken bones and how things heal.

There are the quiet braves we all need: the courage to wait & watch with all of who we are, the courage to admit that we are not alone, the courage to hold each other to the ear of our heart and the courage to care for things that are broken. — Mark Nepo

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on. — Polly Berrien Berends

What if we all carried little timers that counted down the days of our lives? Maybe the timer's a bit dramatic. Just the date would do. It could be tattooed on our foreheads like the expiration date on a milk bottle. It might be a good thing. Maybe we'd stop wasting our lives worrying about things that never happen or collecting things that we can't take with us. We'd probably treat people better. We certainly wouldn't be screaming at someone who had a day left. Maybe people would finally stop living like they're immortal. Maybe we could finally learn how to live. — Richard Paul Evans

We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants. — Bernard Of Chartres

What marvelous things happen when men and women walk with faith in obedience to that which is required of them! I recall reading the story of Commander William Robert Anderson, the naval officer who took the submarine Nautilus beneath the polar ice from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, a daring and dangerous feat. It recounted a number of other exploits of similar danger and concluded with a statement that the commander carried in his wallet a tattered card that had on it these words: "I believe God will always make a way where there is no way." I too believe that God will always make a way where there is no way. I believe that if we will walk in obedience to the commandments of God, if we will follow the counsel of the priesthood, he will open a way even where there appears to be no way. — Gordon B. Hinckley

And here is something that I think is important - your religion didn't come from the land. It could be carried around with you. You couldn't understand what it meant to us to have our religion in the land. Your religion was in a cup and a piece of bread, and that could be carried in a box. Your priests could make it sacred anywhere. You couldn't understand that what was sacred for us was where we were, because that is where the sacred things had happened and where the spirits talked to us. — Kent Nerburn

We carry the world. They did. All those young men did. They carried the world, and it was heavy, and they didn't know what to do with it. Was this the rest? Was this the war? Things had already spun out of control and they weren't always as black and white or as right or wrong as Nick liked to think. — Matthew J. Hefti

If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first. — Philip Larkin

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically
we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first! — Edwin Land