Thousands Words Quotes & Sayings

I don't know
449
that much about the Bible, other than it was
written thousands of years ago, which dilutes
its relevance. However, I know its faithful
followers tend to cherry-pick verses to suit
their needs, the same way they cherry-pick
words or scenes from other books to label
obscene. — Ellen Hopkins

Words are things. A small drip of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps even millions. — Bryon

Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear. Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form. — Isidore Isou

I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them. — John Hodgman

It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't. — Mignon McLaughlin

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words. — Lily King

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think. — George Gordon Byron

I felt in some ways we'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words... — Lily King

Ingersoll was introduced as one of the main speakers by Frederick Douglass and proceeded, unlike most leaders of his party, to eviscerate the court's logic. "This decision takes from seven millions of people the shield of the Constitution," he said. "It leaves the best of the colored race at the mercy of the meanest of the white. It feeds fat the ancient grudge that vicious ignorance bears toward race and color. It will be approved and quoted by hundreds of thousands of unjust men. The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court. The men who, by mob violence, prevent the negro from depositing his ballot - those who with gun and revolver drive him from the polls, and those who insult with vile and vulgar words the inoffensive colored girl, will welcome this decision with hyena joy. The basest will rejoice - the noblest will mourn. — Susan Jacoby

World of words lost on the living /
I take my place with the walking dead /
Robbed of my voice I'm always giving /
Thousands of words to this nameless dread. — Maggie Stiefvater

We've assembled a group of people, your team, people who love you and pray for you. Take a look around the circle. These people represent thousands of words spent in prayer before the throne of God, begging for your safe return to the fold, begging for your peace, your faith, your heart. — Nicole O'Dell

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today ... because there's no space for all of them. — Erin McKean

We fell in love and heard thousands of words in every silence between us. Then we fell apart and heard only silence in thousands of words we spoke to each other. — Akshay Vasu

No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands ... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash. — Semir Zeki

It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report. — Mal Peet

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. — Boris Pasternak

A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless."
"And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness."
"You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words."
"And if it was?"
"In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again."
"In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none."
"You do not find this rather narrow?"
"Madam - "
"Well?"
"I was quoting you. — Steven Brust

What a great treasure can be hidden in a small, selected library! A company of the wisest and the most deserving people from all the civilized countries of the world, for thousands of years, can make the results of their studies and their wisdom available to us. The thought which they might not even reveal to their best friends is written here in clear words for us, people from another century. Yes, we should be grateful for the best books, for the best spiritual achievements in our lives. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON — Leo Tolstoy

Some of the greatest stories ever told are about the everyday mundane experiences that we can all relate to. Reading isn't always about escaping to faraway lands, the best books are the ones that resonate on an emotional level. The author and reader are connected by a tin-can string of words across thousands of miles and hundreds of centuries. — Adriane Leigh

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. — Alberto Manguel

Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them ... It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it. — George Sarton

In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people. — Judy Garland

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer. — Tom Rachman

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story. — Leila Janah

The campus, an academy of trees,
under which some hand, the wind's I guess,
had scattered the pale light
of thousands of spring beauties,
petals stained with pink veins;
secret, blooming for themselves.
We sat among them.
Your long fingers, thin body,
and long bones of improbable genius;
some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.
Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.
That simple that was myself, half conscious,
as though each moment was a page
where words appeared; the bent hammer of the type
struck against the moving ribbon.
The light air, the restless leaves;
the ripple of time warped by our longing.
There, as if we were painted
by some unknown impressionist. — Ruth Stone

Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin. — Rick Moody

Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied. — Steven Pinker

Heart beats are marching like thousands of drums,
Birds find their flight, thrown out of nest,
We win some battles, then we lose some,
Truth is no more than illusion at best.

What has been said under veil of the night,
Under the veil it will ever remain,
But may it ever be in my right,
I know i have never said it in vain. — Aleksandra Ninkovic

If you had a script for your life, Leo thinks, you could look ahead to what would come next. You could see what is going to happen to you. You could read all the thousands and millions of words you will say. You will never again have to wonder What should I say or do? because it will all be written there for you. You could know what dumb things you will do. You could find out if you ever will do anything that isn't dumb. But then, what if your script was dull, if you never got to do anything exciting? Or what if something awful was going to happen to you? What if your script was very, very short? — Sharon Creech

The campaign website was funded by Armistead, and he personally authored the content. He was determined that the campaign's values and goals would fit on one page. The website developer, who was experienced with political campaigns, was opposed to this. He lobbied for detailed policy statements and explanations, which was the conventional approach. But Armistead disagreed. The website developer thus learned that day that core principles were more important than thousands of words of speculative verbiage. — Rodney Page

I used to be a pre-industrial writer: thousands of words in a spurt and then a few days off. But as I get older, I've switched to a mode best described as 'slow and steady wins the race.' Basically, I write during the same four hours every day, after breakfast and the all-important coffee, generally in the same room and wearing the same pajamas. — Scott Westerfeld

I've been with thousands of women and you claimed the one night that you fucked four hundred billion men," I say and Shay smiles slightly. "Out of all those people, you're the only one that makes my heart hurt. Do you know how stupid I feel saying my heart hurts? I feel like a damn pussy, but I'm saying the words because they're true." "I give you heart trouble," Shay whispers. "You own my heart. I don't know if that's the same thing though." "For me, it is. — Bijou Hunter

It was if the city knew about Percy's dream of Gaea. It knew that the earth goddess intended on razing all human civilization, and this city, which had stood for thousands if years, was saying back at her: You wanna dissolve this city, Dirt Face? Give it a shot.
In other words, it was the Coach Hedge of mortal cities- only taller. — Rick Riordan

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language. — Pierre Boulle

She jumped off my bed and shoved my stack of books over; thousands of words crashed onto the floor. — Maggie Stiefvater

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.. — Garry Kasparov

How many books are there?" said Masklin.
"Hundreds! Thousands!"
"Do you know what they're all about?"
Gurder looked at him blankly. "Do you know what you're saying?" he said.
"No. But I want to find out."
"They're about everything! You'd never believe it! They're full of words even I don't understand!"
"Can you find a book which tells you how to understand words you don't understand?" said Masklin.
Gurder hesitated. "It's an intriguing thought," he said. — Terry Pratchett

As the words of my book, 'The Bloodless Revolution,' accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink. — Tristram Stuart

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)] — Carl Sagan

If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes? — Galileo Galilei

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws. — Richard Matheson

The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague. — Garth Stein

Please, accept the most sincere words of sympathy over the natural disaster that affected the United States . I know that hurricane Katrina that hit the US south-western coast led to casualties, left homeless dozens of thousands of US citizens and inflicted a strong damage to the economy of this region. I ask you to convey my condolences to the next of kin of those killed,. — Vladimir Putin

A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. — Maggie Stiefvater

Thank you." I've said thank you thousands of times in my life. Most of the time I mean it to some degree. There are times when I've said it and felt the gratitude behind the words wholeheartedly, but I don't think I ever understood what those two words truly meant until this very moment. Now I think I need a new phrase because thank you is insufficient in this situation. — Kim Holden

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them. — Sue Monk Kidd

Actions are worth more than thousands of words. — Timi Nadela

I'm not sure I can name a kind of story that wouldn't work in comics form. It's words and images, and we've been telling all kinds of stories with that combination since theatre was invented thousands of years ago. — James Vance

A defiant deed has greater value than unnumerable thousands of words ... — Emmeline Pankhurst

What Ethereum Is Good For Ethereum is suited to building economic systems in pure software. In other words, it's software for business logic, wherein people (users) can move money (data representing value) around with the speed and scale that we normally get with data.12 Not the three- to seven-day floating period you get with the commercial banking system. Or the fees associated with vendors such as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal. With a simple Ethereum application, for example, it is fairly trivial to pay hundreds of thousands of people, in hundreds of countries, small amounts every few minutes, whereas in the legacy banking system you would need an entire payroll department working overtime to constantly rebalance your account ledgers and deal with the cross-border issues. — Chris Dannen

Of what use are words of wisdom to the man who is unwise?
Of what use is a lamp to a man who is blind?
Hear the essence of thousands of sacred books: to help others is virtue: to hurt others is sin.
A man rises or goes down by his own actions: like the builder of a wall, or the digger of a well.
The narrow-minded man thinks and says: 'This man is one of us; this one is not, he is a stranger. To the man of noble soul the whole of mankind is but one family.

- quoted in the introduction, ascribed to the Hitopadesa — Juan Mascaro

How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years. — Shashi Tharoor

Now I rewrite more and more severely, and I take great pleasure in cutting thousands of words out of first drafts; I think that's a pleasure worth learning as early as possible in one's career, not least because realizing that one can do it helps one relax into writing the first draft in which it's better to have too much material for later shaping than not enough. — Ramsey Campbell

In terms of language, there were no separate words for female genitalia for thousands of years. That was mostly because women were considered pretty much the same as men, only of course flimsier, more poorly designed, and incapable of writing in the snow. — Elissa Stein And Susan Kim

How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands, — Erich Maria Remarque

For not even one person to have ever exhibited this interest in writing nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre. Saying this all went on in person is simply insufficient to answer the point: if everything was being resolved in person, Paul would never have written a single letter; nor would his congregations have so often written him letters requesting he write to satisfy their questions - which for some reason always concerned only doctrine and rules of conduct, never the far more interesting subject of how the Son of God lived and died. On the other matters Paul was compelled to write tens of thousands of words. If he had to write so much on those issues, how is it possible no one ever asked for or wrote even one word on the more obvious and burning issues of the facts of Jesus' life and death? — Richard Carrier

Thousands of uninstructed Christians are being deceived today.
False teachers use high-sounding words
that seem like the epitome of scholarship and culture. They are intellectually clever and crafty ... adept at beguiling thoughtless, untaught men and women. — Billy Graham

The President? Hmmm, I wonder who that might be? Could it be, perhaps, the sitting two-term incumbent of the same party holding its convention? The person whose economic and military policies shape the environment the next president will deal with? As best I can tell, in the tens of thousands of words making up the combined remarks of John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Lindsay Graham, the Name That Must Not Be Uttered appeared exactly once ... — James Fallows

You have no sense of what war is like. You have no idea what it means to see those you love fall. You cannot possibly understand what it is to fight for what you believe, and how sometimes you have to fight with words and dreams after all the weapons have been put away. You serve a cold god, surviving on his power for thousands of years without ever living! — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas ... And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: "I love you," "Don't go in there," "Get out," "You have no right to say that," "Stop it," "Why should I," "That hurt," "Help," "Marjorie is dead. — Stephen Fry

That's it - hundreds of texts and conversations, thousands upon thousands of words spoken and sent, all boiled down into a single line. is that what relationships become? — David Levithan

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors. — Stephen Fry

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America. — Bharati Mukherjee

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom. — Helen DeWitt

But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven. — Alice Hoffman

Kids are tough sometimes. There are moments when I'm so frustrated and don't feel like we understand each other. When I hit a moment like this and words of aggravation are on the tip of my tongue, this is what I say to myself:
You have been given the unbelievable honor of taking care of and loving the next generation of people. Your work with them is hands down the most important work you'll ever do. Think about how many people these children will come in contact with in their life time. The messages and love you give them or don't give them will be your voice in the future. Think about that when you're aggravated or tired. Every word you speak over them matters. Your voice and the unspoken energy you're sending them are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Speak to them as if they are Kings and Queens and you are on stage in front of thousands of people -because that's how they deserve to be treated.
Give them the best of you. — Brooke Hampton

A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician. — Garry Kasparov

There is a limitation on debate, which is unlike other bills, for 20 hours, but there is no limitation on amendments. In other words, Republicans if they wanted to, and I suspect they do, could offer literally thousands of amendments and keep Senate in session for weeks and months. — Rick Santorum

Where the hell is Ronan? Gansey asked, echoing the words that thousands of humans had uttered since mankind developed speech. — Maggie Stiefvater

Think of it! A few more boats, a few more planks of wood nailed together in a particular way at a thrifty cost and all those men and women whom the world can so ill afford to loose would be with us today. There would be no mourning in thousands of homes which now are desolate and these words need not have been written. — Lawrence Beesley

Multitudes of people who expect to go to Heaven will go to a Hell of torment. Thousands of "good" people, "moral" people, church members, even church workers - yes, and, alas, even prophets, priests and preachers - will find themselves lost when they expected to be saved, condemned when they expected approval, cast out of Heaven when they expected to be received into eternal bliss. That is the explicit meaning of the words of our Lord ... (see: Matt 7:21-23.] — John R. Rice

....my life is full of people talking to me without anyone saying anything, thousands of words but not one real conversation,..... — A.B. Turner

I couldn't explain how it felt to converse with another human being. To actually converse. I had been reduced to sharing nothing of my innermost thoughts for most of my life. Reduced to throwing things when I was angry. Reduced to tears when I was sad. Reduced to the simplicity of nods and bows, of having people look away from me or become frustrated when they didn't know what I was trying to communicate.
I had been alone for so long with thousands of words I couldn't express. — Amy Harmon

A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger's or Whitehead's best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of "obligatory passage point" (Latour's term) in the discussions that follow.
Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made "fewer mistakes" than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress. — Graham Harman

The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research - that's all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That's a serious flaw in my writing process - shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered. — Bob Shacochis

Online magazines such as Salon, Slate, and Suck, had already made an elementary discovery: a reader staring into the equivalent of a thirty-watt bulb didn't want to confront thousands of words. The medium required a little extra white space, a sort of oasis for the optic nerve. — James Marcus

I would not go so far as to say that vaccination has never saved a person from smallpox. It is a matter of record that thousands of the victims of this superstitious rite have been saved from smallpox by the immunizing potency of death. But it is a fact that the official statistics of England and Wales show unmistakably that, while vaccination has killed ten times more people than smallpox, there has been a decrease in smallpox concomitant with the decrease in vaccination ... It might be appropriately asked, in the words of the Vaccination Inquirer — Herbert M. Shelton

Saddam Hussein, influenced by fascism, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of people, fought two disastrous wars, turned his nation into an international pariah and ruined his country's economy. In other words, his record is identical to George W. Bush's. — Ted Rall

There was nowhere for her to go. Not in the kitchen, not in the hallway, not in the bedroom. What she wanted was a little room of her own where she could go and jot down small things in her diary. Tatiana had no little room of her own. As a result she had no diary. Diaries, as she understood them from books, were supposed to be full of personal writings and filled with private words. Well, in Tatiana's world there were no private words. All private thoughts you kept in your head as you lay down next to another person, even if that other person happened to be your sister. Leo Tolstoy, one of her favorite writers, wrote a diary of his life as a young boy, an adolescent, a young man. That diary was meant to be read by thousands of people. That wasn't the kind of diary Tatiana wanted to keep. She wanted to keep one in which she could write down Alexander's name and no one would read it. She wanted to have a room where she could say his name out loud and no one would hear it. Alexander. — Paullina Simons

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. — Susan Cain

We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young
not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age
and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

When I encountered these haunting words from Franz Kafka, I realized exactly why this light sermon about the search for God had struck such a nerve: Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes. That's the routine of our lives. — Stephen Kendrick

What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled. — Charles Johnson

Like words written in the sand taken away by waves
Thousands of years of culture discovered in lost caves
Climbing to a mountain at it's highest peak
Out of no where strength when thought down and weak — Justin Bienvenue

Within her eyes was the gratitude of the thousands of souls that knew him. He saw them. He saw the faces of the fae, the faces of the Wood. He heard their voices as they whispered in his ear of their thanks for what he had endured, for the sacrifices he had made. He felt in his being their emotions, those feelings that words could not describe. They were here because he loved without thinking. They were here because he was loved. Truly loved. True love. — Kate Danley

The "losers" in memory competitions, this research suggests, stumble not because they remember too little. They have studied tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words, and often they are familiar with the word they ultimately misspell. In many cases, they stumble because they remember too much. If recollecting is just that - a re-collection of perceptions, facts, and ideas scattered in intertwining neural networks in the dark storm of the brain - then forgetting acts to block the background noise, the static, so that the right signals stand out. The sharpness of the one depends on the strength of the other. — Benedict Carey

You are so beautiful,' he whispered. She must have heard those words before, thousands of times, but he wanted her to hear them from *him*. — Julia Quinn

I talked a lot in my car. Thousands of words and songs and swears are absorbed in its fabric, just like the orange juice I spilled on my way to the dentist. It knows what happened, when Allie went to Puerto Rico, understands the difference between the way I look at Nick and the way I look at Adam, and remembers the first time I experimented with talking to myself. — Marina Keegan

If you know that everything comes from the mind, don't become attached. Once attached, you're unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. It's thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a clear mind. Understanding comes in midsentence. What good are doctrines? The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way. The Way is wordless. Words are illusions ... Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers ... — Bodhidharma

It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter" that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a "humble carpenter," the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip. — Gene Wolfe

But then again, didn't all marriages carry thousands of hurts? Didn't husbands and wives injure each other all the time, leaving wounds both big and small, with snapped words or forgotten anniversaries or emotional buttons deliberately pushed? But thousands of kindnesses existed in marriages, too. The important thing was that the kindnesses triumphed over the hurts. — Sarah Pekkanen

A proper sense of proportion leaves no room for superstition. A man says, "I have never been in a shipwreck," and becoming nervous touches wood. Why is he nervous? He has this paragraph before his eyes: "Among the deceased was Mr. - . By a remarkable coincidence this gentleman had been saying only a few days before that he had never been in a shipwreck. Little did he think that his next voyage would falsify his words so tragically." It occurs to him that he has read paragraphs like that again and again. Perhaps he has. Certainly he has never read a paragraph like this: "Among the deceased was Mr. - . By a remarkable coincidence this gentleman had never made the remark that he had not yet been in a shipwreck." Yet that paragraph could have been written truthfully thousands of times. — A.A. Milne

Goofy from lack of sleep, they scribble in snatched moments between classes, part-time employment and their married lives. Their brains are dizzy with words as they mop out an operating room, sort mail at a post office, fix baby's bottle, fry hamburgers. And somewhere, in the midst of their servitude to the must-be, the mad might-be whispers to them to live, know, experience - what? Marvels! The Season in Hell, the Journey to the End of the Night, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Clear Light of the Void ... Will any of them make it? Oh, sure. One, at least. Two or three at most - in all these searching thousands. — Christopher Isherwood

Villages that had been groaning beneath the iron weight of Stalin's hand breathed a sigh of relief. And the many millions confined in the camps rejoiced. Columns of prisoners were marching to work in deep darkness. The barking of guard dogs drowned out their voices. And suddenly, as if the northern lights had flashed the words through their ranks: "Stalin has died." As they marched on under guard, tens of thousands of prisoners passed the news on in a whisper: "He's croaked ... he's croaked ... " Repeated by thousand upon thousand of people, this whisper was like a wind. Over the polar lands it was still black night. But the ice in the Arctic Ocean had broken; you could now hear the roar of an ocean of voices. — Vasily Grossman

A picture's worth a thousands words but they don't tell the whole story. — Jennifer Brown

Hutte, for instance, used to quote the case of a fellow he called "the beach man." This man had spent forty years of his life on beaches or by the sides of swimming pools, chatting pleasantly with summer visitors and rich idlers. He is to be seen, in his bathing costume, in the corners and backgrounds of thousands of holiday snaps, among groups of happy people, but no one knew his name and why he was there. And no one noticed when one day he vanished from the photographs. I did not dare tell Hutte, but I felt that "the beach man" was myself. Though it would not have surprised him if I had confessed it. Hutte was always saying that, in the end, we were all "beach men" and that "the sand" - I am quoting his own words - "keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments. — Patrick Modiano

all the silahbands and the attendants upon the platoons gathered together in large crowds of thousands outside the gates of the fort of Lahore and inside it and began to cause various kinds of trouble and molestation to the various men who went or came and teased especially the attendants of the state and the glorious chieftains. Whenever people rode from their mansions and came towards the fort, they began to strike with sticks the face of the horses and the backs of the servants accompanying them and turned them out in great disgrace, uttering many improper and rude words. — Bapsi Sidhwa

Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost. — Kathleen Winter

She couldn't put into words how desparately she wanted to know what had happened to Sarah. But she'd suddenly realized that Sarah was not the only one who had lost her memory of what happened when she was a little girl. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their memories of what had happened to them ... — Denny Taylor

Well, Espen, you're no drug addict, so why do you beg?"
"Because it's my mission to be mirror for mankind so that they can see which actions are great and which are small."
"And which are great?"
Espen sighed in despair, as though weary of repeating the obvious. "Charity. Sharing and helping your neighbor. The Bible deals with nothing else. In fact, you have to search extremely hard to find anything about sex before marriage, abortion, homosexuality, or a woman's right to speak in public. But, of course, it is easier for Pharisees to talk aloud about subordinate clauses than to describe and perform the great actions the Bible leaves us in no doubt about: You have to give half of what you own to someone who has nothing. Thousands of people are dying every day without hearing the words of God because these Christians will not let go of their earthly goods. I'm giving them a chance to reflect. — Jo Nesbo