Vitals Quotes & Sayings

Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

If I sneezed, writers' vitals would spew out my nose like bats from a cave mouth, fiery balls from a roman candle, water from an open fire hydrant. — Dennis Vickers

We are now trusting to those who are against us in position and principle, to fashion to their own form the minds and affections of our youth ... This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once, will be beyond remedy. — Thomas Jefferson

Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however, with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love - horrible antipathy - embracing one another in his bosom, and both concentrating themselves upon a being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there, and which was nourished with his food, and lived upon his life, and was as intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all created things! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Saul's vitals were not human, but familiar:
he never told me he was from another world:
I never told him I was from his future. — Joe Haldeman

You just wouldn't be happy until I had to drag my ass up here to this godforsaken icebox that is. Gotta tell you I'm feelin' some hate here my man. Or I would be if I could actually feel anything other than Arctic cold gnawing at my vitals. — Lara Adrian

To be hated! to love with all the fury of one's soul; to feel that one would give for the least of her smiles, one's blood, one's vitals, one's fame, one's salvation, one's immortality and eternity, — Victor Hugo

Paper money will invariably operate in the body of politics as spirit liquors on the human body. They prey on the vitals and ultimately destroy them — George Washington

Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or "Bible" of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called "mystical experiences" in every religion are true. He should have known better. — Seraphim Rose

slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. — Henry Miller

The knights nodded with exaggerated casualness, showing respect for the wizard but not fear. Or so they thought. The fear came in the way they parted for the old man, took a half step back without really thinking about it.
That's one of the things you learn to do when you study acting. You watch the nonverbal cues. That's what gives a performance depth. The knights were all like, "Hey, Merlin, what's up?" But get past the easy words and bluff tone and you saw faces drawn back, bodies turned at an angle to protect the vitals, an unconscious cringe. — K.A. Applegate

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals - and the vitals of others - which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term - not more. Physiological - and even psychological analysis - can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing. — Clark Ashton Smith

Almost all the prosperity of a public society and civil community does, under God, depend on their rulers. They are like the main springs or wheels in a machine that keep every part in their due motion, and are in the body politic, as in the vitals in the body natural, and as the pillars and the foundation in a building. — Jonathan Edwards

The Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors, — Mark Twain

You must master the habit of procrastination and eliminate it from your wake-up. This habit of putting off until tomorrow that which you should have done last week or last year or a score of years ago is gnawing at the very vitals of your being and you can accomplish nothing until you throw it off. — Napoleon Hill

There are - as every one knows - two kinds of writing: one coming out of your vitals and the other from the top of your head. The first is the only sort from which any true private pleasure can be gained, for it is a way of getting something out of life which seemed to be there in childhood, when childhood is quite over. — J. E. Buckrose

Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew. To not forgive leads to bitterness and hatred. Like self-hatred and self-contempt, hatred of others gnaws away at our vitals. Whether hatred is projected out or stuffed in, it is always corrosive to the human spirit. — Desmond Tutu

Untouchability is a blot on Hinduism. It is a canker eating into its vitals. — Mahatma Gandhi

But that was a long time ago and since then a crab has been gnawing at my vitals. All this began in the Metro (first-class) with the phrase - 'l'homme que j'etais, je ne le suis plus. — Henry Miller

Let the advocate of animal food, force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. — Edward Gibbon

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals. — Alfred North Whitehead

If it was not intended as a veto, then it must have been intended for commanders to interpret as they saw fit, which brings the matter to that melting point of warfare - the temperament of the individual commander.
When the moment of live ammunition approaches, the moment to which all his professional training has been directed, when the lives of men under him, the issue of the combat, even the fate of a campaign may depend upon his decision at a given moment, what happens inside the heart and vitals of a commander? Some are made bold by the moment, some irresolute, some carefully judicious, some paralyzed and powerless to act. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. — James Joyce

I read that when cats are cuddling and kneading you, and you think it's cute, they're really just checking your vitals for weak spots. — Kandyse McClure

To hate another human being is to take a worm into one's own vitals. It consumes life. — Pearl S. Buck

O jealousy, Thou ugliest fiend of hell! thy deadly venom Preys on my vitals, turns the healthful hue Of my flesh check to haggard sallowness, And drinks my spirit up! — Hannah More

We must enlist our own snake and strike like a cobra against their vitals with an attack on Washington. — Robert E.Lee

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one's vitals. — Harold Laski

Love is kindled in a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything rather than a feeble flame; but when the surrounding atmosphere is frigid or lukewarm, it dies, chilled and starved to its vitals. True prayer must be aflame. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame? — Richard J. Foster

Lie in the sun with the child in your flesh shining like a jewel. Dream and sing, pagan, wise in your vitals. Stand still like a fat budding tree, like a stalk of corn athrob and aglisten in the heat. Lie like a mare panting with the dancing feet of colts against her sides. Sleep at night as the spring earth. Walk heavily as a wheat stalk at its full time bending towards the earth waiting for the reaper. Let your life swell downward so you become like a vase, a vessel. Let the unknown child knock and knock against you and rise like a dolphin within. — Meridel Le Sueur

That small word "Force," they make a barber's block,
Ready to put on
Meanings most strange and various, fit to shock
Pupils of Newton ...
The phrases of last century in this
Linger to play tricks
Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:
Those long-nebbed words that to our text books still
Cling by their titles,
And from them creep, as entozoa will,
Into our vitals.
But see! Tait writes in lucid symbols clear
One small equation;
And Force becomes of Energy a mere
Space-variation. — James Clerk Maxwell

That cat was a traitor. And if by some miracle she lived through the night, he was getting downgraded to Tender Vitals. — J.R. Ward

I'm leaving." Her cold lips barely moved as she mouthed the words.
Horror fisted around his vitals. "No."
For the first time she met his eyes. Hers were red-rimmed but dry. "I have to leave,
Simon."
"No." He was a little boy denied a sweet. He felt like falling down and screaming.
"Let me go."
"I can't let you go." He half laughed here in the too-bright, cold London sun before his own
house. "I'll die if I do."
She closed her eyes. "No, you won't. I can't stay and watch you tear yourself apart."
"Lucy."
"Let me go, Simon. Please." She opened her eyes, and he saw infinite pain in her gaze.
Had he done this to his angel? Oh, God. He unclasped his hands. — Elizabeth Hoyt

I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. — Henry David Thoreau

See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality,
that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off all sproutings, all wild luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core. — Nathaniel Culverwell

There were six dolls to be taken up and dressed every morning, for Beth was a child still, and loved her pets as well as ever. Not one whole or handsome one among them; all were outcasts till Beth took them in; for, when her sisters outgrew these idols, they passed to her ... Beth cherished them all the more tenderly for that very reason, and set up a hospital for infirm dolls. No pins were ever stuck into their cotton vitals; no harsh words or blows were ever given them; no neglect ever saddened the heart of the most repulsive: but all were fed and clothed, nursed and caressed, with an affection which never failed. — Louisa May Alcott

Call up your vermin to your back, sir, and fall on! The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye'll taste this steel throughout your vitals. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Literature endures like the universal spirit,
And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men. — Li Shang-yin