Well Nigh Quotes & Sayings

Bare twigs in April enhance our pleasure; We know the good time is yet to come ... Bare twigs in Autumn are signs for sadness; We feel the good time is well-nigh past. — William Allingham

Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh
To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye. Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What? — Thomas Hood

When gratitude dies on the altar of a man's heart,
that man is well-nigh hopeless. — Bob Jones, Sr.

In any event, parents never underestimated the abilities of their own children. Quite the reverse. Sometimes it was well nigh impossible for a teacher to convince the proud father or mother that their beloved offspring was a complete nitwit. — Roald Dahl

If we feel unloved, it is difficult to truly love. If we feel rejected, it is difficult to truly accept. If we feel afraid, it is difficult to truly live. If we feel abandoned, it is difficult to truly belong. If we feel despair, it is difficult to truly hope. If we feel insignificant, it is difficult to truly care.
It is difficult to draw water from an empty well.
Without God, all of these things are difficult, if not nigh impossible.
Thank God, that in Christ, all things are possible, for he is the hope for the beggary of our soul and the remedy for a broken, fragmented world. — Mac MacKenzie

The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience
which is both natural and supernatural
understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental. — Flannery O'Connor

The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply 'the other', 'an object', 'commodity', 'thing'. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain. — Sheila Rowbotham

A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. There is sufficient in the Sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself. — Bernard Baruch

Love is self-explanatory: the right person makes you feel well nigh immortal, vaccinating you with their affections. So long as you remain in their heart you are safe, or better than safe even, for a while at least. You are momentarily, in a state of grace. — Jonathan Hull

They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who "unlearns to fear" sacrifices her most womanly instincts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am more affected by the attractions of virtue than by the deformities of vice; I turn gently away from the wicked and I fly to meet the good. If there is in a literary work, in a character, in a picture, in a statue, a beautiful spot, that is where my eyes rest; I see only that, I remember only that, all the rest is well-nigh forgotten. What becomes of me when the whole work is beautiful! — Denis Diderot

The implausible, well-nigh-miraculous functioning anarchy that we know as New York is adorned with every excellence of Western art. It is a city of manifold suggestions, which ministers to every ambition, engenders a thousand talents, nurtures ingenuity and experimentation. — Ibn Warraq

Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure. — Robert Andrews Millikan

And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing
that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed
is well nigh overpowering. [ ... ] It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful. — William Faulkner

All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh. — Jack Kerouac

I had no answer to those questions, only hope. With absolutely no one to turn to, no Mikey, no Axe, no Danny, I have to face the final battle by myself, maybe lonely, maybe desolate, maybe against formidable odds. But I was not giving up.
I had only one Teammate. And He moved, as ever, in mysterious ways. But I was a Christian, and He had somehow saved me from a thousand AK-47 bullets on that day. No one had shot me, which was well nigh beyond all comprehension. — Marcus Luttrell

The great difficulty with large canvases is that they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch. By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three yard canvas with the same dispatch as one of ten inches is well-nigh impossible. — Joaquin Sorolla

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm. — Siegfried Sassoon

The position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind. — Rose Macaulay

The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do ... How vigilant we are! determined not live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. — Henry David Thoreau

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine ... So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. — Henry David Thoreau

The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible. — Hannah Arendt

The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it. — Malcolm Lowry

If food did not exist it would be well-nigh impossible to get certain types off the phone, as one would be unable to say, 'Look, I've got to run but let's have dinner sometime soon.' — Fran Lebowitz

It is true that private friends have sometimes, after listening to my effusions, gone the length of remarking, "Really, Smith, that's not half bad!" or, "You take my advice, old boy, and send that to some magazine!" but I have never on these occasions had the moral courage to inform my adviser that the article in question had been sent to well-nigh every publisher in London, and had come back again with a rapidity and precision which spoke well for the efficiency of our postal arrangements. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions ... — Sherwood Anderson

It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. — H.P. Lovecraft

I'm just a Boche," I thought to myself; "I'm a Boche and I always have been." At that time in France, I did everything that a Boche does, both those actions he performs deliberately, conscious and proud of his Bocheness, and those that he does when he is well-nigh falling over backward in his attempts not to be taken for what he is. When I returned home I wished to write a little book for Rohwohlt entitled: The Adventures of a Little Boche in France It never came to anything because quite quietly the little Boches had turned into big Boches, and from then on it was difficult for the little ones to prove that they weren't the big ones. — Ernst Von Salomon

We have failed to recapture Gollum. We came on his trail among those of many Orcs, and it plunged deep into the Forest, going south. But ere long it escaped our skill, and we dared not continue the hunt; for we were drawing nigh to Dol Guldur, and that is still a very evil place; we do not go that way.' 'Well, well, he is gone,' said Gandalf. 'We have no time to seek for him again. He must do what he will. But he may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron have foreseen. 'And now I will answer Galdor's other questions. What of Saruman? What are his counsels to us in this need? This tale I must tell in full, — J.R.R. Tolkien

In a sermon entitled "God's Providence," C. H. Spurgeon said, "Napoleon once heard it said, that man proposes and God disposes. 'Ah,' said Napoleon, 'but I propose and dispose too.' How do you think he proposed and disposed? He proposed to go and take Russia; he proposed to make all Europe his. He proposed to destroy that power, and how did he come back again? How had he disposed it? He came back solitary and alone, his mighty army perished and wasted, having well-nigh eaten and devoured one another through hunger. Man proposes and God disposes. — Jerry Bridges

If our web be framed with rotten handles, when our loom is well nigh done, our work is new to begin. God send the weaver true prentices again, and let them be denizens. — Elizabeth I

It is well nigh impossible to talk to anyone about death, I find. Most people seem deeply embarrassed. It is like when I was a girl and nobody could talk about sex. We all did it, but nobody talked about it! We have now grown out of that silly taboo, and we must grow out of our inhibitions surrounding death. They have arisen largely because so few people see death any more, even though it is quite obviously in our midst. A cultural change must come, a new atmosphere of freedom, which will only happen if we open our closed minds. — Jennifer Worth

Now that he had his way, and all went well, and he had work to do after his heart, and had honour in it, he was courteous to all, and less grim than of old, so that well nigh all hearts were turned to him; and many called him Adanedhel, the Elf-man. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I prize the purity of his character as highly as I do that of hers. As a moral being, whatever it is morally wrong for her to do,it is morally wrong for him to do. The fallacious doctrine of male and female virtues has well nigh ruined all that is morally great and lovely in his character: he has been quite as deep a sufferer by it as woman, though mostly in different respects and by other processes. — Angelina Grimke

Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All. — Thomas Mann

The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own. — Meister Eckhart

Growth at an exceptional rate is a red flag in banking. It is hard enough to manage an ordinary bank; to control a sprouting weed is well-nigh impossible. If loans are expanding too quickly, the lending officers have probably been saying 'yes' too frequently. — James Grant

When fortune surprises us by giving us some great office without having gradually led us to expect it, or without having raised our hopes, it is well nigh impossible to occupy it well, and to appear worthy to fill it. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

At the moment I put the bread and wine into those dark hands, once stained with the blood of cannibalism, now stretched out to receive and partake the emblems and seals of the Redeemer's love, I had a foretaste of the joy of glory that well nigh broke my heart to pieces. I shall never taste a deeper bliss, till I gaze on the glorified face of Jesus himself. — John Gibson Paton

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For me, the present agony of departure, the silent terror of leaving a place known to me if hated, the well-nigh impossible task of conquering the fear that possessed me. Not the fear of that hasty look round, the sudden plunge headlong and the giddy shock of hard, cold water, the river itself entering my lungs, rising in my throat, tossing me upon my back with my arms outflung - I could hear the sob strangled in my chest and the blood leave me - but fear of the certain knowledge that there was no returning, no possible means of escape, and no other thing beyond. — Daphne Du Maurier

If you take a guy who loves the sound of his own voice and give him power, he becomes a demagogue. If you give him money, he becomes a show-off. Give him the internet, and he's a ceaselessly flaming activist; give him an Internet of Things, and he becomes a wrangler, a guy for whom every possible relationship to any possible object or service is some ever-ramifying, well-nigh metaphysical hacker session. — Bruce Sterling

Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic. — Andrew Coyle Bradley

An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him. — Eric Maisel

The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. — Theodore Roosevelt

The sexual regions constitute a particularly vulnerable spot, and remain so even in man, and the need for their protection which thus exists conflicts with the prominent display required for sexual allurement. This end is far more effectively attained, with greater advantage and less disadvantage, by concentrating the chief ensigns of sexual attractiveness on the upper and more conspicuous parts of the body. This method is well-nigh universal among animals as well as in man. — Havelock Ellis

I am well-nigh resolv'd to write no more tales but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick. — H.P. Lovecraft

Whosoever considers the immense labors undertaken by Catholic exegetes during well nigh two thousand years, so that the word of God, imparted to men through the Sacred Letters, might daily be more deeply and fully understood and more intensely loved, will easily be convinced that it is the serious duty of the faithful, and especially of priests, to make free and holy use of this treasure, accumulated throughout so many centuries by the greatest intellects. — Pope Pius XII

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. — Henry David Thoreau

As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you got. — Haruki Murakami

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times. — Thomas Hardy

The first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals. — W.B.Yeats

To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic races - the Jews. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by. — M. S. Golwalkar

Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigour the fainting energies of your soul. — William Wilberforce

It must be well-nigh a maximum of sense to behave so that one escapes being hanged. — Mark Twain

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can't pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you can learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiences are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure our your good points and learn to get by with what you have. — Haruki Murakami

The only people who are not in awe of Emerson's powerful voice and well-nigh superhuman strength are the members of his own family. He is aware of this, and often complains about it; so from time to time I like to put on a little show of being intimidated. 'Proceed, my dear,' I said apologetically. — Elizabeth Peters

Ah, Lord Northcliff, how well you look this afternoon!"
"Thank you. I feel well indeed."
Taking Amy's hand, he held it in both of his. "As long as my princess is nigh. — Christina Dodd

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it. — Remy De Gourmont

AS their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East - the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the p. 2 threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchant. merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day - Ki shan i Romani - Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know. — Charles Godfrey Leland

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless. — Moliere

The first essential responsibility of the state is control of the market-place: there must be some official charged with the duty of seeing that honest dealing and good order prevail. For one of the well-nigh essential activities of all states is the buying and selling of goods to meet their mutual basic needs; this is the quickest way to self-sufficiency, which seems to be what moves men to combine under a single constitution. — Aristotle.

Thus far then have we travelled along the terrible road we chose at the call of duty. The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this: A year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate to all eyes but our own. To-day we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls. — Winston S. Churchill

There are people, of course, who think it unscientific to take anything seriously; they do not want their intellectual playground disturbed by graver considerations. But the doctor who fails to take account of man's feelings for values commits a serious blunder, and if he tries to correct the mysterious and well-nigh inscrutable workings of nature with his so-called scientific attitude, he is merely putting his shallow sophistry in place of nature's healing processes. — C. G. Jung

MGM produced an occasional nonstar feature, although these were rare and usually had some obvious hook to draw audiences. A good example of this type of feature was The Fire Brigade, a 1926 project scheduled for a twenty-eight-day shoot and budgeted at $249,556. The picture starred May McAvoy, a "featured player" at MGM, and was directed by William Nigh. The second-class status of the project was obvious from the budget, with only $60,000 going for director, cast, story, and continuity. But the attractions in The Fire Brigade were spectacle, special effects, and fiery destruction rather than star and director. The budget allowed $25,000 for photographic effects and another $66,000 for sets, a relatively high figure since many of the sets for the picture had to be not only built and "dressed" but destroyed as well. — Thomas Schatz

Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the mean time we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. — John Muir

The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp. — Mark Leibovich

Patronage is almost a wicked word. By itself it could well-nigh defeat democracy. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Picture the prince, such as most of them are today: a man ignorant of the law, well-nigh an enemy to his people's advantage, while intent on his personal convenience, a dedicated voluptuary, a hater of learning, freedom and truth, without a thought for the interests of his country, and measuring everything in terms of his own profit and desires. — Desiderius Erasmus

You renounce your friendship even in the hour of our need ' he said. 'Yet you were glad indeed to receive our aid when you came at last to these shores fainthearted loiterers and well-nigh emptyhanded. In huts on the beaches would you be dwelling still had not the Noldor carved out your haven and toiled upon your walls. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. — Alfred Stieglitz

Anything that is secret and mysterious in this system of Yoga should be at once rejected. The best guide in life is strength. In spirituality, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you. Have nothing to do with it. Mystery-mongering weakens the human brain. It has well-nigh destroyed Yoga, one of the grandest of sciences — Swami Vivekananda