Dust quotes
1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside dust — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery."
"He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups. There's something euphorically invigorating and yet filling about it. It tastes the way I imagine the Far East must taste."
"I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually."
"Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again."
"Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself."
"Custom calls me to 't: What custom wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heap't For truth to o'erpeer."
"But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of well, it needs some courage to dive for it, especially as he that does so will be likely to incur more scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge, than thanks for the jewel he procures; as like in manner, she who undertakes the cleansing of a careless bachelor's apartment will be liable to more abuse for the dust she raises than commendation for the clearance she effects."
"That great dust-heap called 'history'."
"For everything exists and not one sigh nor smile nor tear, one hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away."
"Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules."
"You are not worth the dust which the rude wind Blows in your face."
"Would it not grieve a woman to be over-mastered by a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marle?"
"Mean and mighty, rotting Together, have one dust."
"But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike."
"Turning, for them who pass, the common dust Of servile opportunity to gold."
"Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended."
"The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time,unobscured by the dust of history."
"The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again."
"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can."
"What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain, Heart's love will meet thee again."
