Taken quotes
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"It seemed that most women, because they had been caught, gave up on the movement and were just trying to pass the time until they could be released. Men in prison struggled to maintain their pride, including their manhood, because that is all they had left after everything had been taken away."
"I think I've actually returned to a kind of realism about how the world works. That's helpful. Because in a way, no matter who's in charge of the corporation that the United States is, the direction in which it is taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most people realize that's what you are."
"In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise; and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue."
"Because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false."
"The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be."
"As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you've taken before."
"A professor was telling students about his colleagues class. Students in the other class had taken to tossing erasers at the clock. Each precise hit caused it to jump ahead one minute. Before class one morning they succeeded in advancing the clock by ten minutes. Since the new time indicated that the professor was beyond the accepted starting time, the class left. The professor never said a word about the incident. However, he presented the class with a killer of a final exam. As the students labored to finish in the allotted time, the professor amused himself by tossing erasers at the clock."
"As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all."
"You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness."
"Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it."
"Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue."
"Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here."
"All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years."
"Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well, that our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken from us, and the best things are yet to come."
"No matter how many or how few people you have reporting to you, you must remember that as you climb higher in the ranks, your words will be taken as commands even if you're just thinking out loud."
"Followers want to be taken care of. Leaders want to take care of others. We can all be leaders."
"With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same."
"When an oath is taken ... the mind is more attentive; for it guards against two things, the reproach of friends and offence against the gods."
"A false religion out of the church will not hurt the church, any more than weeds in the wilderness hurt an enclosed garden, or poisons hurt the body when they are not taken, and antidotes are received against them."
"Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses."
