Wall quotes
4.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside wall — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it"
"The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes. But when you hit a wall in your personal life, and you screw up, people don't give you a chance to navigate your way through it and tap into what's extraordinary about you."
"The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems."
"They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."
"My whinstone house my castle is, I have my own four walls."
"On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe."
"I dunno when I started writing really. I was, like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex. 'occasionally' , stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls."
"A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again"
"Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall"
"I'm for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?"
"My friend Sally is a nudist. I went to her house. The closets have no doors. The walls are covered with see-through wallpaper."
"The Ripe FigNow that You live here in my chest,anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.And those other images,which have enchanted peoplelike porcelain dolls from China,which have made men and women weepfor centuries, even those have changed now.What used to be pain is a lovely benchwhere we can rest under the roses.A left hand has become a right.A dark wall, a window.A cushion in a shoe heel,the leader of the community!Now silence. What we sayis poison to someand nourishing to others.What we say is a ripe fig,but not every bird that flieseats figs."
"As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over."
"A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape"
"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."
"A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome”? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging."
"When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on."
"If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls."
"How beautiful it is for a man to die Upon the walls of Zion! to be called Like a watch-worn and weary sentinel, To put his armour off, and rest in heaven!"
"I devoted my career to building an affinity with my fans who have supported me unflinchingly and no barbed wire fence or prison wall will stop that."
