Quotessence
Home / Quotes / H Quotes

H Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with H. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All H Quotes

“He thought of all that the newspapers were printing about him. Each man attributed to him his own hopes, his own motives and rancors, and his own secret misanthropy: it was in vain that he stated his own aims clearly; there was nothing he could do about it. And yet the truth was clear; it could hardly be clearer. He loved all those free roots that gave their beauty to the earth and to man’s life on it. He loved nature, and he had always done his best to defend it.”

“He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly – yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think. From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!” – “Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!” – “Don’t argue, obey!” – “Don’t try to understand, believe!” – “Don’t struggle, compromise!” – “Your heart is more important than your mind!” – “Who are you to know? Your parents know best!” – “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!” – “Who are you to object? All values are relative!” – “Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!” Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival – yet that was what they did to their children.”

“He thought of Dr. Stein again. What was Stein’s favorite line? “Understanding is a delaying tactic.” Stein used to get angry about that. When the graduate students would intellectualize, going on and on about patients and their problems, he would interrupt in annoyance, “Who cares? Who cares whether we understand the psychodynamics in this case? Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.”

“He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.”

“He thought of one of those girls frowning over a book, pushing a lock of brown hair back over one oddly curved ear. He thought of the way she looked at him, brows narrowed in suspicion. Scornful and alert. Awake. Alive. He imagined her as a mindless servant and felt a rush of something he couldn't quite untangle- horror, and also a sort of terrible relief. No ensorcelled human could look at him as she did.”

“He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy . . . who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.”

“He thought of the fish they had caught. “Can a fish ask themselves if they are real or not?” he pondered. Were they real because he had eaten one? He wondered what had become of the fish he had eaten. Was the fish now a part of him or was he what he ate? Was he a part of a fish? It was all so perplexing. Just like a mysterious dream in a children’s book.”

“He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.”

“He thought of the words of the hymn he had always loved: Help of the helpless, O abide with me. He knew one could say - perhaps Rhonda Skillings might say - that this was merely the plea of a frightened child reaching up in the dark to hold the hand of Parent God. But Tyler, softly humming the tune as he stood beneath the elm - fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide - thought God existed in the hymn itself, in the yearning and sorrowful acknowledgment of the loneliness and fears that arrived in life.”

“He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.”

“He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth.”

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”