W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.”
Source: Miss Manners' guide to rearing perfect children
“When a society begins to lack men that, that they stand up against the collapse of equity in their land that is the kind of thing that brings sorrow to the heart of our King”
“When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings”
Source: The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre
“When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, revolutions start there.”
“When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.”
“When a society is criticised by outsiders, its members wince but shrug their shoulders. 'What you can expect from strangers?' is the feeling. When the attack comes from within, no such indulgence is shown. 'He was one of us,' runs the refrain.”
“When a society is invaded and dominated by another, it can easily lose its sense of self, especially if the dominating group imposes a different language, culture, worldview and cosmology upon the conquered, stigmatizing their former ways of knowing and being in the world. The conquered become dislocated from their rootedness in the world, ontologically speaking... When a culture is severely compromised, it tends to lose control of its institutions, especially those that help it to understand itself.”
“When a society is organized around that which is fitting in each realm, then peace, the fruit of justice, can flourish.”
Source: The Prayer of Saint Francis: A Message of Peace for the World Today
“When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.”
“When a society lacks God, even prosperity is joined by a terrible spiritual poverty.”
“When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather VINDICTIVENESS. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.”
“When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.”
Source: Pascal Pensées
“When a soldier of the night's watch dies they say, "And now his watch is over." That's what they say when a comedian dies. They go, "And now his tour is done."”
“When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.”
“When a song comes from a real story and from a real place I think it comes across to people. That's important.”
“When a song comes to you, you can't run around it.”
“When a song gets its legs and begins to come to me, this is the euphoric hook that keeps me wanting to continue.”
“When a song is ended, it leaves nothing but a feeling in those who heard it until that feeling, slowly moving backwards in time, collapses under pressure from more recent feelings and is replaced. Events become memories, unreliable stories, fade away at the ends. Unconnected and distinct from the day's experience, they become one of the millions of strata that make us who we are. We are the sum of all our experiences. We are waves on the ocean, interacting with and affected by all the other waves that move and die and are washed up on the shore. We are each a breath, a song, a flower. We are time itself, and mine has been long and I've collected many disconnected layers.”
Source: Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story
“When a song wants to be written, it will be written.”
“When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.”
Source: History of My Life
“When a soothing wind blows gently love through the thistledown of expectations, hope may inveigle the future for timeless care and tenderness to be anchored in a bay of good luck. ("Happiness blowing in the wind" )”
“When a soul has advanced so far on the spiritual road as to be lost to all the natural methods of communing with God; when it seeks Him no longer by meditation, images, impressions, nor by any other created ways, or representations of sense, but only by rising above them all, in the joyful communion with Him by faith and love, then it may be said to have found God of a truth, because it has truly lost itself as to all that is not God, and also as to its own self.”
“When a soul is created, so is its mate. In every lifetime those souls find each other. They complete the other's destiny.”
“When a soul is saved, raised up out of the black abyss of despair, it never means as much to anyone else as it does to the one rescued.”
Source: Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year
“When a soul leaves a body gracefully, it, knowingly or unknowingly, lowers its life intensity enough so that it can exit the physical body with minimal drama. Elderly folk, who manage to pass on peacefully, go through a process of gradually and progressively diminishing their life energy. They come and go, exiting and returning, until they finally don’t return again. It is common to see old people sitting in their chair, barely there, and then they will spring back to life until, one day, the back and forth is done. This is a good way to die. It carries the least amount of karmic refuse and allows the individual to move forward with less drag.”
Source: Purnima
“When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.”
Source: Notes on the Cinematograph
“When a Southern woman offers you a homecooked meal, you're only rude if you refuse. That goes for seconds and thirds too, by the way." -Ruby Watts”
Source: Whispers in the Branches
“When a Spanish man cries it's not a sign of weakness”
“When a sports movie really works, it gets you on all levels, because the stakes are high. It's black and white. It's win or lose.”
“When a star blinks, it is acknowledging you; when it winks, it is embracing you.”
“When a star goes supernova, the explosion emits enough light to overshadow an entire solar system, even a galaxy. Such explosions can set off the creation of new stars.
In its own way, it was not unlike being born.”
Source: Appetite & Other Stories
“When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.”
“When a state is afraid of the journalists, it means that that state is definitely doing some secret devilish things!”
“When a stock doubles, sell half - then what you have is a free position. Then it becomes more of an art form. When you sell depends on individual circumstances.”
“When a stock is selling at a discount to liquidation value per share, a near rock-bottom appraisal, it is frequently an attractive investment.”
“When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.”
Source: Memoirs Of A Geisha
“When a storm blows, you must stand firm. For it is not trying to knock you down, it is really trying to teach you to be strong.”
“When a storm comes, it is the trees that get uprooted. Be as humble as the grass and nothing can touch you.”
“When a storm of harassment disturbs our thinking and brings us down to our knees, the umbrella of our imagination can shield us against destructive aggression. It is offering shelter and is teaching us how to conquer ourselves, train our resilience, and grit our teeth. We better learn to adopt the virtue of endurance, as life consists of both ‘passion’ and ‘patience.’ ("The umbrella")”
“When a storm shows up, always remind yourself a rainbow is hiding behind it.”
“When a story captures me, it comes quickly and easily.”
“When a story gets wedged in your head and refuses to go away, when it keeps coming back, again and again, despite your seeming inability to tell it, know this..the story has chosen you and You are ready, so tell it or it’ll haunt you to the end of your days. Characters too! They will find you, drop anchor and before you know, they will speak through you, shaping their own narrative, their own unique destiny. Let go and allow them. You have no option but to be a channel for them. This joy of surrender can only be felt… never truly explained.”
“When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.”
“When a story is unpleasant, it is hard to focus on details that allow you to put yourself in the place of the subject, because the pain of distortion starts to feel familiar. Paying attention often requires some sort of empathy for the subject, or at the very least, for the speaker. But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else's no longer exist.”
Source: The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
“When a stranger on the street makes a sexual comment, he is making a private assessment of me public. And though I’ve never been seriously worried that I would be attacked, it does make me feel unguarded, unprotected.
Regardless of his motive, the stranger on the street makes an assumption based on my physique: He presumes I might be receptive to his unpoetic, unsolicited comments. (Would he allow a friend to say “Nice tits” to his mother? His sister? His daughter?) And although I should know better, I, too, equate my body with my soul and the result, at least sometimes, is a deep shame of both.
Rape is a thousand times worse: The ultimate theft of self-control, it often leads to a breakdown in the victim’s sense of self-worth. Girls who are molested, for instance, often go on to engage in risky behavior—having intercourse at an early age, not using contraception, smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. This behavior, it seems to me, is at least in part because their self-perception as autonomous, worthy human beings in control of their environment has been taken from them.”
Source: Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
“When a stray animal crosses your path, it may be as close to God as you're going to get in this lifetime.”
“When a street musician lowered his violin to inquire, 'Hey lovely, what you got there?' she said, 'Musicians who ask questions,' and kept on dragging.”
“When a string of disconnected events weave together, I know my spirit is talking to me.”
Source: Old Maggie's Spirit Whispers
“When a strong sense of accountability flows through your veins, it won't let you make any compromise in the face of inhumanity.”
Source: Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society
“When a strong storm hits a house, it can destroy everything, the roof, the walls, the furniture... But there is one thing that the storm can never destroy it: Memories from that house! Why? Because even if it destroys the owners of those memories, it is not possible to kill everyone who has witnessed or listened to those memories once!”