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“Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he leaned in to kiss her, she gave herself over to him. While he held her close, she ran her hands over his shoulders and back, feeling the strength in his arms. She knew he’d wanted more in their relationship than she’d been willing to offer, but here and now, she suddenly knew she had no other choice. There was only this moment, and it was theirs.”

“Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.”

“Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also! Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.”

“Yet man does recognise himself [as an animal]. But I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history, I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science.”

“Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my everlasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.”

“Yet neither they nor the condition of academic philosophy more generally is sufficient to explain the radical marginalization of philosophical concerns in our culture. This marginalization has several aspects. In part it is a matter of the relegation of philosophy in the vast majority of colleges and universities to a subordinate position in the curriculum, an inessential elective for those who happen to like that sort of thing. But this itself is a symptom of a more general malaise. For to a remarkable extent the norms of our secularized culture not only exclude any serious and systematic questioning of oneself and others about the nature of the human good and the order of things, but they also exclude questioning those dominant cultural norms that make it so difficult to pose these philosophical questions outside academic contexts in any serious and systematic way. We have within our social order few, if any milieus within which reflective and critical enquiry concerning the central issues of human life can be sustained and the education to which we subject our young is not well-designed to develop the habits of thought necessary for such questioning. This tends to be a culture of answers, not of questions, and those answers, whether secular or religious, liberal or conservative, are generally delivered as though meant to put an end to questioning. So it is not just that the philosophy of the academic philosopher has been marginalized in the college curriculum. It is also and more importantly that, when plain persons do try to ask those questions about the human good and the nature of things in which the philosophical enterprise is rooted, the culture immediately invites them to think about something else and to forget those questions.”

“Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew; Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.”

“Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.”

“Yet now all the world seemed to be afire. Whole forests burst into flame; whole towns burnt as fiercely as ever Magdeburg had burnt. “Ah,” said Philander Groot, “it could be the End, after all, my friends.” “And good riddance to it,” I said. “It is a poor world, a bad world, a decadent world. It expects love without sacrifice. It expects immediate gratification of its desires, as a child might, as a beast might. And if it does not receive gratification it becomes pettish and destroys in a tantrum. What’s the use of seeking a Cure for its Pain, Philander Groot? What’s the use of attempting, by any means, to divert it from its well-earned doom?” “Because we are alive, I suppose, Captain Von Bek. Because we have no choice but to hope to make it better, through our own designs.” Philander Groot seemed amused by me. “The world is the world,” said Sedenko. “We cannot change it. That is for God to do.” “Perhaps He thinks it is for us to do,” said Groot quietly.”

“Yet, of all the people I have had approach me or e-mail me to say they have seen a UFO, not one has been an amateur astronomer. As a matter of fact, I have never heard about any amateur astronomers seeing something in the sky they absolutely could not explain. Yet they spend far more time looking at the sky than lay people and statistically should see far more UFOs! How can this be? Easy. Remember, the amateur astronomers study the sky. They know what's in it and what to expect. When they see a meteor, or Venus, or sunlight glinting off the solar panel of a satellite, they know it's not an alien spaceship. Amateur astronomers know better and, in fact, all the amateurs to whom I have spoken about this are very skeptical about UFOs being alien spaceships. This is a very strong argument that there are mundane explanations for the vast majority of UFO sightings.”