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Middle Quotes

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Middle Quotes

“Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?”

Way Important Age Faces Courses Father Loses Middle Stupid Prepared Arguing Middle Ages Our Father Prestige Not Stupid

Author:Robertson Davies

“One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in "spirit" was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped.”

Source: Writings on religion

“The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

Littles Ends Facts Seems Middle Creatures

Book:I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

“Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.”

Class Blood Middle Passionate Middle Class Moderates Bosoms Clinging Thirsty Absorbing

Author:Matthew Arnold

“My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into an unequivocal position.”

Should Wells War Order Left Social Numbers Clear Middle Subjects Position Habit Convinced Reform Temperament Social Reform Pacifist Small Numbers Middle Of The Road Unequivocal

Book:The Jane Addams Reader

Source: The Jane Addams Reader

“Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?”

Ifs Ends Middle Why Not Beginning Middle And End

Book:Stirner: The Ego and Its Own

Source: Stirner: The Ego and Its Own

“He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.”

Two Age Middle Italian Middle Ages Statesmen

Author:Andrew Dickson White

“The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.”

Years Two Different Facts Middle Century Thousand Method Thousand Years Inquiry Pursued

Book:A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods

Source: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods

“It was like finding some weird tribe in the middle of the jungle and, you know, they all come out and go: "Fear of the Dark. Favorite Album." What?!?”

Knows Firsts Dark Middle Findings First Time Albums Performing Tribes Jungle Costa Rica

Author:Bruce Dickinson

“I'm not as optimistic as Gene Roddenberry was. I fall somewhere in the middle. But as a romantic, I like to think things are going to get bigger rather than worse.”

Thinking Fall Middle Bigger Optimistic Genes

Author:J. J. Abrams

“It truly is a little intimidating to go speak at a middle school. Sure, on one hand the kids are only around 13 years old, but on the other hand, merely going back there reactivates the dorky, miserable feeling of being that age again. It isn't easy. As soon as I arrived I could almost feel the braces on my teeth, the don't-look-at-me slouch of my shoulders, the feathered wings of my bangs.”

Feels Years Looks Littles Feelings Hands Kids Age School Speak Easy Middle Wings Shoulders Teeth Miserable Look At Me Bangs Intimidating Middle School Braces Dorky

Author:Kristin Armstrong

“All middle men are bad.”

Author:Syd Barrett

“Marriage is not something that can be accomplished all at once; it has to be constantly reaccomplished. A couple must never indulge in idle tranquility with the remark: "The game is won; let's relax." The game is never won. The chances of life are such that anything is possible. Remember what the dangers are for both sexes in middle age. A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.”

“A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.”

Lines Middle Rounds Circles Holes Straight Lines Learning Math

Book:Mark Twain's Essays: Top Essays

Source: Mark Twain's Essays: Top Essays

“I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.”

Men Facts Helping Fighting Class Middle He Man Trade Unions Income Ideology Developing Posts Officials Appropriate Middle Class Labour Bourgeois Bourgeoisie Working Man Trade Unions

Author:George Orwell

“It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.”

Knows Feels Should Stills Political Difficult Natural Five Middle Baby Profession Seventies Statesmen Middle Aged

Book:The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell

Source: The collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell

“[Among the Arapeh... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community...] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.”

People Ifs Men Should Children Care Mother Father Community Answers Middle Should Have Responsible Comment Bores Looking Good Middle Aged Child Care

Author:Margaret Mead

“Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.”

Should Doe Art Ends Artist Given Class Poverty Middle Becoming Comfortable Training Should Have Complaining Middle Class

Book:A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue

Source: A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue

“In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song.”

“It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.”

Age Literature Middle Honor Crosses Middle Ages Unthinkable Legion Frenchmen Syphilis

Author:Andre Gide

“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as "misogynous." In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies ... there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”

“September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.”

Age Faces Night Stuff Middle Century Conflict Enlightenment Islam East Nuclear Landscape Indian Middle East September Irrational Arena Medieval September 11 Jihad Bronze Old Stuff Anachronism

Author:Martin Amis

“We have been in recess since July, and during that time there has been a fuel crisis, a Danish no vote, the collapse of the euro and a war in the middle east, but what is our business tomorrow? The Insolvency Bill [Lords]. It ought to be called the Bankruptcy Bill [Commons], because we play no role.”

Has Beens War Play Lord Roles Middle Ought Tomorrow Vote Crisis Bills East Fuel Middle East Collapse July Bankruptcy Euro Recess Danish Insolvency

Author:Tony Benn

“Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.”

“At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.”

Source: Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

“I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.”

Middle Meetings Spats

Author:Joni Mitchell

“BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.”

Poor Class Rich Middle Middle Class Disappearance

Author:Douglas Coupland

“Our first and immutable commitment must be to the security of Israel, our only true ally in the Middle East and the only democracy.”

Firsts Democracy Middle Security Commitment Israel East Allies Middle East

Author:Barack Obama

“Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.”

Art Imagination Class Middle Intellectual Illusion Notion Smell Middle Class Quotations Closets Disbelief Dressed Up Stale Negation Suspension Pedestrians Suspension Of Disbelief

Book:Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

Source: Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

“The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.”

Stills Growth Natural Class Middle Objects Taste Aesthetic Leisure Supplements Lower Class Aesthetic Beauty

Book:The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class

“It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.”

People Wells May Problem Sound My Own Practice Middle Century Bases Decades Psychological Chiefs Emptiness Surprising Colleagues Twentieth Century Clinicals Psychiatric

Book:Man's Search for Himself

Source: Man's Search for Himself

“Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.”

“While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.”

Men Stories Wealth Class Poverty Study Middle Percent Myth Riches Executives Steel Rags Railroads Upper Class Horatio Textiles Rags To Riches

Book:A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

Source: A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

“If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.”

Ifs Law Left Class Middle Majors Crisis Middle Class Iron Capitalist Back Again

Author:Terry Eagleton

“In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge”

Men World Age Fall Secret Middle Madness Debate Gods Will Dramatic Beast Marvelous Disputes Middle Ages Renaissance Metamorphosis Clouded Renaissance Man

Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Source: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim... Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture's luxury items than the 'oppressor'.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex

“The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.”

Years Children Past Parent Middle Caught Children And Parents

Book:The Middle Ground

Source: The Middle Ground

“Unless the Arab states give Israel formal recognition, within secure, recognised and mutually agreed boundaries, as a permanent feature of the geography and politics of the Middle East. But if Israel is to obtain this recognition, she must, in a settlement, put an end to the territorial occupation which she has maintained since the war of 1967; the nine members of the European Community have declared that this is an essential element in a settlement. On behalf of the British Government I underline that need today.”

“A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.”

Has Beens Two Enjoy Class Rich Middle Standards Ordinary Workers Population Decades Luxury Proportion Britain Middle Class Prerogative

Author:Anthony Crosland

“The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.”

Universe Behinds Middle Cost Tonight

Book:The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

Source: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“We face a brutal enemy who will kill the innocent for one purpose and that is to gain control of the Middle East and to use the leverage of oil to bring down the West, and to attack us again.”

Use Faces Purpose Enemy Middle Gains West Oil East Innocent Middle East Brutal

Author:Karl Rove

“I was born with the biggest middle finger on Earth.”

Earth Born Middle Fingers Middle Finger

Author:Eminem

“Europe is a woman, now middle-aged, who has already had a number of heart attacks and is currently experiencing the biggest health crisis of her life, but one that need not be fatal.”

Needs Heart Numbers Middle Europe Crisis Middle Aged Heart Attack

Author:Timothy Garton Ash

“The Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

World Stills Two Lying Middle Cost Thirds Oil East Prize Middle East Lowest

Author:Dick Cheney

“I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.”

Life Littles Fall Middle Surround Explosions Incidents Pluck Blankness

Book:In the Heart of the Country: A Novel

Source: In the Heart of the Country: A Novel

“There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life.”

Writing Interesting Class Middle Middle Class Middle Class Life

Author:Jarvis Cocker

“Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.”

Wells Art Age Today Able Middle Art Is Forgiving Middle Ages Never Forgive

Author:Samuel R. Delany

“Israel is the number one rogue state threat to Middle Eastern peace with its nuclear arms and acts of outright aggression towards its peaceful neighbours Syria and Lebanon - and genocidal actions against the marginalised Palestinians of the West Bank - and Gaza in particular.”

States Action Numbers Middle Particular Arms Threat West Israel Nuclear Peaceful Aggression Palestinian Syria Eastern Neighbour Gaza Rogues Lebanon Nuclear Arms

Author:Mohamed ElBaradei

“I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.”

Thinking War Suffering Bits Views Company Fire Too Much Middle Battle Definitions Pops Smell East Journalism Middle East Reporters Immune Romanticism Victorian Cannons

Author:Robert Fisk

“I was the person who did academics until the middle of the day, then went on auditions. I think there was a moment later in my life where I was like, "What am I doing? Why am I so serious?" .”

Thinking Persons Moments Middle Serious Auditions

Author:Carla Gugino