Quotes - Riff (Boulder, CO) Showing 1-30 of 45

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#1

“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
― Alexander Pope

tags: error, humility, wisdom

381 likes

#2

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

tags: failure, forgiveness, humanity, mistakes

2825 likes

#3

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

78 likes

#4

“To love and win is the best thing.
To love and lose, the next best.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray

tags: inspirational

1716 likes

#5

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

tags: inspirational, politics, presidential

8284 likes

#6

“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

tags: achievement, fame, struggle

385 likes

#7

“Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.”
― Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

tags: abilities, equality, fear, gender, intelligence, men, misogyny, skills, strength, superiority, suppression, weakness, women

357 likes

#8

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

tags: our-mutual-friend

550 likes

#9

“And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at istelf and dies with the doer of it! but Good, never.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

tags: eternal-truths, goodness

43 likes

#10

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”
― Winston S. Churchill

tags: truth

266 likes

#11

“Bully”
― Theodore Roosevelt

33 likes

#12

“Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

tags: feminist, human-rights, pro-feminist, roosevelt

68 likes

#13

“Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

tags: charles-dickens, love, our-mutual-friend

63 likes

#14

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: betrayal, infidelity, longing, touch

344 likes

#15

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: anchoring, attachment, belonging, home, homelessness, roots

255 likes

#16

“[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: darkness, isolation, loneliness, modern-society, noise, peace, shallowness, silence, stillness, technology

67 likes

#17

“Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: change, civilization, growth, human-condition, humanity, rebellion, revolution, society

24 likes

#18

“There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

33 likes

#19

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: life, time

31 likes

#20

“His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

26 likes

#21

“I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: eyes, intimacy, transparency

13 likes

#22

“The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: deprivation, empathy, modern-society, progress, shallowness, technology

7 likes

#23

“I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: civilization, convention, culture, grandparents, progress, tribalism

5 likes

#24

“His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

5 likes

#25

“I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it.”
― Wallace Stegner , Angle of Repose

tags: anarchy, civilization, colonization, commune, crowds, history, human-nature, idealism, noise, privacy, society, study, wild

8 likes

#26

“You can spread jelly on the peanut butter but you can't spread peanut butter on the jelly.”
― Dick Van Dyke, My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business

tags: humor, life-and-living

38 likes

#27

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: art, beauty, music, wonder

2448 likes

#28

“To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.”
― Henry Adams, Democracy, an American novel

3 likes