Calligraphic Flourishes Quotes

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world. ~ Albert Camus

The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast. ~ Joseph Conrad

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented. ~ Mark Twain

Truth is without flourishes or manners and runs with a logic all its own. ~ Patricia Briggs

I have refused to believe that Mother will die. And by denying her cancer, even her death, I deny her life. Denial stops us from listening. I cannot hear what Mother is saying. I can only hear what I want. But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs walls around us to keep us safe. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Lieutenant Commander Sibley added a few final flourishes as he brought the Jade up to cruising speed. "If you have to hurl, Staff Sargent, bite the black tab at the base of your faceplate. It'll open a pouch."
No answer. Not even the sound of a lost lunch.
"Staff?"
Her telltales were green. She was conscious. Heart pumping at sixty/sixty. Respiration slow and steady.
Then it dawned on him. While he'd been flying a pattern designed to test the limits of Human physiology, his passenger had gone to sleep. ~ Tanya Huff

Ancient poets and sages have called the earth the mother of all things. They could hardly have chosen a more attractive name, or one that was more appropriate. From her lap springs everything that possesses life and motion, everything that flourishes, fades, and has its fated day, and she tirelessly provides material for the countless varied bodies that are created
and then abandoned
by the life force in its unending, hidden progress through nature. ~ Jonas Hallgrimsson

Evil flourishes when good men do nothing. - SHARON WALL, QUOTING EDMUND BURKE ~ Lisa Pulitzer

Zeal is fit for wise men, but flourishes chiefly among fools. ~ John Tillotson

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

In the suburbs lust thrives and flourishes like an epidemic of lawn grubs during a heat wave. ~ Helen Argiro

The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me. ~ Philip Pullman

- I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest. - The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science - the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions - a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to "know."... "Therefore, man must be made unhappy," - this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest. - It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world: - "sin."... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up against science - against the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest. - Away with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour. - The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness" - lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality - were devised to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect! - And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An atta ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb. ~ William Butler Yeats

When fraternities are not allowed, Communism flourishes. Young men who are inexperienced but have faith are more useful than older, experienced men without faith. The fraternity system is a bastion of American strength. ~ Barry Goldwater

Knowledge flourishes where words of eminent men empower the cognition of young minds with enlightenment. ~ Stephen TSJ

The challenge of a revival is how to bring something fresh. The reward is the opportunity to add different flourishes. You're dealing with different actors, designers and a different time. ~ Scott Ellis

Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race's first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here's your cubicle. The space had been ~ James S.A. Corey

I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three months' stay in England and Europe that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection you would have ten-fold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

She handed Lord Payne a steaming cup, and he took an immediate, reckless draught. A devilish smile curved her way. "Gunpowder tea? Well done, Miss Finch. I do enjoy a lady with a sense of humor."
Now this one ... he was a rake. It was written all over him, in his fine dress and flirtatious manner. He might as well have had the word embroidered on his waistcoat, between the gold-thread flourishes. She knew all about men of his sort. Half the young ladies in Spindle Cove were either fleeing them or pining for them. ~ Tessa Dare

Panurge stood beside the galley with an oar in his hand, not to help the herdsmen but to prevent from from somehow clambering aboard and thus escaping their death, and all the while preached to them eloquently . . . with rhetorical flourishes about the miseries of this world and the blessings of the next, affirming that those who had passed on to that place were happier than those who lived on in this vale of tears. ~ Francois Rabelais

The Eucharist is the heart of the Church. Where Eucharistic life flourishes, there the life of the church will blossom. ~ Pope John Paul II

There's no one there to understand, there's just understanding, which flourishes in you as peace, joy and contentment. ~ Mooji

The race of men is like the race of leaves. As one generation flourishes, another decays. ~ Homer

Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman's fingers
play music on holy strings.

Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.

A place to rest
isn't given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown. ~ Friedrich Holderlin

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference. ~ Thomas Hardy

My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. ~ William Shakespeare

The deepwood is vanished in these islands
much, indeed, had vanished before history began
but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling's story 'Puck of Pook's Hill,' it is by right of 'Oak and Ash and Thorn' that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history. ~ Robert Macfarlane

Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes. ~ Carlo Rovelli

Mum said no one has ever called me by my first name so I've always assumed that even as a baby they could tell I wasn't an Arabella, a name with loops and flourishes in black-inked calligraphy; a name that contains within it girls called Bella or Bells or Belle - so many beautiful possibilities. No, from the start I was clearly a Beatrice, sensible and unembellished in Times New Roman, with no one hiding inside. ~ Rosamund Lupton

We ought to thank God always for you, brothers, as is fitting, because your faith flourishes ever more, and the love of every one of you for one another grows ever greater. ~ Anonymous

True science and true religion are twin sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis. ~ Thomas Huxley

But nothing else escapes all-ruinous time.
Earth's might decays, the might of men decays,
Honor grows cold, dishonor flourishes,
There is no constancy 'twixt friend and friend,
Or city and city; be it soon or late,
Sweet turns to bitter, hate once more to love. ~ Sophocles

Imagination flourishes best in solitude. ~ Anthony Storr

A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe." The children lean forward. "And then?" "Behind the thirteenth door" - the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands - "is the Sea of Flames." Puzzlement. Fidgeting. "Come now. You've never heard of the Sea of Flames? ~ Anthony Doerr

And what's Cristiano's style? With his constant search for perfection, he fits the 'classical' mould. He has constantly refined his play, eliminating even the tiniest flourishes to perfect the most utilitarian form and winning formula. Both he and Messi are products of their footballing ~ Luca Caioli

Success flourishes only in perseverance ceaseless, restless perseverance. ~ Manfred Von Richthofen

My mother's people, the people who captured my imagination when I was growing up, were of the Deep South - emotional, changeable, touched with charisma and given to histrionic flourishes. They were courageous under tension and unexpectedly tough beneath their wild eccentricities, for they had and unusually close working agreement with God. They also had an unusually high quota of bullshit. ~ Willie Morris

16 When the wicked are in authority, sin flourishes, but the godly will live to see their downfall. ~ Anonymous

I like the structure of the crime story, but most of all I like the ecosystem in which the genre flourishes: the festivals, the websites, the fans, the fact that you have your own special section of the bookshop. And crime is cool, too. It's dark and edgy and funny and intelligent. I love it. ~ Harry Bingham

Avoid theatrical flourishes - the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good writing," and therefore must be struck from the text. ~ Donald Spoto

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. ~ William Hazlitt

What kind of house will these dreamers become? What will it be like to live among people who don't fidget in fear of what's around the next bend? What kind of melodies will they compose?

He guessed that they would make strange company. Mysterious. Aggressively curious. Scary. Ignoring urgent concerns, distracted by insects and clouds and children. Each would live with one foot planted in another world. No more worry about their reputation. No more sugarcoated persuasion. No more flourishes designed to solicit a shower of coins. Only riddles and play and prophecy. ~ Jeffrey Overstreet

What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. ~ Henry David Thoreau

On Love and Happiness: Happiness is created within us. It flourishes in emotions, the very important human emotions. ~ Katerina Kostaki