Immovable Quotes

A very good friend of mine, Michael Purser, once remarked that if my mother was the irresistible force, my father was surely the immovable object. Whatever the truth, I should not be here but for them. Being here is the supreme gift. ~ Julian Barbour

We always think of language as an immovable object, as this set of codified and unbreakable rules. But when you consider that one can rearrange the
letters in PRESBYTERIANS and spell
BRITNEY SPEARS, it reminds us that
language (and the stories we tell with
language) can be twisted and molded. ~ John Green

But time was a beast, a big, indolent immovable beast that wasn't interested in my efforts at hastening it in any direction. ~ Piper Kerman

How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself ... ? ~ Dalma Heyn

To analyze or assess a person's failings or deficiencies,' he declared to himself, 'is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in diverse ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being. ~ A.E. Coppard

Be a peg, hammered into the frozen ground, immovable. ~ Winston S. Churchill

It sickens me to think of you
a prevalence of void
unholy
immovable
damned. gifts.
an overblown sense of his own importance.
I wish you were dead.

forget about you.
crow
florid with
fantasies
it's so awful
a perfect imitation
a liability to love
forget you
Ingrid Magnussen

quite alone
masturbating
rot
disappointment
grotesque

Your arms cradle
poisons
garbage
grenades

Loneliness
long-distance cries
forever
never
response.

take everything
feel me?
the human condition

Stop
plotting murder
penitence
Cultivate it

you
forbid
appeal
rage
important
I
cringe

fuck
you
insane
person
dissonant and querulous

my
gas tanks marked FULL ~ Janet Fitch

Here's the papal proclamation of 1455 that empowered the Christian kings of Europe to enslave, plunder, and slaughter in the name of discovery: invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.12 ~ Brian D. McLaren

To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I've effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I've actually imprinted it in indelible ink. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Freemasonry is an institution founded on eternal reason and truth; whose deep basis is the civilization of mankind, and whose everlasting glory it is to have the immovable support of those two mighty pillars, science and morality. ~ George Washington

Coagulate, v.: It is a dangerous thing, this thickening of affection; you want it to have weight, but not to be an immovable burden. ~ David Levithan

58 b Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in c the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord d your labor is not in vain. ~ Anonymous

There can be no living together without understanding, and understanding means compromise. Compromise is not a dirty word, it is the cornerstone of civilization, just as politics is the art of making civilization work. Men do not and cannot and hopefully will never think alike, hence each must yield a little in order to avoid war, to avoid bickering. Men and women meet together and adjust their differences, this is compromise. He who stands unyielding and immovable upon a principle is often a fool, and often bigoted, and usually left standing alone with his principle while other men adjust their differences and go on. ~ Louis L'Amour

I'll tell you the story of the wave and the rock. It's an old story. Older than we are. Listen. Once upon a time there was a wave who loved a rock in the sea, let us say in the Bay of Capri. The wave foamed and swirled around the rock, she kissed him day and night, she embraced him with her white arms, she sighed and wept and besought him to come to her. She loved him and stormed about him and in that way slowly undermined him, and one day he yielded, completely undermined, and sank into her arms."
"And suddenly he was no longer a rock to be played with, to be loved, to be dreamed of. He was only a block of stone at the bottom of the sea, drowned in her. The wave felt disappointed and deceived and looked for another rock
"What does that mean? He should have remained a rock."
"The wave always says that. But things that move are stronger than immovable things. Water is stronger than rocks. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

I realized both the upper and lower body must be held securely in place with one strap across the chest and one across the hips. The belt also needed an immovable anchorage point for the buckle as far down beside the occupant's hip, so it could hold the body properly during a collision. It was just a matter of finding a solution that was simple, effective and could be put on conveniently with one hand. ~ Nils Bohlin

This journey then, is nothing more, yet nothing less than a period of acclimating to a new way of seeing, a time of transition and revelation as it gradually comes upon "that" which remains when there is no self. this is not a journey for those who expect love and bliss, rather, it is for the hardy who have been tried by fire and have come to rest in a tough, immovable trust in "that" which lies beyond the known, beyond the self, beyond union and even beyond love and trust itself ~ Bernadette Roberts

Was going to drown. Woo had attached him to the drain at the bottom of the pool with his own handcuffs. He looked up. The moon was shining down on him through a filter of water. He stretched his free arm up and out of the water. Hell, the pool was only one meter deep here! Harry crouched and tried to stand up, stretched with all his might. The handcuff cut into his thumb, but still his mouth was twenty centimeters below the surface. He noticed the shadow at the edge of the pool moving away. Shit! Don't panic, he thought. Panic uses up oxygen. He sank to the bottom and examined the grille with his fingers. It was made of steel and was totally immovable, it didn't budge even when he grabbed it with both hands and pulled. How long could he hold his breath? One minute? Two? All his muscles ached, his temples throbbed and red stars were dancing in front of his eyes. He tried to jerk himself loose. His mouth was dry with fear, his brain had started producing ~ Jo Nesbo

To love one's neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one's neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingering near the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

I longed for release from whatever it was I was. But whatever I was lay hard and immovable in me, like bone; I would never be free of my own weight. ~ Steven Millhauser

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it. ~ Gustave Flaubert

This book will prove the following ten facts:
1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.
2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.
3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight.
5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast.
6. An Englishman's home is his castle.
7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
8. One black eye deserves another.
9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.
10. It pays to increase your word power. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

But fear is confusing. It tears you in two. Half of you wants to run far, far away, but the other half is paralyzed, frozen, immovable. And the hard part is that you never know which half is going to win. ~ Melody Carlson

Here is the difference between Oscar Wilde and me. For all the tortures he suffered, for all the ugliness of being punished for loving men, nobody read his lines and asked him: What does your husband think of that? Jail, exile
these were his lot. But never, What does your husband think?
Women may have the vote, but they are not free as long as that reaction erupts. Even those without husbands are judged as if they had offended them merely by writing the truth.
So immovable is the wall around a woman's freedom that she can't do a things without being asked to think of its effect upon some man who is presumed to be more important than she. ~ Erica Jong

There are no immovable barriers to education. ~ Irina Bokova

The emotion of sex is an "irresistible force," against which there can be no such opposition as an "immovable body." When driven by this emotion, men become gifted with a super power for action. ~ Napoleon Hill

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this Supreme Being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. ~ Barry Goldwater

Today, he saw the true cost of two men's immovable wills. He saw what happened when men were forced to fight each other for months on end. It was not merely sickness of the body that plagued sieges, but sickness of the soul that turned men into monsters. ~ Kiersten White

Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession ... Since movement always proceeds from something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood
namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found. Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The important thing is to polish wisdom and the mind in great detail. If you sharpen wisdom, you will understand what is just and unjust in society and also the good and the evil of this world; then you will come to know all kinds of arts and you will tread different ways. In this manner, no one in this world will succeed in deceiving you. It is after this stage that you will arrive at the wisdom of strategy. The wisdom of strategy is entirely distinct. Even right in the middle of a battle where everything is in rapid movement, it is necessary to attain the most profound principle of strategy, which assures you an immovable mind. You must examine this well. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

In this breaking-through, I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things. ~ Meister Eckhart

The way you're talking right now, you're aspiring to my fist in your face!' I yelled over my shoulder. I reached the door but he was there in a flash, sliding in front of me. He was so tall. So broad. So immovable. 'Move,' I hissed. 'Or I swear to every god and planetary system I will hit you in your smug face. ~ Catherine Doyle

The Immovable Object can also be construed as an idea whose
time has come. It's an idea of proportions that the human mind can
only grasp a small portion. Like the idea of freedom during the days
of revolution - only a handful understand what it means for the long
term, but it's the idea that cause people to take up arms, revolt
against the ruling class and fight for what they perceive to be
freedom. ~ Carla R. Herrera

I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable - individual psychology. ~ George Packer

The Spirit is like the steady axis of a wheel. If our attention reaches the immovable firm axis at the very centre of the wheel of our existence (which is constantly moving), we become enlightened by the Spirit, the source of inner peace, and reach a state of complete calm and self-knowledge. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

Perseverance is pushing against the immovable and the impossible until it breaks. The energy used to push is not physical, but spiritual, emotional and mental! Add pressure. Push! It will move. ~ Manuela George-Izunwa

Let your promises be few, and let them be immovable. ~ Ilya Atani

Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction. ~ Robin Boyd

Inertia, when first encountered, appears to be an immovable force. We are creatures who like comfort, patterns, and repetition ... Yet change is life's only constant. ~ Laurie Beth Jones

This could be the cause of all modern neurosis . . . [;] the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change. ~ Dave Eggers

As we become more spiritually mature and increasingly steadfast and immovable, we focus upon and strive to understand the fundamental and foundational doctrines of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. ~ David A. Bednar

We have seen mass protests about military invasions and about injustices of many kinds, but we are now entering a new era of understanding and for the first time we are going to see people protesting in large numbers about the conspiracy itself and not just its individual expressions, like globalisation and wars. It is a time when the irresistible force (the human awakening) is going eye-to-eye with what it thinks is the immovable object (the agenda for global control). Immovable it is not, as we shall see in due course, but it is not going to go quietly. We need to be strong and refuse to acquiesce to these control freaks under any circumstances, no matter what the scale of intimidation and provocation. The Illuminati families may have the money, governments, banks, corporations, police and military, but the humanity that they so mercilessly target has the sheer numbers. ~ David Icke

We are enemies. Opposites. An immovable object and an unstoppable force. ~ Pippa DaCosta

Now it is evident from the covenant of grace, that the smoking flax cannot be quenched. "The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but the covenant of my peace shall not be removed, says the Lord" (Isaiah 54:10). If there is falling from grace, how is it an immovable covenant? If grace dies and the smoking flax is quenched, how is our state in Christ, better than it was in Adam? The covenant of grace is called "a better covenant" (Heb. 7:22). How is it a better covenant than that which was made with Adam? Not only because it has a better Surety and contains better privileges - but because it has better conditions annexed to it: "It is ordered in all things, and sure" (2 Sam. 23:5). Those who are taken into the covenant shall be like stars fixed in their orbit and shall never fall away. If grace might die and be quenched, then it would not be a better covenant. ~ Thomas Watson

I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather ... the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side. ~ Dean Koontz

The statement serves as the basis for what is commonly called the Doctrine of Discovery, the teaching that whatever Christians "discover," they can take and use as they wish. It is breathtaking in its theological horror. Muslims (then called Saracens) and all other non-Christians are reduced to "enemies of Christ." Christians, even as they plunder, enslave, and kill, count themselves friends of Christ by contrast. Christian global mission is defined as to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue" non-Christians around the world, and to steal "all movable and immovable goods" and to "reduce their persons to perpetual slavery" - and not only them, but their descendants. And notice the stunning use of the word convert: "to convert them to his and their use and profit. ~ Brian D. McLaren

Bree shot to her feet and glared at him.
"Look all you want, Brianna. That was the deal, remember? Until Arturo is found, I'm not leaving you alone."
Alessandro stared down at her with immovable stubbornness.
"How am I gonna explain you to my grandfather? And what if the rest of my family is there?"
"Hello O'Reiley family, you remember Alessandro, the father of my child, the man that I love, the light of my life, ma raison d'être…"
"Are you done?" Bree asked cocking an eyebrow.
"Depends, are you quite ready to go? Look, you can explain that I'm there for answers too. My father's involvement in this vendetta directly influences my own future and that of my child. ~ E. Jamie

...Puritanism has made life itself impossible. More than art, more than estheticism, life represents beauty in a thousand variations; it is indeed, a gigantic panorama of eternal change. Puritanism, on the other hand, rests on a fixed and immovable conception of life; it is based on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, imposed upon man by the wrath of God. In order to redeem himself man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty.

Puritanism celebrated its reign of terror in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, destroying and crushing every manifestation of art and culture. It was the spirit of Puritanism which robbed Shelley of his children, because he would not bow to the dicta of religion. It was the same narrow spirit which alienated Byron from his native land, because that great genius rebelled against the monotony, dullness, and pettiness of his country. It was Puritanism, too, that forced some of England's freest women into the conventional lie of marriage: Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, George Eliot. And recently Puritanism has demanded another toll--the life of Oscar Wilde. In fact, Puritanism has never ceased to be the most pernicious factor in the domain of John Bull, acting as censor of the artistic expression of his people, and stamping its approval only on the dullness of middle-class respectability. ~ Emma Goldman

By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it's possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive mental state will result - fudoshin, the immovable mind. ~ H.E. Davey

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them. ~ Marcel Proust

There are three kinds of people: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those who move. ~ Benjamin Franklin

You can stick to your immovable zero-tolerance rules, but I'm going to stick to the motto "There's hope until the last second'! ~ Mary Lindsey

I believe that our ability to worship God, to reaffirm our covenants and receive the healing power of the Holy Ghost, to receive the instruction we need in order to make personal progress - all of these things are greatly affected by how secure and safe we feel in our Church environment during the three-hour block of time on Sundays. If we have to spend our energy dealing with feelings that we are not accepted, being concerned about our appearance, or worrying that what we do or say will be judged harshly, in other words that the fellowship of our ward members is anything but "fixed, immovable, and unchangeable", we certainly won't be able to make the kind of progress we could make otherwise. ~ Virginia H. Pearce

It's exhausting being cynical. You are trying to be an immovable, angry rock in the middle of a stream. But the stream will not move. It is you that will be worn down to dull silt. ~ Caitlin Moran

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Visigoth and Gaul, politics and plague. She fought on, struggling in tandem with antiquated interpretations and outmoded explanations, wondering at the senselessness of something so strong, so powerful, so immovable fading from history, disappearing, once and for all time, into shadow and dust. ~ Fiddles McMonkeypants

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. ~ Carl Sagan

She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count - it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously - an immovable certainty within her kept repeating - pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously. ~ Ayn Rand

Sheltered by his caste, Sarcellus had not, as the impoverished must, made fear the pivot of his passions. As a result he possessed an immovable self-assurance. He felt. He acted. He judged. The fear of being wrong that so characterized Achamian simply did not exist for Cutias Sarcellus. Where Achamian was ignorant of the answers, Sarcellus was ignorant of the questions. No certitude, she thought, could be greater. ~ R. Scott Bakker

The centre of the system of the world is immovable. ~ Isaac Newton

Nothing is immovable, Tatum. Everything is negotiable. ~ Christina June

Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time ... a tradition without intelligence is not worth having ... ~ T. S. Eliot

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one's native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology. where she is not maligned she is magnificently condescended to, as in this diary entry by Somerset Maugham written when he was in medical school:

The Professor of Gynaecology: He began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity.

I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence.

Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not be despised so much. were she sexually loved, or even liked, she and what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light, she would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contempt for her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible; immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is n ~ Andrea Dworkin

Should all the hoards of mankind assemble as one and bring the full force of their numbers against us, we must remember that one man standing alone with God remains an immovable majority. ~ Craig D Lounsbrough

Integrity is the very core of our being. It is who we really are. When all the scaffolding is removed, it is our integrity that both defines us and identifies us. Men of integrity are like the Rock of Gibraltar - steadfast and immovable. Men without it are like the shifting sands on the Sahara Desert - tossed to and fro by every variant wind of life. ~ Tad R. Callister

Key Rabbit, allow me to bore you with a comparison of your wife and a beautiful woman," I said. "In the morning a beauty must lie in bed for three or four hours gathering strength for another mighty battle with Nature. Then, after being bathed and toweled by her maids, she loosens her hair in the Cascade of Teasing Willows Style, paints her eyebrows in the Distant Mountain Range Style, anoints herself with the Nine Bends of the River Diving-water Perfume, applies rouge, mascara, and eye shadow, and covers the whole works with a good two inches of the Powder of the Nonchalant Approach. Then she dresses in a plum-blossom patterned tunic with matching skirt and stockings, adds four or five pounds of jewelry, looks in the mirror for any visible sign of humanity and is relieved to find none, checks her makeup to be sure that it has hardened into an immovable mask, sprinkles herself with the Hundred Ingredients Perfume of the Heavenly Spirits who Descended in the Rain Shower, and minces with tiny steps toward the new day. Which, like any other day, will consist of gossip and giggles. ~ Barry Hughart

Our women are not incredible because they have managed to avoid the difficulties of life - quite the opposite. They are incredible because of the way they face the trials of life. Despite the challenges and tests life has to offer - from marriage or lack of marriage, children's choices, poor health, lack of opportunities, and many other problems - they remain remarkably strong and immovable and true to the faith. Our sisters throughout the Church consistently succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees. ~ Quentin L. Cook

For the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space. ~ Brian Cox

Being steadfast and immovable with our heels in tar on the Lord's side of the line is the only strategy that works long-term against Lucifer. ~ Sheri L. Dew

When one practices discipline and moves from the beginner's territory to immovable wisdom, one makes a return and falls back to the level of the beginner. ~ Takuan Soho

The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men. The doctrine was a hang-over from the seventeenth century in France, when the philosophers had given up the idea of God, but still thought that there must be some immovable basis for man's conduct and ideals. In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If 'natural rights' means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception. ~ Clarence Darrow

The reality, I believe, is that all change starts small. The big picture is just too unwieldy, too incomprehensible and seemingly immovable. But give us something individual, quantifiable and personalize-able and, suddenly, our perspective shifts to the one. ~ Mick Ebeling

There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen. ~ Benjamin Franklin

How do you remain - steadfast and immovable during a trial of faith? You immerse yourself in the very thing that helped your core of faith: you exercise faith in Christ, you pray, you ponder the scriptures, you repent, you keep the commandments, and you serve others. ~ Neil L. Andersen

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces, which our senses determine by its position to bodies, and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space. ~ Isaac Newton

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction. ~ Zachary Mason

It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True geniuswill not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new sense. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guarantees of condition. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and damned rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. ~ James Baldwin

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture - its only value to provide shade for the livestock - but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor - especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer's day - could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic. ~ Graham Swift

Similarly, Medusa (or Gorgon) was celebrated for her outstanding beauty. She was a daughter of the very wealthy king Phorcys whose large kingdom was surrounded by the sea. This Medusa, according to the ancient stories, was of such striking beauty that not only did she surpass all other women--which was an amazing and supernatural thing--but she also attracted to herself, because of her pleasing appearance--her long and curly blond hair spun like gold, along with her beautiful face and body--every mortal creature upon whom she looked, so that she seemed to make people immovable. For this reason the fable claimed that they had turned to stone. ~ Christine De Pizan

It may be the reason behind the apostolic prayer for the disciples to be filled with a dimension of the Holy Spirit beyond the original baptism. This conceptual crisis may account for the falling away of the Galatians; the sustained immaturity of the Hebrews; the lawlessness of the Corinthians; and the mixture among the Colossians. It becomes obvious that the apostolic exhortations to "grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord," and to be "steadfast and immovable" are invitations to a sphere of intelligence that promote productive stewardship in the Kingdom of God. ~ Kirby Clements Sr.

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses. ~ Isaac Newton

Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything- except deep conviction in anything. The cry used to be for 'tolerance,' by which we meant, 'We have very strong differences, but we will not let those be the cause of hatred or violence between us.' Now it is something else, where all convictions are softened to second or third place while we all agree to enjoy the world as much as we can. But truth is not like conviction. Conviction might be a matter of personal opinion, but truth is like a great mountain, solid and immovable whether we like it or even acknowledge it. ~ John Eldredge

There is this narrative, which we follow in our world, that tells us we ought to always be strong. Fortified, immovable, brave. So we tell ourselves that's what we are. Then we believe it. The grave problem with this narrative lies in the fact that in the minutes we stop to breathe and be quiet, in the minutes we stop telling ourselves that, we look into the mirror, or we look at our photographs, and it hits us: we are soft! We are soft, we are bruised, we got hurt far too much than what we deserved! And guess what? It wasn't okay! It really was never okay. And then panic settles in as we realise that all of that time we were abandoning the real us, inside of us, like a small child left in the corner of an alleyway, in favour of embracing the big and brave version of ourselves that we told ourselves to love! So we stopped actually loving the us of the us. The real us. The real you. There is no sadder thing! Please... you are soft and scared... embrace your teddy self, embrace your infant soul, protect what is left of you. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Let us begin with some of the earliest discoveries and correct hypotheses. Anaximander thought that the earth floats freely, and is not supported on anything. Aristotle,2 who often rejected the best hypotheses of his time, objected to the theory of Anaximander, that the earth, being at the centre, remained immovable because there was no reason for moving in one direction rather than another. If this were valid, he said, a man placed at the centre of a circle with food at various points of the circumference would starve to death for lack of reason to choose one portion of food rather than another. This argument reappears in scholastic philosophy, not in connection with astronomy, but with free will. It reappears in the form of 'Buridan's ass', which was unable to choose between two bundles of hay placed at equal distances to right and left, and therefore died of hunger. ~ Anonymous

This Fudo Myo-o, whose name means "Immovable Wisdom King," is represented with a sword to cut through our ignorance and a rope to bind up our emotions ~ Miyamoto Musashi

Mere physical sitting is not enough. You have to sit carefully and attentively. Let your body and breathing sit. Let your mind and emotions sit. Let your blood circulation sit. Let everything sit. Then your sitting becomes indestructible, immovable. ~ Taizan Maezumi

From the very beginning - from the first moment, I may almost say - of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. ~ Jane Austen

You could look through the windows at any one of these people, but you would only ever see what was there, not what wasn't. The losses and absences didn't show, despite so often being the immovable facts around which a life orbited. ~ Alice Adams

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ceaseless rain is falling fast,
And yonder gilded vane,
Immovable for three days past,
Points to the misty main,
It drives me in upon myself
And to the fireside gleams,
To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,
And still more pleasant dreams,
I read whatever bards have sung
Of lands beyond the sea,
And the bright days when I was young
Come thronging back to me.
In fancy I can hear again
The Alpine torrent's roar,
The mule-bells on the hills of Spain,
The sea at Elsinore.
I see the convent's gleaming wall
Rise from its groves of pine,
And towers of old cathedrals tall,
And castles by the Rhine.
I journey on by park and spire,
Beneath centennial trees,
Through fields with poppies all on fire,
And gleams of distant seas.
I fear no more the dust and heat,
No more I feel fatigue,
While journeying with another's feet
O'er many a lengthening league.
Let others traverse sea and land,
And toil through various climes,
I turn the world round with my hand
Reading these poets' rhymes.
From them I learn whatever lies
Beneath each changing zone,
And see, when looking with their eyes,
Better than with mine own. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What is required is the finding of that Immovable Point within one's self, which is not shaken by any of those tempests which the Buddhists call 'the eight karmic winds': 1-fear of pain, 2-desire for pleasure; 3-fear of loss; 4-desire for gain; 5-fear of blame, 6-desire for praise; 7-fear of disgrace; [and] 8-desire for fame. ~ Joseph Campbell

They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature, whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions. ~ Ethan A. Hitchcock

Ever feel like you're always winding up and never throwing it out? You might blame it on perfectionism or procrastination or preparation. You may even call it prudent. But whatever it is...IT'S NOT WORKING. I call this phenomenon "petrified performance." Where you're busy, busy, busy (on the wrong activities or the right activities for too long), and never accomplishing the idea or task you set out to do. You're stuck. Like a tree that once was lively is now dead and immovable like a stone. What once was a fluid idea is now frozen in time. How do you overcome petrified performance? With practice, silly. Everything you do should be considered a "project" because projects have a beginning and an end with a timeline. No more dreaming. Wake up and put those dreams to work by putting the steps necessary to make them happen on the calendar. Are you willing to practice? That's my prescription. ~ Richie Norton

Patience means accepting that which cannot be changed and facing it with courage, grace, and faith. It means being "willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [us], even as a child doth submit to his father." Ultimately, patience means being "firm and steadfast, and immovable in keeping the commandments of the Lord" every hour of every day, even when it is hard to do so. In the words of John the Revelator, "Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and ... faith [in] Jesus. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Coco?" I whispered, standing still, hardly able to believe it. "Oh - Coco?" "It is impossible to imagine," a voice behind seemed to be saying from a great distance away, "how the dog could have reached this spot. For three days he has been immovable in his kennel." I dropped on my knees, and took his paw in my hand. He gave the faintest wag of his tail, and tried to raise his head; but it fell back again, and he could only look at me. For an instant, for the briefest instant, we looked at each other, and while we looked his eyes glazed. "Coco - I've come back. Darling - I'll never leave you any more - - " I don't know why I said these things. I knew he was dead, and that no calls, no lamentations, no love could ever reach him again. Sliding down on to the stone flags beside him, I laid my head on his and wept in an agony of bitter grief. Now indeed I was left alone in the world. Even my dog was gone. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

In the dictionary of the seeker of truth there is no such thing as being "not successful." He is or should be an irrepressible optimist because of his immovable faith in the ultimate victory of Truth, which is God. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

If you start embracing life's storms instead of hiding away from them, you'll stop fearing them all together; it is this way one becomes immovable. ~ Stefanie Schneider

A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation ~ H.L. Mencken