Nearer Quotes

For the nearer everything is unto unpassionateness, the nearer it is unto power. And as grief doth proceed from weakness, so doth anger. For both, both he that is angry and grieveth, have received a wound, and cowardly have as it were yielded themselves unto their affections... For it was ordained unto holiness and godliness, which specially consist in an humble submission to God and His providence in all things; as well as unto justice: these also being part of those duties, which as naturally sociable, we are bound unto; and with without which we cannot happily converse one with another: yea and the very ground and fountain indeed of all just actions. ~ Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers? ~ Michel De Montaigne

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on ~ C.S. Lewis

For my part I am persuaded the more light we have, the more we see our own sinfulness: the nearer we get to heaven, the more we are clothed with humility. In every age of the Church you will find it true, if you will study biographies, that the most eminent saints - men like Bradford, Rutherford, and McCheyne - have always been the humblest men. On ~ J.C. Ryle

I'm in the Dance Band on the Titanic Singing "Nearer my God to thee" and the icebergs on the starboard bow Won't you dance with me? ~ Harry Chapin

For a flexible person, it is impossible not to reach his destination, because by using his ability to be flexible, he can easily define a nearer new destination! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The iron rail proved a magicians' road. It virtually reduced England to a sixth of its size. It brought the country nearer to the town and the town to the country ... It energized punctuality, discipline, and attention; and proved a moral teacher by the influence of example. ~ Samuel Smiles

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

As with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? ~ Christopher Hitchens

the nearer we approach to God, the more we are drawn by Him. ~ Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

And as we glided across the ice toward Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer. ~ Marilynne Robinson

The smaller the planets are, they are, other things being equal, of so much the greater density; for so the powers of gravity on their several surfaces come nearer to equality. They are likewise, other things being equal, of the greater density, as they are nearer to the sun. ~ Isaac Newton

Pickett's lines being nearer, the impact was heaviest upon them. ~ James Longstreet

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I would remain nearer you for what time there is."
"Gone in one faerie sigh," she quoted.
Leather-clad fingers brushed over her short hair, rested on her cheek. "I can hold my breath. ~ Holly Black

It may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the more remote they seem: the more we study them, the more we have yet to learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty; and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves. This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it. so true as of Egypt. ~ Amelia B. Edwards

We are all missionaries. Wherever we go we either bring people nearer to Christ or we repel them from Christ. ~ Eric Liddell

The great mobility of the King forms one of the chief characteristics of all endgame strategy. In the middlegame the King is a mere 'super', in the endgame on the other hand - on of the 'principals'. We must therefore develop him, bring him nearer to the fighting line. ~ Aron Nimzowitsch

No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced. ~ Christopher Dawson

Now that I was sitting here holding my own flesh and blood with my heart about to explode from sheer joy, I felt nearer to knowing what it meant to be loved by God. The thought occupied my mind all summer - at every diaper change and every feeding, with every coo and smile and cry.

So this is what it's like to really love someone else, to have the sum total of everything you are and love, living and breathing outside of you?

It was my first, real taste of heaven, of communion with God, and in a way, its own baptism of sorts. ~ Edie Wadsworth

I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who went fishing in the lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky. ~ Neil Gaiman

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die! ~ Leo Tolstoy

If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks - that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc. ~ Robert Baden-Powell

I think it is the fact that birds are two-legged, like us, which gives them something of our balance and gesture and makes them nearer to us. ~ Quentin Blake

Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Pleasure, in itself harmless, may become mischievous, by endearing to us a state which we know to be transient and probatory, and withdrawing our thoughts from that of which every hour brings us nearer to the beginning, and of which no length of time will bring us to the end. Mortification is not virtuous in itself, nor has any other use, but that it disengages us from the allurements of sense. In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint. ~ Samuel Johnson

To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Triune God is in the world, nearer to us than we are to ourselves, yet the world is also encompassed by his loving presence. He does have the whole world in his hands, even while he inhabits the whole world. For Christians, being saved means being caught up into this communion, indwelled by God and indwelling in him, and being opened up so that other people have room in us and we in them. ~ Peter J. Leithart

But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. ~ C.S. Lewis

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. ~ Mark Twain

The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. ~ C.S. Lewis

I was at the South-Eastern wall, and looking out through The Great Embrasure towards the Three Silver-fire Holes, that shone before the Thing That Nods, away down, far in the South-East. Southward of this, but nearer, there rose the vast bulk of the South-East Watcher - The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute. ~ William Hope Hodgson

As she reached the stairs, she made a quick detour and stepped outside.
A crescent moon hung in the midnight blue sky along with trillions of twinkling stars. Out here there were no streetlights to wash out the view. She loved being able to see the stars.
Tonight, the mountains were etched deep purple against the night sky. The white snowcapped tips gleamed silver. Nearer, silhouetted pine trees swayed in the breeze as if in a slow dance.
"You are such a romantic," Trask had once told her. "Are you sure you want to open a bar? You should be writing poetry."
She'd laughed. "How do you know I don't? ~ B. J. Daniels

The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research
namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is hard pressed by reality, he abandons abstract speculation and reverts to a mode of response that becomes increasingly cautious and conservative as the forces he hopes to subdue, or at least to outrun, draw ever nearer. ~ Rene Girard

Clove!" Cato's voice is much nearer now. I can tell by the pain in it that he sees her on the ground.
"You better run now, Fire Girl," says Thresh.
I don't need to be told twice. I flip over and my feet dig into the hard-packed earth as I run away from Thresh and Clove and the sound of Cato's voice. Only when I reach the woods do I turn back for an instant. Thresh and both large backpacks are vanishing over the edge of the plain into the area I've never seen. Cato kneels beside Clove, spear in hand, begging her to stay with him. In a moment, he will realize it's futile, she can't be saved. ~ Suzanne Collins

Come be angry at a nearer distance ~ Holly Black

Do heroes know when they are heroic? Rarely. Are historic moments acknowledged when they happen? You know the answer to that one. (If not, a visit to the manger will remind you.) We seldom see history in the making, and we seldom recognize heroes. Which is just as well, for if we knew either, we might mess up both. But we'd do well to keep our eyes open. Tomorrow's Spurgeon might be mowing your lawn. And the hero who inspires him might be nearer than you think. He might be in your mirror. ~ Max Lucado

In the same degree in which a man's mind is nearer to freedom from all passion, in the same degree also is it nearer to strength. ~ Marcus Aurelius

The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema ... ~ Derek Jarman

Jesper shrugged again. He adjusted the buttons on his shirt, touched his thumbs to his revolvers. When he felt like this, mad and scattered, it was as if his hands had a life of their own. His whole body itched. He needed to get out of this room.
Wylan laid his hand on Jesper's shoulder. "Stop."
Jesper didn't know if he wanted to jerk away or pull him closer.
"Just stop," Wylan said. "Breathe." Wylan's gaze was steady.
Jesper couldn't look away from that clear-water blue. He forced himself to still, inhaled, exhaled.
"Again," Wylan said, and when Jesper opened his mouth to take another breath, Wylan leaned forward and kissed him. Jesper's mind emptied. He wasn't thinking of what had happened before or what might happen next. There was only the reality of Wylan's mouth, the press of his lips, then the fine bones of his neck, the silky feel of his curls as Jesper cupped his nape and drew him nearer.
This was the kiss he'd been waiting for. It was a gunshot. It was prairie fire. It was the spin of Makker's Wheel. Jesper felt the pounding of his heart - or was it Wylan's? - like a stampede in his chest, and the only thought in his head was a happy, startled, Oh.
Slowly, inevitably, they broke apart. "Wylan," Jesper said, looking into the wide blue sky of his eyes, "I really hope we don't die. ~ Leigh Bardugo

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first. ~ Marcus Aurelius

It is easy to understand that the nearer we live to the source of wealth, the more wealth we shall receive. ~ Wallace D. Wattles

Instead, though, as he drew nearer, his mind kept drifting back to Gansey's voice in the cave the day before. The tremulous note in it. The fear - a fear so profound that Gansey could not bring himself to climb out of the pit, though there was nothing physically preventing him.
He had not known that Richard Gansey III had it in him to be a coward.
Adam remembered crouching on the kitchen floor of his parents' double-wide, telling himself to take Gansey's oft-repeated advice to leave. "Just put what you need in the car, Adam."
But he had stayed. Hung in the pit of his father's anger. A coward, too.
Adam felt like he needed to reconfigure every conversation he'd ever had with Gansey in light of this new knowledge. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

I push through the crowd and draw even nearer, so near I can smell him. So near I could touch him. I could take his hand, twist it just so and force him to his knees in an instant. He would never see it coming. He would barely know what happened. ~This ~ Shaun Roundy

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us. ~ Bell Hooks

How many different ways there are of knowing a person - and even so there are all these different ways of knowing Christ; so that you may keep on all your lifetime, still wishing to get into another room, and another room, nearer and nearer to the great secret, still panting to "know him." Good Rutherford says, "I urge upon you a nearer communion with Christ, and a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn by, in Christ, that we never shut, and new foldings in love with him. I despair that ever I shall shall win to the far end of that love; there are so many plies in it. Therefore, dig deep, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can, he will be won by labor. ~ Spurgeon, Charles H.

Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 percent and leave your bins unemptied on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine-- but maybe cheaper-- go on holiday-- but somewhere nearer-- and pay off your mortgage--although maybe later. ~ Caitlin Moran

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole ... ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Have you kissed many boys before?" he asked quietly.
His question brought my mind back into focus. I raised an eyebrow. "Boys? That's an assumption."
Noah laughed, the sound low and husky. "Girls, then?"
"No."
"Not many girls? Or not many boys?"
"Neither," I said. Let him make of that what he would.
"How many?"
"Why - "
"I am taking away that word. You are no longer allowed to use it. How many?"
My cheeks flushed, but my voice was steady as I answered. "One."
At this, Noah leaned in impossibly closer, the slender muscles in his forearm flexing as he bent his elbow to bring himself nearer to me, almost touching. I was heady with the proximity of him and grew legitimately concerned that my heart might explode. Maybe Noah wasn't asking. Maybe I didn't mind. I closed my eyes and felt Noah's five o' clock graze my jaw, and the faintest whisper of his lips at my ear.
"He was doing it wrong. ~ Michelle Hodkin

I have a vision of the whole Church getting nearer to God by abiding by the precepts of the Book of Mormon. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird. ~ Terry Pratchett

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition. ~ George MacDonald

In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,
no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice. ~ Elihu Root

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night clolour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Change. The more you do it, the more you don't. The farther you seek it, the nearer you find it. The less it's in your world, the more it's in you. ~ T.A. Barron

The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it's not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn't what love is. ~ Robertson Davies

I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

We are nearer to him than his jugular vein. ~ Anonymous

The whole strenuous intellectual work of an industrious research worker would appear, after all, in vain and hopeless, if he were not occasionally through some striking facts to find that he had, at the end of all his criss-cross journeys, at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth. ~ Max Planck

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer. ~ Sigmund Freud

We must press on then, in haste; not simply because every hour brings us nearer to death, but because even before then our powers of perception and comprehension begin to deteriorate. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the picture belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of sensing makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture, the actor's mimicry--these are not extras that I borrow from the real world in order to aim across them at prosaic things in their absence. The imaginary is much nearer to and much farther away from the actual. It is nearer because it is the diagram of the life of the actual in my body, its pulp and carnal obverse exposed to view for the first time...And the imaginary is much further away from the actual because the picture is an analogue only according to the body; because it does not offer to the mind an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things, but rather it offers to the gaze traces of the vision of the inside, in order that the gaze may espouse them; it offers to vision that which clothes vision internally, the imaginary texture of the real. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared - the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age. ~ C.S. Lewis

O little feet! that such long years Must wander on through hopes and fears, Must ache and bleed beneath your load; I, nearer to the wayside inn Where toil shall cease and rest begin, Am weary, thinking of your road! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
(from "Marina") ~ T. S. Eliot

Are-are you leaving?"
She saw his shoulders stiffen at the sound of her voice, and when he turned and looked at her, she could almost feel the effort he was exerting to keep his rage under control. "You're leaving," he bit out.
In silent, helpless protest Elizabeth shook her head and started slowly across the carpet, dimly aware that this was worse, much worse than merely standing up in front of several hundred lords in the House.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you," he warned softly.
"Do-do what?" Elizabeth said shakily.
"Get any nearer to me."
She stopped cold, her mind registering the physical threat in his voice, refusing to believe it, her gaze searching his granite features.
"Ian," she began, stretching her hand out in a gesture of mute appeal, then letting it fall to her side when her beseeching move got nothing from him but a blast of contempt from his eyes. "I realize," she began again, her voice trembling with emotion while she tried to think how to begin to diffuse his wrath, "that you must despise me for what I've done."
"You're right."
"But," Elizabeth continued bravely, "I am prepared to do anything, anything to try to atone for it. No matter how it must seem to you now, I never stopped loving-"
His voice cracked like a whiplash. "Shut up!"
"No, you have to listen to me," she said, speaking more quickly now, driven by panic and an awful sense of foreboding that nothing she could do or say would ever make him ~ Judith McNaught

He started moving slowly towards me, with each and every step my heart was pounding and my mind was asking, 'What will happen next?' When he was only inches away from me, he stood still and gazed straight into my eyes. I could feel his warm breaths as he exhaled. Slowly, he reached out and put his hands on my shoulders and then let his hands slide seductively down over my body. His light touch passing across my skin was killing me. My heart was beating hard as a drum. He brought his face nearer to mine, and then he nibbled my ear lobe as I closed my eyes and quietly moaned. I was drowning in a sea of arousal. ~ Delicious David

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple. ~ Victor Hugo

Believe me, you cannot stand still in your souls. Habits of good or evil are daily strengthening in your hearts. Every day you are either getting nearer to God, or further off. ~ J.C. Ryle

I heard nothing, but ever more clearly as the light of the half-moon grew sharper, I thought I could make out a dark shape, and soon, as it came nearer, I saw it. It sat on a horse, a high-boned, haggard white horse. A dark mantle fluttered across the figure's shoulders, and as he flew past, two burning eyes stared at me out of a pale face. ~ Theodor Storm

The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow,
till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lowly they are. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life. ~ Karl Jaspers

When by the flood of your tears, the inner and the outer have fused into One, you will find Her whom you sought with such anguish, nearer than the nearest, the very breath of life, the very core of every heart. ~ Anandamayi Ma

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. ~ Henri Bergson

Everything about her in that moment was soft, and that was one of his favorite memories later on--her tense grace made tender by the dimness, her eyes and hands and especially her lips, infinitely soft. He kissed her again and again, and each kiss was nearer to the last one of all.

Heavy and soft with love, they walked back to the gate. Mary and Serafina were waiting.

"Lyra--" Will said.

And she said, "Will."

He cut a window into Cittàgazze. They were deep in the parkland around the great house, not far from the edge of the forest. He stepped through for the last time and looked down over the silent city, the tiled roofs gleaming in the moonlight, the tower above them, the lighted ship waiting out on the still sea.

He turned to Serafina and said as steadily as he could, "Thank you, Serafina Pekkala, for rescuing us at the belvedere, and for everything else. Please be kind to Lyra for as long as she lives. I love her more than anyone has ever been loved. ~ Philip Pullman

The length of time that the thought is held has also much to do with its accomplishment, for the thought-vibrations have to be active for a certain time to bring about a certain result. A certain length of time is required for the baking of a cake; if it is hurried the cake will be uncooked; with too great a heat it will burn. If the operator of the mental vibrations lacks patience then the power of thought will be wasted, even if it were half-way to its destiny, or still nearer to a successful issue. If too great a power of thought is given to the accomplishment of a certain thing it destroys while preparing it. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

I daren't come and drink," said Jill.
Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.
Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer."I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."
There is no other stream," said the Lion. ~ C.S. Lewis

I swear that while I live I will do what little I can to preserve and to augment the liberties of man, woman, and child.
It is a question of justice, of mercy, of honesty, of intellectual development. If there is a man in the world who is not willing to give to every human being every right he claims for himself, he is just so much nearer a barbarian than I am. It is a question of honesty. The man who is not willing to give to every other the same intellectual rights he claims for himself, is dishonest, selfish, and brutal. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Your forgiveness or failure to forgive simply takes you nearer or further away from your ultimate goal. There are no two ways to deal with it, there is only one. ~ Stephen Richards

She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Never ~ Wilkie Collins

At around 8 pm we heard the sound of sirens. As the sound drew nearer and nearer, we caught sight of a fire truck. As it reached the hotel, the truck pulled into the parking lot with emergency lights shining and horns blasting. It came to a stop in front of our congregation. We didn't see a fire or any other emergency in the immediate vicinity, so this was quite unexpected. Perhaps our smell had been reported as some kind of toxic leak or spill? Firemen began to pour out of the truck carrying different trays covered in foil. I could hardly believe my eyes. The local Franklin Fire Department had brought us all a spaghetti and meatball dinner! They also brought salad and pudding for desert. This was an example of trail magic at its finest. ~ Kyle Rohrig

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back. ~ William Faulkner

To me, man means awareness of death. I am not saying become afraid of death; that is not awareness. Just be aware of the fact that death is coming nearer and nearer and you have to be prepared for it ... ~ Rajneesh

From a letter to Barrett H.Clark, 4 May 1918(LL,II,pp.204-5):
my attitude to subjects and expressions, the angles of vision, my methods of composition will, within limits, be always changing
not because I am unstable or unpricipled but because I am free. Or perhaps it may be more exact to say, because I am always trying for freedom
within my limits ... A work of art is seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. ~ Joseph Conrad

This isn't about romance. A proper kiss, a proper courtship. There's a way these things should be done."
"For proper thieves?" The corners of her beautiful mouth curled and for a moment he was afraid she would laugh at him, but she simply shook her head and drew even nearer. Her body was the barest breath from his now. The need to close that scrap of distance was maddening.
"The first day you showed up at my house for this proper courtship, I would have cornered you in the pantry," she said. "But please, tell me more about Fjerdan girls."
"They speak quietly. They don't engage in flirtations with every single man they meet."
"I flirt with the women too."
"I think you'd flirt with a date palm if it would pay you any attention."
"If I flirted with a plant, you can bet it would stand up and take notice. Are you jealous?"
"All the time. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path. ~ Edward Gorey

I am born for God only. Christ is nearer to me than father, or mother, or sister - a near relation, a more affectionate Friend; and I rejoice to follow Him, and to love Him. Blessed Jesus! Thou art all I want - a forerunner to me in all I ever shall go through as a Christian, a minister, or a missionary ... ~ Henry Martyn

But before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society nearer to the higher. The Education of a Nation, instead of being confined to a few schools & Universities, for the instruction of the few, must become the National Care and expence, for the information of the Many. ~ John Adams

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowning actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die. . .

For them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

The generalized theory of relativity has furnished still more remarkable results. This considers not only uniform but also accelerated motion. In particular, it is based on the impossibility of distinguishing an acceleration from the gravitation or other force which produces it. Three consequences of the theory may be mentioned of which two have been confirmed while the third is still on trial: (1) It gives a correct explanation of the residual motion of forty-three seconds of arc per century of the perihelion of Mercury. (2) It predicts the deviation which a ray of light from a star should experience on passing near a large gravitating body, the sun, namely, 1".7. On Newton's corpuscular theory this should be only half as great. As a result of the measurements of the photographs of the eclipse of 1921 the number found was much nearer to the prediction of Einstein, and was inversely proportional to the distance from the center of the sun, in further confirmation of the theory. (3) The theory predicts a displacement of the solar spectral lines, and it seems that this prediction is also verified. ~ Albert Abraham Michelson

It was then that I could feel that the moths in him, with their wings so paper-thin, will never be near enough to the light. They will always want to be nearer - to be inside of it. It was then that I could feel the lost thing in him. ~ Ava Dellaira

Adventure is making the distant approach nearer
but romance is having what is where it is which is not
where you are stay where it is. ~ Gertrude Stein

It's a bird of some sort. It's like a duck, only I never saw a duck have so many colors.
The bird swam swiftly and gracefully toward the Magic Isle, and as it drew nearer its gorgeously colored plumage astonished them. The feathers were of many hues of glistening greens and blues and purples, and it had a yellow head with a red plume, and pink, white and violet in its tail. ~ L. Frank Baum