Ovid Byron Quotes

Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re. global warming, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role."
He replies:
"The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?" p.367 ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I never learn anything from listening to myself (Ovid Byron, in Flight Behavior) ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The opening to reality, as it really is, is beauty. ~ Byron Katie

156. By faithful study of the nobler arts, our nature's softened, and more gentle grows. ~ Ovid

Make good use of your time, it flies fast. ~ Ovid

The humblest individual under heaven, Than might suffice a moderate century through. I knew that nought was lasting, but now even Change grows too changeable without being new. ~ George Gordon Byron

I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself. ~ Lord Byron

Just as old age is creeping on space, And clouds come o'er the sunset of our day, They kindly leave us, though not quite alone, But in good company
the gout or stone. ~ Lord Byron

I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours and God's. Much of our stress comes from mentally living out of our business. When I think, "You need to get a job, I want you to be happy, you should be on time, you need to take better care of yourself," I am in your business. When I'm worried about earthquakes, floods, war, or when I will die, I am in God's business. If I am mentally in your business or in God's business, the effect is separation. ~ Byron Katie

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime? Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime! ~ Lord Byron

Lord Byron ! Of course!" cried Dr Greysteel. "I forgot all about him! I must go and warn him to be discreet." "I think it's a little late for that, sir," said Frank. ~ Susanna Clarke

Spare the soul that feels a deadly wound. ~ Ovid

Censure no more shall brand my humble name
The child of passion and the fool of fame ~ George Gordon Byron

Let there be light!" said God, and there was light! "Let there be blood!" says man, and there's a sea! - Lord Byron, Don Juan ~ Robert Liparulo

Money nowadays is money; money brings office; money gains friends; everywhere the poor man is down.
[Lat., In pretio pretium nunc est; dat census honores,
Census amicitias; pauper ubique jacet.] ~ Ovid

I think the worst woman that ever existed would have made a man of very passable reputation
they are all better than us and their faults such as they are must originate with ourselves. ~ Lord Byron

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell-or in an unhappy marriage,-not knowing which would be the severest. ~ Lord Byron

The gift derives its value from the rank of the giver. ~ Ovid

Absence - that common cure of love. ~ George Gordon Byron

To control your nerves, you must have a positive thought in your mind. ~ Byron Nelson

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree. ~ Robert Moor

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong. ~ Ovid

All love is vanquished by a succeeding love. ~ Ovid

Think'st thou there is no tyranny but that Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice
The weakness and the wickedness of luxury
The negligence
the apathy
the evils Of sensual sloth
produces ten thousand tyrants, Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing. ~ Lord Byron

There's only one thing harder than accepting this, and that is not accepting it. ~ Byron Katie

Alas! They were so young, so beautiful, so lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour was that in which the heart is always full, annd, having o'er itself no further power, prompts deeds eternity can not annul. ~ George Gordon Byron

The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonised the whole
And, oh! that eye was in itself a Soul! ~ George Gordon Byron

Opinions are made to be changed - or how is truth to be got at? ~ Lord Byron

The premises are so delightfully extensive, that two people might live together without ever seeing, hearing or meeting. ~ Lord Byron

In trying to find out what Bruno thought of his priesthood, we now have a serious problem which we did not have before. In Venice, he told his fellow-prisoners that he was an enemy of the mass, and thought transubstantiation a ridiculous idea and the Catholic ritual bestial and blasphemous. He compared the elevation of the host to hanging somebody on a gallows, or perhaps to lifting him up on a pitchfork. He told somebody who had dreamt of going to mass that that was a terrible omen; and he performed a mock mass with Ovid's Art of Love instead of a missal. He joked about hungry priests going off from mass to a good breakfast. He spoke particularly ill of the mass as a sacrifice, and said that Abel, the archetype of the sacrificing priest, was a criminal butcher who was rightly killed by the vegetarian Cain. A phrase he used elsewhere, apparently about Christ's passion and not directly about the mass itself, seems nevertheless to express rather exactly his attitude to is: he called it 'some kind of a cabbalistic tragedy'. ~ John Bossy

When the whistle blows you have only a limited amount of time to do what you have to do. You either do it then or you don't do it at all. ~ Byron White

Who would have known of Hector, if Troy had been happy? The road to valor is built by adversity. ~ Ovid

You can only see what you believe - nothing else is possible. ~ Byron Katie

When there is plenty of wine, sorrow and worry take wing. ~ Ovid