Sinews Quotes

Then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. ~ William Shakespeare

The sinews of war are not gold, but good soldiers; for gold alone will not procure good soldiers, but good soldiers will always procure gold. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

The transmission of excitation energies between molecules through electromagnetic coupling is not a mere matter of speculation."2 These energies flow through water channels inside the body since over 99 percent of the molecules inside the body are water molecules and the body is two-thirds water by volume. Every protein, whether constituting bone, sinews, or any other tissue, exists in a hydrated form. When the water content of the body decreases to less than 50 percent, we die. Protons and electrons separate along membranes to create charged layers analogous to a tiny battery as the revolutionary work of Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington has recently shown.3 In this inner electrical environment of our bodies, the magic of life unfolds and this environment is also able to be influenced in a powerful manner through sound vibrations. ~ Eileen Day McKusick

O all you host of heaven!O Earth! waht else?
And shall i couple hell? O Fie! Hold, hold, my heart
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memmory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter; yes, by heaven! ~ William Shakespeare

[B]ut it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals.
The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together,
and once the spirit has let the white bones, all the rest
of the body is made subject to the fire's strong fury,
but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away. ~ Homer

So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls "a feeble fighter". ~ Plato

A man's life will not come again, once it has slipped through his teeth. And no power on earth can bring it back. This is the mortal law. Then no longer will his bones be held together by wet sinews. Then no longer the soul flutter in his mouth. But by Death's blazing light, he is ground out and spent. ~ Paul Pope

His fingers unhooked from hers, following that same path up her arm, and then back down it again. The feeling was so distracting, so good, so sweet against her clammy skin. She didn't choose a piece from her repertoire; Etta gave herself over to the notes that started streaming through her mind, rising from somewhere deep inside of her.

The melody of her heart had no name; it was quick, and light. It rolled with the waves, falling as the breath left his chest, rising as he inhaled. It was the rain sliding down the glass; the fog spreading its fingers over the water. The creaking of a ship's great body. The secrets whispered by the wind, and the unseen life that moved below.

It was the flame against the candle.

Nicholas's arm was a map of hard muscles and delicate sinews, heartbreakingly perfect. She wondered if he could hear her humming the piece against his skin over the droning roars overhead. Maybe. His free hand skimmed up her skin, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake.

With the world blacked out around them, she could catalog all over her senses, capture this moment in the warm darkness forever. He brushed back the loose hair across her forehead, cheek, the corner of her lips, her jaw, and she knew it had to be the same for him, that they'd never been so aware of another person in their entire lives.

She released his arm, and he drew it up around her, guiding both of them down so they were on their sides, their hea ~ Alexandra Bracken

The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Be sober, and to doubt prepense, These are the sinews of good sense. ~ Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

Lifting up his hand to her, he said, Here, madam, take the hand, or rather, as I may say, the executioner of all earthy miscreants-take, I say, that hand which never woman touched before; no, not even she herself who has entire possession of my whole body; nor do I hold it up to you that you may kiss it, but that you may observe the contexture of the sinews, the ligament of the muscles, and the largeness and dilation of the veins; whence you may conclude how strong that arm must be to which such a hand is joined. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods. ~ Thomas Carlyle

As if one killed by calculation! A person kills only from an impulse that springs from his blood and sinews, from the vestiges of ancient struggles, from the need to live and the joy of being strong. ~ Emile Zola

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. ~ Hilary Mantel

It sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it relisheth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickenth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking. ~ Joseph Lyons

I feel my sinews slackened with the fright, and a cold sweat trills down all over my limbs, as if I were dissolving into water. ~ John Dryden

Be aware of negativity but do not let it take root in the sinews of your creative spirit. ~ Bryant McGill

Education of youth is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave to Ulysses. ~ John Milton

He was a man's man, despite his vocation; after all, he studied American history. A litany of red-blooded patriots, fighting savages and redcoats alike, taming the wilderness, proving their worth with bulging sinews and roaring guns. ~ Jordan L. Hawk

Carl Furillo was pure ballplayer. In his prime he stood six feet tall and weighed 190 pounds and there was a fluidity to his frame you seldom see, among such sinews. His black hair was thick, and tightly curled. His face was strong and smooth. He had the look of a young indomitable centurion ... I cannot imagine Carl Furillo in his prime as anything other than a ballplayer. Right field in Brooklyn was his destiny. ~ Roger Kahn

The jolt of arousal was immediate. Electric. The moment his hand closed around his rigid staff, her own breeding parts went soft and quivering.
Perhaps she ought to have felt embarrassed- and to be truthful, she did, a bit. But she couldn't look away. The visible proof of his arousal, the strength of his grip, the tension in the sinews of his neck as he stroked up and down...
She'd caused that. All of it.
The surge of power was intoxicating.
Most thrilling of all was the way he looked at her, or rather looked through her. Inside her. Somewhere beyond those eyes, he was making love to her in bold, passionate strokes.
And something told her it wasn't the first time he'd been lost in that particular fantasy.
The idea was wildly arousing. ~ Tessa Dare

Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrist. ~ John Sterling

Taxes are the sinews of the state. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage. ~ William Shakespeare

Take my hand, my love. On sinews of air we tread Aught but distance our guide With no tempo to our gait No endpoint drawn Neither plot nor plan ~ C.D. Reiss

I stand in the presence
of the destroyed god:
a rubble of tendons,
knuckles and raw sinews.
Knowing that the work is mine
how can I love you? ~ Margaret Atwood

When Heaven is about to confer a great office on a man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil ; it exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty ; it confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies. ~ Mencius

Endless money forms the sinews of war. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed. ~ B.J. Ward

If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world? ~ Bill McKibben

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul. ~ Thomas Fuller

Revenge ... is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion. ~ Jeremy Taylor

With the hollowing out of community by the market system, with its loss of structure, articulation, and form, comes the concomitant hollowing out of personality itself. Just as the spiritual and institutional ties that linked human beings together into vibrant social relations are eroded by the mass market, so the sinews that make for subjectivity, character, and self-definition are divested of form and meaning. The isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated as the highest achievement of "modernity" turns out to be the mere husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as an ego was responsible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded and complete community. ~ Murray Bookchin

So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. So limp of body that their purple dresses appear no more indicative of housing nerves and sinews than when they hang suspended from their hooks. ~ Mervyn Peake

This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feigned ashes of forg'd love,
And will at last break out into a flame:
As festered members rot but by degree,
Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away,
So will this base and envious discord breed. ~ William Shakespeare

Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies. ~ Lord Chesterfield

The two of them carefully stepped around the crime scene, picking up Nick's arms, legs and organs, and brought them back to his head. They placed his extremities into position, and then pieced in the gorier bits, assembling a gruesome jigsaw puzzle. In a few moments, most of Nick's body was in place.
The healing process took about twenty minutes. Elphaba and John stood spellbound as they watched a bloody collection of body parts reintegrate into a human form.
As Nick's sinews, nerves, and muscle knit back into place, the gaping wound in Esperto's body also closed, completing a few minutes before Nick's healing. The panther form quickly shrank back to housecat just as Nick sat up. Esperto jumped in his lap and licked the remnants of blood off his face.
"Thank you Esperto," Nick said. He looked at Elphaba and John. "Well, that could have gone better. ~ Abramelin Keldor

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

It is one thing to put bread and wine away in a store-room, and quite another to eat them. What is eaten is digested and distributed around the body, to become sinews, flesh, bones, blood, a good complexion, sound breathing. What is stored away is ready at hand, to be sure, to be taken out and displayed whenever you wish, but you derive no benefit from it, except that of having the reputation of possessing it. [ ~ Epictetus

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually. ~ James A. Michener

The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress. ~ Katherine Paterson

War begun without good provision of money beforehand for going through with it is but as a breathing of strength and blast that will quickly pass away. Coin is the sinews of war. ~ Francois Rabelais

In the sinews of the dead there is no blood. ~ Aeschylus

Her eyes were misting over, her heart was talking on her lips. To need everything when everything is finished. She no longer knew whether she was sad or whether it was hunger. To live like that, head bent forward, chin resting down near her breasts, without muscles, without sinews, without vertebrae.
She smiled a martyr's smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion. ~ Violette Leduc

Defeats and failures are great developers of character. They have made the giants of our race by giving Titanic muscles, brawny sinews, and far-reaching intellects. ~ Orison Swett Marden

He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him. ~ Leslie Marmon Silko

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion. ~ Dylan Thomas

María picked a thorn off the top of a maguey, made thread out of the sinews of the leaf, and told the maguey: 'Pardon me for taking your needle, pardon me for threading the needle with your body, pardon me for love, pardon me for I am what I am, and I do not know what this means. ~ Leonora Carrington

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts
its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things
as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty
but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge ~ G. Willow Wilson

Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up, together with all the flesh and blood of my body! I welcome it! But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom. ~ Buddha

Bow, stubborn knees, and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.
All many be well. ~ William Shakespeare

When Heaven is going to give a great responsibility to someone, it first makes his mind endure suffering. It makes his sinews and bones experience toil, and his body to suffer hunger. It inflicts him with poverty and knocks down everything he tries to build. In this way Heaven stimulates his mind, stabilizes his temper, and develops his weak points. - The Book of Mencius (Chinese, 300 BC) ~ Timothy Keller

I freely admit that the best of my fun, I owe it to Horse and Hound - Whyte Melville (1821-1878)


"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of ~ Whyte Melville

I am the Maker of all things. By my word were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of my mouth. I spread out the northern skies over empty space; I suspend the earth over nothing. I clothe you with skin and flesh and knit you together with bones and sinews. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster. ~ Zhang Yun

Money is the sinews of love, as of war. ~ George Farquhar

I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion. ~ Edmund Burke

No system can long command the loyalties of men and women which does not expect of them certain measures of discipline, and particularly self-discipline. The cost in comfort may be great. The sacrifice may be real. But this very demanding reality is the substance of which comes character and strength and nobility. Permissiveness never produced greatness. Integrity, loyalty, and strength are virtues whose sinews are developed through the struggles that go on within as we practice self-discipline under the demands of divinely spoken truth. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Were not the disadvantages of slavery too obvious to stand in need of it, I might enumerate and describe the tedious train of calamities inseparable from it. I might show that it is fatal to religion and morality; that it tends to debase the mind, and corrupt its noblest springs of action. I might show that it relaxes the sinews of industry, clips the wings of commerce, and introduces misery and indigence in every shape. ~ Alexander Hamilton

He looked down at his hands - resting on his knees - flexing the fingers, the veins and sinews standing out clearly amidst the scars. Killer's hands, I thought, knowing they could choke the life from me in a few seconds. ~ Anthony Ryan

The convention is the voice, the bone and the sinews of a political party-and sometimes it even nominates an Abraham Lincoln. ~ Fletcher Knebel

After that summer, after being friends with Won-a-nee and her young, I never killed another otter. I had an otter cape for my shoulders, which I used until it wore out, but never again did I make a new one. Nor did I ever kill another cormorant for its beautiful feathers, though they have long, think necks and make ugly sounds when they talk to each other. Nor did I kill seals for their sinews, using instead kelp to bind the things that needed it. Nor did I kill another wild dog, nor did I try to speak another sea elephant.
Ulape would have laughed at me, and other would have laughed, too -- my father most of all. Yet this is the way I felt about the animals who had become my friends and those who were not, bu in time could be. If Ulape and my father had come back and laughed, and all the other had come back and laughed, still I would have felt the same way, for animals and birds are like people, too, though they do no talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place. ~ Scott O'Dell

You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Habit with it's iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day. ~ Alphonse De Lamartine

He who first called money the sinews of the state seems to have said this with special reference to war. ~ Plutarch

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life ... These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The Praying Mantis Visits A Penthouse


The praying Mantis with its length of straw
Out of nowhere's forehead born full armed
Engaged the century at my terrace door.
Focused at inches the dinosaur insect sends
Broadsides of epic stillness at my eye,
Above the deafening projects of the age.
My love, who fears the thunder of its poise,
Has seen it and cries out. The clouds like curls
Fall in my faith as I seize a stick to stop
This Martian raid distilled to a straw with legs,
To wisps of prowess. Bristling with motionlessness
The Mantis prays to the Stick twice armed with Man.
I strike, the stick whistles, shearing off two legs
Which run off by themselves beneath some boards.
The Mantis spreads out tints of batlike wing,
The many colored pennants of its blood,
And hugs my weapon; the frantic greens come out,
the reds and yellows blurt out from the straw,
All sinews doubtless screaming insect death.
Against the railing's edge I knock the stick
Sending that gay mad body into the gulf.
Such noisy trappings in defeat wake doubts.
I search my mind for possible wounds and feel
The victim's body heavy on the victor's heart. ~ Oscar Williams

If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true; but to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best - although my actions are controlled by Mind - would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression. ~ Socrates

Here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants' sinews. Around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. It felt like a good place, where there was old magic. ~ Duncan Harper

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money. ~ Samuel Butler

It is a quintessential example of the whirling kinetics that drive a Keaton film, in which not just the medium but the human body- the permutations of the sinews, the shock of the limbs -seems infinitely elastic, an unruly instument to be wilded with a cheeky kind of grace. ~ Edward McPherson

Somebody Within this world are the great oceans, And on those oceans the dark smudge Of continents and the green islands With towns and cities, their stone sinews Taut under the soft plumage Of dust and smoke. And in those cities Are streets full of people of many colours, Laughing, sighing, whistling tunes Of times and places that are not now. And one I saw a moment ago, Who tried to keep on his poor hearth Of bone the fire from going out; Who tried to grow to the full stature His shadow attained on the hard wall. And his hands were clenched and his feet sore; His mind ached and his brow was charted With care, and fear formed in his veins. Yet he looked up and smiled, as he passed. 1970 ~ R.S. Thomas

He holds the boy, feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost of a flea or two.
523 ~ Hilary Mantel

The sinews of war are infinite money. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero