Centre Quotes

1. "The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality. Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present."
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "But when, from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: 'Here I stand; I can no other,' a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment, everything was made plain to her. She felt instantly that she understood the meaning of life - as far as it concerned her. Amazing to see clearly for the first time. Now everything was explained. How simple it was for her to realize that she herself was the centre of her own universe. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence."
Author: Anna Kavan

4. "I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?"
Author: Caitlin Moran

5. "What does economic growth actually mean? It means more consumption – and consumption of a specific kind: more consumption of goods and services that are exchanged for money. That means that if people stop caring for their own children and instead pay for childcare, the economy grows. The same if people stop cooking for themselves and purchase restaurant takeaways instead.Economists say this is a good thing. After all, you wouldn't pay for childcare or takeaway food if it weren't of benefit to you, right? So, the more things people are paying for, the more benefits are being had. Besides, it is more efficient for one daycare centre to handle 30 children than for each family to do it themselves. That's why we are all so much richer, happier and less busy than we were a generation ago. Right?"
Author: Charles Eisenstein

6. "I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

7. "I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

8. "I wasn't lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world. If anything, because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home."
Author: Chris Hadfield

9. "What is meant by this term, 'the heart'? According to the general scriptural usage of the term, the heart means the centre of the personality. It does not merely mean the seat of the affections and the emotions."
Author: D. Martyn Lloyd Jones

10. "I think it's vital to have something outside your acting to keep you rooted in the real world, and help you fill the vacuum. If you have nothing else, it can be unhealthy. For me being a Christian has been invaluable: it simply means acting isn't the centre of my life."
Author: David Oyelowo

11. "I was born and I live in a small village, where the centre of life is the square, and the small bar/cafe."
Author: Diego Della Valle

12. "If, in all that you wish to do, you begin by asking yourself: am I certain that I would wish to do this an infinite number of times? This should be for you the most solid centre of gravity . . . My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again - for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

13. "As the "people of the centre" in everysense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves:--they escape DEFINITION, and are thereby alone the despair of the French."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

14. "There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "If Colleen Howe had been a hockey player, she would have been a centremen. I can see her as a centreman because you can do what you want and go wherever you want to go."
Author: Gordie Howe

16. "The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature"
Author: Graham Greene

17. "Our strength in finance has led us to set up an international financial centre with medium and long-term objectives, especially to develop Islamic financial and insurance services."
Author: Hassanal Bolkiah

18. "Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the centre of the ring, fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round – remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped."
Author: James Corbett

19. "We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important passages of the four several books; those sins being much more elaborately and powerfully represented than the virtues, which are opposed to them, and which are personified in the titular heroes of the respective books. The alteration which made these personified virtues the centre each of a book was probably part of the reconstruction on the basis of Aristotle Ethics.The nature of the debt to Aristotle suggests that Spenser did not borrow directly from the Greek, but by way of modern translations."
Author: Janet Spens

20. "The equatorial line is, in fact, the centre of atmospheric motion."
Author: John Hanning Speke

21. "Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of i?"
Author: John Le Carré

22. "The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

23. "A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a centre, if it was a centre, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality."
Author: Julio Cortázar

24. "The mother-in-law is the centre of a family."
Author: Les Dawson

25. "The village lay in the hollow, and climbed, with very prosaic houses, the other side. Village architecture does not flourish in Scotland. The blue slates and the grey stone are sworn foes to the picturesque; and though I do not, for my own part, dislike the interior of an old-fashioned pewed and galleried church, with its little family settlements on all sides, the square box outside, with its bit of a spire like a handle to lift it by, is not an improvement to the landscape. Still, a cluster of houses on differing elevations - with scraps of garden coming in between, a hedgerow with clothes laid out to dry, the opening of a street with its rural sociability, the women at their doors, the slow waggon lumbering along - gives a centre to the landscape. It was cheerful to look at, and convenient in a hundred ways. ("The Open Door")"
Author: Margaret Oliphant

26. "And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling."
Author: Mark Haddon

27. "I follow the stream as it cuts through the centre of the clearing. Soon I hear a familiar chant.Touch me, touch me not. Touch me, touch me not.If I were not in such a bad temper, the tune would make me smile. At the damp edge of the far side of the clearing, near where the stream disappears back into the forest, grow those whom I call, for lack of a better word, my friends. These simple flowers are my only pleasant companions. Their talk has the power to soothe my unhappiness, the same way the sap from their stems soothes the itch from a nettle scratch."
Author: Maryrose Wood

28. "Jeg ville gerne være højere, så jeg kunne se dig i øjnene, jeg ville gerne expandere, så jeg kunne rumme os begge, jeg ville gerne koncentrere mig, så det hele kunne nås inden for dette øje-bliks grænser, så ingen overflødige ord skulle spilde tiden med at forbinde vore afstandes sår, jeg ville gerne koncentrere mig, så ordenes mislykkede graviditeter blev afbrudt, så nye afstande døde før fødselen, jeg ville gerne være højere, så jeg kunne se dig i øjnene, jeg ville gerne indfange dine øjnes udtryk og indtryk; men afstanden er for stor, og du ser det hele fra en anden vinkel - ser ned på mit forståelsessøgende blik."
Author: Michael Strunge

29. "My dearest friends at school, and harmless nicknames then, but embarrassing when you find yourself shouting 'Pussy!' excitedly across Centre Court at Wimbledon during a quiet match point fifteen years later. Carry on…"
Author: Miranda Hart

30. "Huxley believed that anyone "with a gift for the knowledge of ultimate reality" could do far more good "by sticking to his curious activities on the margin of society than by going to the centre and trying to improve matters there."
Author: Nicholas Murray

31. "He wanted Rachel to be his wife, his lover, the centre of his whole world; a girlfriend implied that he would see her from time to time, that she would have some kind of independent existence away from him, and he didn't want that at all."
Author: Nick Hornby

32. "We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres."
Author: Northrop Frye

33. "We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. ."
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

34. "In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years"
Author: Oscar Wilde

35. "A sentimentalist is one who delights to have high and devout emotions stirred whilst reading in an arm-chair, or in a prayer meeting, but he never translates his emotions into action. Consequently a sentimentalist is usually callous, self-centred and selfish, because the emotions he likes to have stirred do not cost him anything."
Author: Oswald Chambers

36. "Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - "On Life"
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

37. "Wanneer u beschikt over een beperkt budget of u hebt een deadline die angstig snel nadert, concentreer u dan op de belangrijkste richtlijnen."
Author: Peter Kassenaar

38. "Whenever we think, we construct a world that is centred upon the object of our thinking; whenever we act, we reconstruct a world that is centred upon ourselves."
Author: Raheel Farooq

39. "The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

40. "Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together."
Author: Robert Musil

41. "The circle of indifference has the self at its centre. The circle of compassion has others at the centre. The former leads to apathy; the latter to empathy."
Author: Shubha Vilas

42. "We'll shake, we'll shake the tree of dreams, That solitary tree of dreamsIn the centre of the verdant field."
Author: Shūsaku Endō

43. "Near the snow,near the sun , in the highest fieldSee how those names are feted by the wavering grass,And by the streamers of white cloud,And whispers of wind in the listening sky;The names of those who in their lives have fought for life,Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.Born of the sun they traveled a short while towrads the sun.And left the vivid air signed with their honour."
Author: Stephen Spender

44. "Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre."
Author: Taiye Selasi

45. "I love going into the centre of London because people don't give a monkey's about you or who you are. You can be in a restaurant and no one notices you or if they do they won't show it."
Author: Teddy Sheringham

46. "Ally wasn't disappointed in the writers: she hadn't expected anything from them in the first place; it hadn't occurred to her to be interested in writers as individuals beyond their work. To her relief no one whose books she'd read ever came to the centre, although sometimes she had to pretend to have read the writers who did. The writers could be fairly crazy, too; you had to be vigilant not to trip over their vanity or anxiety. Luckily, most of her favourites were dead. (She's the one, 151)"
Author: Tessa Hadley

47. "My roles don't centre around drugs at all! Shadiness is different - it's drama. We're making movies! You've gotta have conflict."
Author: Timothy Olyphant

48. "The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I."
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"
Author: W.B. Yeats

50. "In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it."
Author: Yasunari Kawabata

Centre Quotes Pictures