Constancy Quotes

1. "The world's a scene of changes, and to be constant, in nature were inconstancy."
Author: Abraham Cowley

2. "I sing to him that rests below,And, since the grasses round me wave,I take the grasses of the grave,And make them pipes whereon to blow.The traveller hears me now and then,And sometimes harshly will he speak:`This fellow would make weakness weak,And melt the waxen hearts of men.'Another answers, `Let him be,He loves to make parade of painThat with his piping he may gainThe praise that comes to constancy.'A third is wroth: `Is this an hourFor private sorrow's barren song,When more and more the people throngThe chairs and thrones of civil power?'A time to sicken and to swoon,When Science reaches forth her armsTo feel from world to world, and charmsHer secret from the latest moon?'Behold, ye speak an idle thing:Ye never knew the sacred dust:I do but sing because I must,And pipe but as the linnets sing:And one is glad; her note is gay,For now her little ones have ranged;And one is sad; her note is changed,Because her brood is stol'n away."
Author: Alfred Tennyson

3. "The two of us praying like this to the Black Madonna Sudenly washes over me, and I'm filled with love for my mother. The best gift she has give me is the constancy of her belief. Whatever I become, she loves me. To her, I am enough."
Author: Ann Kidd Taylor

4. "Constancy is my true nature! I shall never look at another woman for the rest of my days, or rather, I shall look, but they shall be to me like chairs, or tables. Not that I intend to sit, of course, or eat off them, but in the sense that they are but furniture."
Author: Anne Fortier

5. "The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice. When that past is the past of one's people or country or church, then the danger is terrible indeed, because then the past makes claims upon our honor and allegiance. Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, "I am still here." And then our plans for social control—for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us—must fail. For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never."
Author: Anthony Esolen

6. "The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings - the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky - thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity."
Author: Anton Chekhov

7. "And so reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance."
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

8. "Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks."
Author: C.S. Lewis

9. "The love, born of beauty was not mine; I had nothing in common with it: I could not dare to meddle with it, but another love, venturing diffidently into life after long acquaintance, furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy, consolidated by affection's pure and durable alloy, submitted by intellect to intellect's own tests, and finally wrought up, by his own process, to his own unflawed completeness, this Love that laughed at Passion, his fast frenzies and his hot and hurried extinction, in this Love I had a vested interest; and whatever tended either to its culture or its destruction, I could not view impassibly."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

10. "Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

11. "Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives."
Author: Dan Savage

12. "What seems real one moment is fiction the nextand gone out of existence the moment after that.Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,and change our only constancy."
Author: David Budbill

13. "What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles."
Author: David Quammen

14. "Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversarySomewhere up in the eaves it began:high in the roof – in a sort of vaultbetween the slates and the gutter – a small leak.Through it, rain which came from the east,in from the lights and foghorns of the coast – water with a ghost of ocean salt in it – spilled down on the path below.Over and over and overyears stone began to alter,its grain searched out, worn in:granite rounding down, giving waytaking into its own inertia that information water brought, of ships,wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.It happened under our lives: the rain,the stone. We hardly noticed. Nowthis is the day to think of it, to wonder:all those years, all those years together –the stars in a frozen arc overhead,the quick noise of a thaw in the air,the blue stare of the hills – through it allthis constancy: what wears, what endures.-"
Author: Eavan Boland

15. "If any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone. For God hath made all men to enjoy felicity and constancy of good."
Author: Epictetus

16. "Like space, the soul is not an expression of eternal constancy but of constant change, and this motion has but one purpose: to continue forward, on the narrow ledge, in the absurd hope that you can escape the Darkness."
Author: Erik Valeur

17. "The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions."
Author: Foucault

18. "Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns."
Author: Gary Hamel

19. "Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?"
Author: George Bernard Shaw

20. "The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."
Author: George Bernard Shaw

21. "When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures."
Author: George Eliot

22. "As soon seek roses in December, ice in June,Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaffBelieve a woman or an epitaphOr any other thing that's falseBefore you trust in critics."
Author: George Gordon Byron

23. "Constancy is the complement of all other human virtues."
Author: Giuseppe Mazzini

24. "That in affairs of very considerable importance men should deal with one another with satisfaction of mind, and mutual confidence, they must receive competent assurances concerning the integrity, fidelity, and constancy each of other."
Author: Isaac Barrow

25. "All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light..."
Author: James Joyce

26. "Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with from Camden-place to Westgate-buildings. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way."
Author: Jane Austen

27. "I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.""Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."
Author: Jane Austen

28. "...the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man's nature, and the importance of love. When I had picked up my possessions and repaired my appearance, I fell asleep."
Author: John Cheever

29. "Poor heretics there be,Which think to establish dangerous constancy,But I have told them, ‘Since you will be true,You shall be true to them, who are false to you."
Author: John Donne

30. "To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty"
Author: John Ruskin

31. "He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?"
Author: John Steinbeck

32. "Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today."
Author: Jon Kabat Zinn

33. "Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - _for fertilizer_. Get the point? Constancy isn't."
Author: Jonathan Gash

34. "I've found constancy and balance between creativity and normality."
Author: Julian Lennon

35. "To tell the truth, she didn't want to; she liked the constancy of preoccupation."
Author: Kate Morton

36. "Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams."
Author: Lew Wallace

37. "But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part."
Author: Lionel Shriver

38. "I was always anti-marriage. I didn't understand monogamy. I couldn't figure out how that could last. And then I met Bryn and I started to understand the beauty of constancy and history and change and going on the roller coaster with someone - of having a partner in life."
Author: Maria Bello

39. "And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells."
Author: Marisha Pessl

40. "When we say 'time', I believe we mean at least two things. We mean changes. And we mean something unchangeable. We mean something that moves . but against an unmoving background. And vice versa.Animals can sense changes. But consciousness of time involves the double sense of constancy and change. Which can only be attributed to those who give expression to it. And that can only be done through language, and only man has language.The perception of time and language are inextricably bound up with one another."
Author: Peter Høeg

41. "Strive now to unite in yourself all the virtues of these different examples. Have the purity of virgins, the austerity of anchorites, the zeal of pastors and bishops, and the constancy of martyrs."
Author: Pierre Abélard

42. "TELL me not, Sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly. True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. Yet this inconstancy is such As thou too shalt adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more."
Author: Richard Lovelace

43. "I have always argued that change becomes stressful and overwhelming only when you've lost any sense of the constancy of your life. You need firm ground to stand on. From there, you can deal with that change."
Author: Richard Nelson Bolles

44. "The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence."
Author: Salman Rushdie

45. "I reply with a letter as brief as his: 'My brother, after my first battle the only thing I now worship is the sun, a star that represents death's constancy. Beware of the moon, which reflects our world of beauty. It waxes and wanes, it is treacherous and ephemeral. We will all die some day . . . ."
Author: Shan Sa

46. "We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang on to the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It´s less painful to think 'I'm shallow', 'She's self centred', 'We couldn't communicate', 'It was all just physical', than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling -- that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're untrue even to life."
Author: Stephen Vizinczey

47. "Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good."
Author: Thomas Browne

48. "Women are never tired of bewailing man's fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy."
Author: Thomas Hardy

49. "And while thoulivest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain anduncoined constancy; for he perforce must do theeright, because he hath not the gift to woo in otherplaces: for these fellows of infinite tongue, thatcan rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they doalways reason themselves out again. What! aspeaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. Agood leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; ablack beard will turn white; a curled pate will growbald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will waxhollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and themoon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for itshines bright and never changes, but keeps hiscourse truly. If thou would have such a one, takeme; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love?speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee"
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes! Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." "My hands are of your colour; but I shame to wear a heart so white. A little water clears us of this deed: How easy it is then! Your constancy hath left you unattended."
Author: William Shakespeare

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