Flourishing Quotes

1. "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."
Author: Adam Smith

2. "Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks."
Author: Alistair Cooke

3. "For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic."
Author: Chang Rae Lee

4. "Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing."
Author: Charles Dickens

5. "The increasing importance of Sydney must in some measure be attributed to the flourishing condition of the colony itself, to the industry of its farmers, to the successful enterprise of its merchants, and to particular local causes."
Author: Charles Sturt

6. "The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high - and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find."
Author: Cornel West

7. "I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you're playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God's love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I've come to think that happiness isn't really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year."
Author: David Brooks

8. "My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die—and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing."
Author: Doris Lessing

9. "Each item of business was described in the expansive, flourishing script that Balfour associated, in his mind, with a man who could afford to waste his ink on curlicues."
Author: Eleanor Catton

10. "Well, the cat is flourishing and gets more spoiled and more beautiful every day. His whiskers measure, from tip to tip, including his mouth and nose, of course, ten inches, pure white whale bone."
Author: Elizabeth Bishop

11. "For getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest."
Author: George Eliot

12. "The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics."
Author: Gideon Haigh

13. "Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth."
Author: Isaac Barrow

14. "The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us.All delirium is expansive.All impulses escape stereotyping."
Author: Isidore Isou

15. "Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?"Day mumbled something that sounded like"Ancient History of the Near East and Greece.""Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,"Come with me and see the Near East."
Author: Jack Kerouac

16. "Feral beauty tangled up and over every surface. Enormous vines and flourishing blooms swathed the area creating a shadowy, organic cathedral. A faint whiff of perfume breezed to her, like jasmine, but sweeter, more delicate—if jasmine could be more delicate without losing its scent entirely. The buzzing of alien insects reminded her of the sticky, summer days of her childhood in the South, and cicadas filled her memory with their incessant mating calls. Here, however, the insects grew louder as it grew darker. It seemed even they understood the dangers of daylight."
Author: Jacqueline Patricks

17. "I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it."
Author: Jamaica Kincaid

18. "Here they [the Jaredites] became a flourishing nation; but, giving way in time to internal dissensions, they divided into factions, which warred with one another until the people were totally destroyed (p. 15)."
Author: James E. Talmage

19. "We long for experiences "of profound connection with others," he writes, "of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative." Just as important, we long for esteem and pride, "a self that happiness is a fitting response to." Implicit in Nozick's experiment is the idea that happiness should be a by-product, not a goal. Many of the ancient Greeks believed the same. To Aristotle, eudaimonia (roughly translated as "flourishing") meant doing something productive. Happiness could only be achieved through exploiting our strengths and our potential. To be happy, one must do, not just feel."
Author: Jennifer Senior

20. "By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age.Given how far back it stretches in time, the history of the region -- and even of Iraq itself -- is too big a canvas for me to paint. Instead, what I hope to do in this book is take on the nonetheless ambitious task of sharing with you a remarkable story; one of an age in which great geniuses pushed the frontiers of knowledge to such an extent that their work shaped civilizations to this day."
Author: Jim Al Khalili

21. "By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief."
Author: John Woolman

22. "There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a "person"; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions."
Author: Judith Butler

23. "We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish."
Author: Ken Robinson

24. "It came as a surprise to find that a professional society and journal (Econometrica) were flourishing, and I entered this area of study with great enthusiasm."
Author: Lawrence R. Klein

25. "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing culture in our land."
Author: Mao Zedong

26. "I see little alteration at Lyons since I formerly passed through it. Its manufactories are, nevertheless, flourishing, though less improvement than could be expected is visible in the external aspect of the place."
Author: Marguerite Gardiner

27. "I believe it is within our capacity that by the year 2051 that 51 percent of the human population will be flourishing. That is my charge."
Author: Martin Seligman

28. "Jareed tended to rush in and out of the dining room; he had Willing worlds to conquer every day. But he made sure to stop in the doorway on his way out and give Sadie a huge, flourishing farewell bow.It stopped traffic."
Author: Melissa Jensen

29. "Spinoza spoke of vitality as the purest virtue, the only virtue. The drive to persist, to flourish, he said, is the absolute quality shared by all living beings. What happens, however, when vitality is inverted, and instead of flourishing, one is driven to eat oneself alive?"
Author: Michael Greenberg

30. "Long before genetics became a flourishing field, Christians have spoken about sin as an inherited condition."
Author: Michael Horton

31. "The truth about Hamas and Islamic Jihad is that they don't prevent Israel from existing or even flourishing, they prevent Palestine from coming into existence."
Author: Michael Medved

32. "Peace is not just a desired state of being for people, but also enables the flourishing of nature as well as human-created landscapes."
Author: Norris Brock Johnson

33. "Happiness is the good life that is marked by flourishing well-being, joy, prosperity, peace, satisfaction, and pleasure."
Author: Ogwo David Emenike

34. "People and their values are almost infinitely diverse, and people will never agree on many elements of social arrangements that might be subjected to uniform rules of governance. Hence, the greater the scope of strictly individual self-determination, the lesser the scope of governance, and the greater the tolerance with which people live and let live among their fellows, the more peaceful and flourishing society will be"
Author: Robert Higgs

35. "Finally a soldier marched in and, holding his right hand to his chest, said, "Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Jan-e-shoma jur ast? Khub hastid? Sahat-e-shoma khub ast? Be khair hastid? Jur hastid? Khane kheirat ast? Zinde bashi."Which in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, means, "Peace be with you. How are you? Is your soul healthy? Are you well? Are you well? Are you healthy? Are you fine? Is your household flourishing? Long life to you." Or: "Hello."
Author: Rory Stewart

36. "I remember times when the whole music scene was just flourishing."
Author: Roscoe Mitchell

37. "A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good."
Author: Rowan Williams

38. "After a moment, his father looked up from the list and surveyed her. "Well done, Champion. Well done indeed."Then Celaena and the King of Adarlan smiled at each other, and it was the most terrifying thing Dorian had ever seen."Tell my exchequer to give you double last month's payment," the king said. Dorian felt his gorge rise- not just for the severed head and her blood- stiffened clothing, but also for the fact that he could not, for the life of him, find the girl had loved anywhere in her face. And from Chaol's expression, he knew his friend felt the same.Celaena bowed dramatically to the king, flourishing a hand before her. Then, with a smile devoid of any warmth, she stared down Chaol before stalking from the room, her dark cape sweeping behind her.Silence."
Author: Sarah J. Maas

39. "Flourishing is everyone's birthright. I'm trying to break this hold that being smiley and cheery has on what people think the good life is."
Author: Steve Jurvetson

40. "I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcryand whose arrival announces to men the season when fieldsare plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,since other men posess my flourishing acres now,and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life."
Author: Theognis

41. "What do we see by [our enlightened age] which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one. . . . We see children perishing in manufactories, where they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we see Mr. Sackbut."
Author: Thomas Love Peacock

42. "It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing."
Author: Tom G. Palmer

43. "To arrive at this flourishing condition had required years. He had undergone everything, in the shape of privation; he had done everything, except get into debt. Rather than borrow, he did not eat."
Author: Victor Hugo

44. "What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor."
Author: Virginia Woolf

45. "And as a general rule, which may make all creditors who are inclined to be severe pretty comfortable in their minds, no men embarrassed are altogether honest, very likely. They conceal something; they exaggerate chances of good luck; hide away the reals state of affairs; say that things are flourishing when they are hopeless; keep a smiling face (a dreary smile it is) upon the verge of bankruptcy--are ready to lay hold of any pretext for delay, or of any money, so as to stave off the inevitable ruin a few days longer."
Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

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