Spectator Quotes

1. "Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear."
Author: Aimé Césaire

2. "Why does the rain make us feel so romantic and strange? Maybe it's the fact that we are unnatural spectators of it, from inside our homes, and it is a reminder that we have the power to live our whole lives like this, if we choose. It's not the smell of fertile ground kicked up by raindrops, or the slick leaves, or the way we must amplify our voices to be heard over this larger presence. It's the power of the rooftop that makes us want to fuck under it."
Author: Amelia Gray

3. "Sometimes for the spectators a great magic effect is worth a life's experience."
Author: Amit Kalantri

4. "As a spectator I witnessed the applause given to the performer, so I decided to be the performer."
Author: Amit Kalantri

5. "You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator" Father Fernando Cardenal"
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

6. "The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune."
Author: Bert Williams

7. "Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you're an owner. Faith is at its best when it's that way too. It's best lived when it's owned."
Author: Bob Goff

8. "When you are born without the ordinary feelings and emotions shared by most other human beings, life looks different to you. It seems at times like a movie you're walking through, more a spectator than a participant. There is above all a lack of empathy with most of mankind, a sense of detachment. But with detachment comes perspective. The less you care, the more you know, and the more you know the less you care."
Author: Boyd Rice

9. "From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology."
Author: Daniel Pinchbeck

10. "What Slattery wants is a ring painted on concrete in the empty desert. With no living spectator around for miles, just him and the grinning demons. A chance to fight them each, one by one . . . to leave them broken and humbled, or even to lose the fights, but with nobility, and earn the respect of all the men who have showed him none. I want peace, he thinks to himself late at night. I want peace. But then he dreams of fistfights."
Author: David Benioff

11. "Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but "super". It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch"
Author: Dean Cavanagh

12. "Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else."
Author: Derek Landy

13. "Draga Relu, epoca pe care-o traim e suficient s-o privesti ca spectator pentru a trage concluzii pentru toate vremurile. Eu am devenit imun la orice, la fostele credinte si la orice credinta viitoare. Mai cred poate în inteligenta si-n focul de artificii al spiritului. „Realitate" nu exista decît în suferinta, dar moartea o anuleaza si pe ea, asa încît în cele din urma nimic n-are nicio consistenta. Eu citesc foarte mult, în special Shakespeare si marii poeti englezi. în afara de muzica si poezie, totul e minciuna sau vulgaritate. Nu stiu daca pe acolo gasesti carti. Ti-as trimite ceva, dar pe posta nu se poate înca. Pe data ceva fi posibil, o sa fac sa-ti parvina. Dintre prietenii de la Bucuresti mi-e dor de Tutea. L-ai mai vazut?"
Author: Emil Cioran

14. "I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator."
Author: Galen Rowell

15. "Cricket cannot afford to throw up meaningless games before its benefactors, which is what spectators and television audiences are."
Author: Harsha Bhogle

16. "Separation! They were very much alike in ideas and temperament, and just then they were helping each other as much as they could. But I saw clearly--I who was a spectator apart from men and whose gaze soared above them--that they were strangers, and that in spite of all appearances they did not see nor hear each other any more. They conversed as best they could, but neither could yield to the other, and each tried to conquer the other. And this terrible battle broke my heart."
Author: Henri Barbusse

17. "We need a barn or one of those storage areas for the Broken vehicles.""A garage?"He gave her a short nod. "A private, relatively remote location, with thick walls to dampen the sound and preferably a sturdy door I could bolt from the inside, keeping your grandmother, your brothers, and all other painfully annoying spectators out..."Rose began to laugh. A make-out bunker..."I'm glad you find our dilemma hilarious,"
Author: Ilona Andrews

18. "Never keep staring at the dreams you have on the paper... Don't just live like a spectator. You have the power, you have the mine, you have the skills, you can dribble your obstacles to get your goals moving to the other"
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

19. "You are either a player or a spectator! Players influence the game while spectators watch them to do it. Such is life!"
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

20. "In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextro-rotatory helix, DNA. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . ."
Author: J.G. Ballard

21. "As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive."
Author: Jack London

22. "I had some good sex last night. How do I know it was good? Because I was participating, and not just a passive spectator and photographer."
Author: Jarod Kintz

23. "I love work. Well, I love being a passive spectator, rather than an active participant."
Author: Jarod Kintz

24. "I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing."
Author: Jean Pierre Melville

25. "Film spectators are quiet vampires."
Author: Jim Morrison

26. "The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself."
Author: John Berger

27. "What I suffer from this continuous idleness I am quite unable to describe. This wonderful spring with its secret life and movement troubles me unspeakably. These eternal blue skies, lasting for weeks, this continuous sprouting and budding in nature, these coaxing breeze impregnated with spring sunlight and fragrance of flowers... makes me frantic. Everywhere this bewildering urge for life, fruitfulness, creation....and only I, although like the humblest grass of the fields one of God's creatures, and may not take part in this festival of resurration, at any rate not except as a spectator with grief and envy -- Hugo Wolf."
Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

28. "The people who love my paintings, that respond to them the most, they're spectators, they're not viewers."
Author: LeRoy Neiman

29. "One of the men attached to the prison was the occasion of great amusement on the part of the prisoners, as well as the spectators, by taking a large lump of ice to show these strangers from the tropics."
Author: Lewis Tappan

30. "It's not so easy for us when we play teams who have a different mindset, like Chelsea or Inter Milan, because they have the intention of trying to stop us rather than playing a game that is more attractive for the spectators to enjoy."
Author: Lionel Messi

31. "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
Author: Marcel Duchamp

32. "Scarlett, I don't know just when it was that the bleak realizationcame over me that my own private shadow show was over. Perhaps inthe first five minutes at Bull Run when I saw the first man Ikilled drop to the ground. But I knew it was over and I could nolonger be a spectator. No, I suddenly found myself on the curtain,an actor, posturing and making futile gestures. My little innerworld was gone, invaded by people whose thoughts were not mythoughts, whose actions were as alien as a Hottentot's. They'dtramped through my world with slimy feet and there was no placeleft where I could take refuge when things became too bad to stand.When I was in prison, I thought: When the war is over, I can goback to the old life and the old dreams and watch the shadow showagain. But, Scarlett, there's no going back. And this which isfacing all of us now is worse than war and worse than prison--and,to me, worse than death. . . . So, you see, Scarlett, I'm beingpunished for being afraid."
Author: Margaret Mitchell

33. "What changes when a woman marries? What does a woman lose and what does she gain? For Abishag, marrying king David gave her instant status. As a wife, impugning Abishag's character meant a swift death. As a wife, she inspired fear.What changes when a woman is widowed? For Abishag, it meant foreign women came to Jerusalem to marry Solomon--and she was relegated to that of a spectator. In Abishag's widowhood, none feared her.pg 17"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

34. "True faith calls on the name of Jesus for salvation from death, hell, sin, and Satan. Therefore, sound theology has its source in a founding drama with its revealed doctrines. Through the drama and the doctrine together the Spirit produces doxology — repentance and trust — and brings us into the unfolding story of God, no longer as spectators, but as disciples on pilgrimage to the everlasting city."
Author: Michael S. Horton

35. "You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters."
Author: Michelangelo Antonioni

36. "…the two chatting surreptitiously as a procession of priests, musicians, and locals dressed like demons paraded down the street: the men hoisting erect wooden phalluses, the women embracing smaller carved penises swathed in red paper, the spectators touching the tips of passing phalluses to ensure good health for their children."How remarkable," commented Holmes."I thought you might find this of interest," said Mr Umezaki.Holmes grinned slyly. "My friend, I suspect this is much more to your liking than mine.""You're probably right," agreed Mr Umezaki, smiling while his fingertips reached out for an oncoming phallus."
Author: Mitch Cullin

37. "To become the spectator of one's own life, as harry says, is to escape the suffering of life"
Author: Oscar Wilde

38. "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
Author: Oscar Wilde

39. "Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker."
Author: Robert Hughes

40. "You are not a mere spectator at a contest between cancer cells and killer drugs. Your attitude is important. Your will to get healthy. People give up; sometimes it seems easier to die than hang in there, go the distance... You've got to be your own hero. People need to find things inside themselves they never knew were there."
Author: Robert Lipsyte

41. "The power of real debate is in the language and intellectual honesty of the debaters, alongside the engagement of spectators."
Author: Ruzwana Bashir

42. "Here I first mounted a little Highland steed; and if there had been many spectators, should have been somewhat ashamed of my figure in the march. The horses of the Islands, as of other barren countries, are very low: they are indeed musculous and strong, beyond what their size gives reason for expecting; but a bulky man upon one of their backs makes a very disproportionate appearance."
Author: Samuel Johnson

43. "It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's"
Author: Samuel R. Delany

44. "... It's perfect! Locke would appreciate it.""Bug," Calo said, "Locke is our brother and our love for him knows no bounds. But the four most fatal words in the Therin language are 'Locke would appreciate it.'""Rivalled only by 'Locke taught me a new trick,'" added Galo."The only person who gets away with Locke Lamora games ...""... is Locke ...""... because we think the gods are saving him up for a really big death. Something with knives and hot irons ...""... and fifty thousand cheering spectators."
Author: Scott Lynch

45. "I was a spectator who had gotten free admission to a freak show."
Author: Steven Ramirez

46. "To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was."
Author: Thomas Hardy

47. "Life is not a spectator sport; it requires full pads and full participation."
Author: Toni Sorenson

48. "Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

49. "Football spectators appreciate a bit of loyalty, and we're seeing that less and less. There are echelons of football, as in society, where some players are clearly mercenaries. I regret in a way that somehow the local identification, the local bonding between the community and its football team has been commercialised to such an extent."
Author: Vincent Nichols

50. "He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors."
Author: Voltaire

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