Sustaining Quotes

1. "Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness."
Author: A.A. Milne

2. "Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "It was a single poppy seed...she rolled it between her fingers and raised her eyes past the straining sails, to the star-filled vault above. On any other night she would have scanned the sky for the planet she had always thought to be the arbiter of her fate - but tonight her eyes dropped instead to the tiny sphere she was holding between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life: it was this minuscule orb - at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful. This was her Shani, her Saturn."
Author: Amitav Ghosh

4. "Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency."
Author: Amity Shlaes

5. "There wasn't a man alive in Pern who hadn't secretly cherished the notion that he might be able to Impress a dragon. That he could be linked for life to the love and sustaining admiration of these gentle great beasts. That he could transverse Pern in a twinkling, astride his dragon. That he would never suffer the loneliness that was the condition of most men - a dragonrider always had his dragon."
Author: Anne McCaffrey

6. "If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think--to produce--to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together."
Author: Bell Hooks

8. "Jesus never commanded believers to produce fruit. Fruit is the *purpose* of the branch, but it is not the *responsibility* of the branch. The branch cannot produce anything on it's own. However, if it remains attached to the vine, it will receive life-sustaining sap, nourishment, strength, everything it needs."
Author: Charles R. Swindoll

9. "I am not functioning very well. Living with the knowledge that the baby is dead is painful. I feel so far away from you, God. I can only try to believe that you are sustaining me and guiding me through this. Please continue to stand by my side."
Author: Christine O'Keeffe Lafser

10. "It's strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next. After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless. We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete. We live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very lives. The picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look and consumed souls without defense. They're everywhere. Some are people we know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives."
Author: Christopher Hawke

11. "You are my country, Desdemona." Yearning, harsh and poignant, and she felt herself swaying toward him. "My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining."
Author: Connie Brockway

12. "He stopped. She heard the intake of his breath. "You are my country, Desdemona." Yearning, harsh and poignant and she felt herself swaying toward him. "My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining."She gasped.His gaze fell, shielded by his lashes. An odd, half-mocking smile played about his lips. "You'll never hear old Blake say something like that."She swallowed, unable to speak, her senses abraded by his stimulating words, her pulse hammering in anticipation? Trepidation?"Remember my words next time he calls you a bloody English rose."
Author: Connie Brockway

13. "So, the world is fine. We don't have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That's what we need to think about."
Author: Douglas Adams

14. "After the most amazing head I've ever gotten in my life over the longest period of time imaginable, I climax into Isa's mouth and she drinks me up like what I'm offering is life sustaining."
Author: Ella Dominguez

15. "Linton did not appear to remember what she talked of and he had evidently great difficulty in sustaining any kind of conversation. His lack of interest in the subjects she started, and his equal incapacity to contribute to her entertainment, were so obvious that she could not conceal her disappointment. An indefinite alteration had come over his whole person and manner. The pettishness that might be caressed into fondness, had yielded to a listless apathy; there was less of the peevish temper of a child which frets and teases on purpose to be soothed, and more of the self-absorbed moroseness of a confirmed invalid, repelling consolation, and ready to regard the good-humoured mirth of others as an insult. Catherine perceived, as well as I did, that he held it rather a punishment, than a gratification, to endure our company."
Author: Emily Brontë

16. "Cricket is a self-sustaining industry; but corporates need to realise that other sports don't have that luxury. This is the time when they need to invest, and keep the faith. Every sport has the potential to create world champions. Imagine India as a country full of world champions. Why imagine? Let's just make it happen."
Author: Gagan Narang

17. "What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him."
Author: Germaine Greer

18. "We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on natures's sustaining and poetic spirit."
Author: Henry Beston

19. "If there be a people on earth whose more especial duty it is to be at all times prepared to defend the rights with which they are blessed, and to surpass all others in sustaining the necessary burthens, and in submitting to sacrifices to make such preparations, it is undoubtedly the people of these states."
Author: James Monroe

20. "Community means engaging constructively with like-minded nations to build strong, sustaining institutions and alliances - and bringing emerging powers into this community so future conflict becomes less likely."
Author: Joe Lieberman

21. "By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world."
Author: John Banville

22. "For me, the most interesting thing is longevity and sustaining a career, because that's what's truly difficult."
Author: John Cho

23. "The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods."
Author: John Updike

24. "But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees into things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. There are no answers other than that. He was not like the rest of us. Not even like himself. His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet. He needed the very ordinary. He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze."
Author: Joseph O'Connor

25. "I knew how to block out my issues in a sprint, but in marathons I ran out of gas. Consistency became a critical problem. On days that I was inspired, I was unstoppable. But other days I would play bad chess. The time had come for me to learn the science of long-term, healthy, self-sustaining peak performance."
Author: Josh Waitzkin

26. "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

27. "Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive."
Author: Larry Kramer

28. "The basic common denominator of all life is the urge to survive, and the survival of life on Planet Earth is achieved only as a shared initiative with and through all life-forms. Life is a joint effort; no 'man' separate from 'nature.' Homo sapiens as individuals and as species are as much a part of life's overall thrust for survival as any other species. As living organisms, we are part if the greater whole, and as such, we are embodied with exactly the same fundamental purpose: to survive. And to do so--as individuals, families, groups, and as a species--we have to live in dynamic collaboration with the plant and animal kingdoms in a healthy, life-sustaining environment."
Author: Lawrence Anthony

29. "Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me."
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

30. "Life's choices are wild and free, but sustaining and elevating, or destructive and debilitating. It's up to us to choose."
Author: Mark O'Brien

31. "Ultimately, my greatest achievement is maintaining my career while sustaining a happy marriage and kids."
Author: Melina Kanakaredes

32. "It sickens me to admit this, but the divorce rate is the same for religious couples as it is for non-religious couples. Is it preposterous for us to think that we can love someone for a lifetime? Marriage is held together with such flimsy things--lace, promises and tolerance. We humans are so unskilled at sustaining intimacy. We begin with such high hopes, yet lose our way so quickly.pg i"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

33. "If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes."
Author: Michelangelo

34. "True Joy is not the absence of pain but the sanctifying, sustaining presence of the Lord Jesus in the midst of the pain"
Author: Nancy Leigh DeMoss

35. "Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded. Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don't know."
Author: Paulo Coelho

36. "Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down."
Author: Peter Straub

37. "Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. . . Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes ‘good people' off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence."
Author: Philip G. Zimbardo

38. "Because I am a part of the Big Picture, I do matter and substantially so. Because I am only a part, however, I am rightly situated off to stage right—and happily so. What freedom there is in such truth! We are inherently important and included, yet not burdened with manufacturing or sustaining that private importance. Our dignity is given by God, and we are freed from ourselves!"
Author: Richard Rohr

39. "It is tempting to look upon England as a sort of musical Australia, an island culture inhabited by, and sustaining, its own insular fauna – musical kangaroos, koalas, and platypuses. That, however, would be very much to exaggerate England's musical isolation or independence. It is also a considerable exaggeration to view the English preference for thirds as something altogether alien or opposed to continental practice, as if only in remote geographical corners (and behind closed doors, among consenting adults) could harmonies unsanctioned by Pythagoras or the Musica enchiriadis be furtively enjoyed."
Author: Richard Taruskin

40. "Worship is critical in sustaining what God is doing. As God is honored in worship, His presence will continue."
Author: Rodney Burton

41. "My God, that scene in Monster Inc. where the monsters realise that their entire world is founded on hurting children -look at that for a change! Two galumphing cartoon characters making a shattering realisation about their world and their role in sustaining it. A truly epic moment. It's stunning."
Author: Russell T. Davies

42. "Nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the"
Author: Scott Anderson

43. "...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many layered inner exchange, a to-and-fro which I long ago discovered that I need in order to locate myself in the world. Reading...keeps the inner realm open, susceptible. Involvement in a book sets things going at a depth. If I cannot sink into some virtual 'other' place or triangulate my experience with that of another, I feel that my life is lacking the shadows and overtones and illusion of added dimension that imagination provides. It feels flat to me."
Author: Sven Birkerts

44. "If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure."
Author: Tahir Shah

45. "Pride; you know that self sufficient, self sustaining ego that may be very well the strength to your entire being but the weakness to your being entire."-taken from "A Heart's Thoughts"
Author: The Tru Sum

46. "But we wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain."
Author: Theodor Herzl

47. "Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations. (157)"
Author: Thomas Lewis

48. "As far as sustaining our popularity, I believe we can."
Author: Vince McMahon

49. "She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex changed so far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasure of life were increased and its experiences multiplied."
Author: Virginia Woolf

50. "Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life."
Author: Wislawa Szymborska

Sustaining Quotes Pictures