#magnificent

Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing. ↗

— Guy Kawasaki

#failure #good #good thing #magnificent #thing

Surfing soothes me, it's always been a kind of Zen experience for me. The ocean is so magnificent, peaceful, and awesome. The rest of the world disappears for me when I'm on a wave. ↗

— Paul Walker

#awesome #been #disappears #experience #i

Once, in Thessaly, there was a poet called Simonides. He was commissioned to appear at a banquet, given by a man called Scopas, and recite a lyric in praise of his host. Poets have strange vagaries, and in his lyric Simonides incorporated verses in praise of Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. Scopas was sulky, and said he would pay only half the fee: ‘As for the rest, get it from the Twins.’ A little later, a servant came into the hall. He whispered to Simonides; there were two young men outside, asking for him by name. He rose and left the banqueting hall. He looked around for the two young men, but he could see no one. As he turned back, to go and finish his dinner, he heard a terrible noise, of stone splitting and crumbling. He heard the cries of the dying, as the roof of the hall collapsed. Of all the diners, he was the only one left alive. The bodies were so broken and disfigured that the relatives of the dead could not identify them. But Simonides was a remarkable man. Whatever he saw was imprinted on his mind. He led each of the relatives through the ruins; and pointing to the crushed remains, he said, there is your man. In linking the dead to their names, he worked from the seating plan in his head. It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day, Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof fell in. ↗

— Hilary Mantel

#art

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. ↗

— Richard M. Nixon

#deepest #ever #highest #highest mountain #how

I think I had about a month off when I broke my rib in Australia, which was magnificent. ↗

— Kevin Pietersen

#australia #broke #had #i #i think

The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in. ↗

— Robert Plant

#could #elusive #get #gets #had

And I always think of life like a giant wave. You know, it rises and it crests and it flies, and it's just magnificent, and then it crashes. And for a lot of people, when it crashes, that's the end, and they go down the deep, dark hole of depression. ↗

— Jane Seymour

#crashes #dark #deep #depression #down

We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children. ↗

— Patricia Sun

#around #beauty #because #brains #brilliance

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#iliad #indeed #magnificent #much #odyssey

We are all proud of having thus contributed to the heretofore magnificent successes of our army. ↗

— Gustav Krupp

#contributed #having #heretofore #magnificent #our