#promise

While waiting for a Moses to lead us into the promised land, we have forgotten how to walk. ↗

— Wendell Johnson

#how #into #land #lead #moses

We’re always being made promises,’ she said. ‘You make them yourself and you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always going on about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older, and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promise you high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight if you eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Life is quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat through a constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises. And how many do we remember? We forget the ones we would like to remember, and we remember the ones we’d prefer to forget. ↗

— Henning Mankell

#age

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars. ↗

— Mark Twain

#greed #money #promise #age

[Henry] felt himself bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland, and believing that heart to be his own which he had been directed to gain, no unworthy retraction of a tacit consent, no reversing feared of unjustifiable anger, could shake his fidelity, or influence the resolutions it prompted. ↗

— Jane Austen

#resolution #anger

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#politics #art

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#fail #international #life #national life #noted

Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: "He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals. ↗

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

#compromise #idealism #attitude

Yet, it had been Dimitri’s gentleness and thoughtfulness mixed with that deadliness that made him so wonderful. The same hands that wielded stakes with such precision would carefully brush the hair out of my face. The eyes that could astutely spot any danger in the area would regard me wonderingly and worshipfully, like I was the most beautiful and amazing woman in the world. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#dimitri #dimitri-belikov #gentleness #love #rose

I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses... ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#severus-snape #beauty

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept? ↗

— Bernhard Schlink

#sadness #beauty