Distant Quotations

The chance of any species reaching and then surviving on an island as distant as one of the Hawaiian chain is infinitesimal, but despite the extraordinary odds, plants and seeds found their way ashore, carried by the tide or blown by trade winds, inside birds or in their feathers, in the branches of trees and in the jetsam of sunken ships.

This fact immediately suggested a singular event - that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event - the creation, the beginning of the universe.

We citizens of the affluent countries tend to discuss our obligations toward the distant needy mainly in terms of donations and transfers, assistance and redistribution: How much of our wealth, if any, should we give away to the hungry abroad?

The days of languorous shore leave are long gone. Overnight stays are unheard of and sailor towns a distant memory. In better ports, seafarers head for a seamen's mission.

What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.

When one knows at an early age that their gift, talent and direction is musical, one tends to focus on that and let nothing interfere or impede the forward motion toward the end of that rainbow. And after 50-something years of rockin' out, you still realise there is no end to that distant rainbow until one's last sunset.

Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.

Like the winds that we come we know not whence and blow whither soever they list, the forces of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin. They arise before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not the speculations of men.

Some have called we rock and roll performers who never retire 'troubadours.' I enjoy this misnomer immensely. While there are many differences between me and my distant predecessors in L'Occitane, I do believe there is a lineage that connects us of the last 70 years with those romantic singers of the High Middle Ages.

The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony.

It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

There is no racial or ethnic involvement in Thanksgiving, and people who may be very distant from the Christian system can see the beauty and the positive spirit that comes from the holiday.

We would fight not for the political future of a distant city, rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth.

During exposure, interference takes place between the incident rays and those reflected by the mirror, with the formation of interference fringes half a wavelength distant from each other.

I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.

Abraham, a simple farmer, at a word from the Invisible God, marched, with family and stock, through the terrible desert to a distant land to live among a people whose language he could neither speak nor understand! Not bad, that!

The plane is simply abstracting the power stored in the wave by a distant gale, and using it to counteract gravity. And if the work be continued long enough, or a multitude of planes be continually drawing on the reservoir of power, the wave must inevitably be flattened.

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

I look forward to a time, in the not so distant future, when we no longer look forward to 'firsts' as milestones women have yet to achieve, but we look back on them as historic events that continue to teach and inspire.

The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another.

We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.

I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.

My dad doesn't like religion much, but I grew up very close to the Baptist tradition. God isn't this distant thing. God is right here with you all the time. He's your buddy, and you can talk about everything.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.

My wife and kids are the constituents I will be serving long after my days in Springfield are a distant memory.

Money you won't need to use for at least seven years is money for investing. The goal here is to have your account grow over time to help you finance a distant goal, such as building a retirement fund. Since your goal is in the future, money for investing belongs in stocks.

A great stench will come from Lausanne, but they will not know its origin; they will put out all people from distant places, fire seen in the sky, a foreign nation defeated.

A true epilogue is removed from the story in time or space. That's the reason it is called an 'Epilogue'; the label serves to alert the reader that the story itself is over, but we are going to now see a distant result or consequence of that story.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

Heaven and God are not high above us, far away; they are deep within us. Heaven is not a distant country where there are trees and houses and other objects; it is a plane of consciousness within us. Seekers of the eternal Truth will realise their eternal Heaven within their aspiring hearts.

I find my earliest memories covering the anachronistic features of a previous incarnation. Clear recollections came to me of a distant life, a yogi amidst the Himalayan snows. These glimpses of the past, by some dimensionless link, also afforded me a glimpse of the future.

Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family - that's impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

We are journeying externally from country to country. We are traveling in historical time, from the present to the distant past. We are traveling inwardly as well, through the music of meditation.

Since the heady days of the 2009 Inauguration, middle-class independents have grown increasingly distant from Obama. Working-class voters - always more enamored of Clinton - have grown even more wary and distrustful of the Chicagoan. Both voting blocs pose the danger of serious defection in 2012. Without their support, Obama cannot win.

Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant - that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous - but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person.

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

You know, our ratings after this match will be very close - I think I can also become the world number one in the not too distant future. However, I'm sure that Garry will also have something to say about this!

The room-service Caesar salads with soggy croutons, the distant relatives who show up at readings pitching weird, far-fetched investment schemes, the fans who have you sign a book to 'Cathy' and then tell you, 'No, it's Kathy with a K' - it gets challenging after a while. It tests your stamina.

Smart development builds on a region's own skills, resources and local businesses. Dumb growth invites a big corporation in, surrenders control and profits to a distant headquarters, undercuts local manufacturers, and risks layoffs without warning.

What is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith's revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.

The whole Obama phenomenon brings up memories from my distant past: the good-looking guy who talks real good, whose line you don't buy immediately but whose charm is so dazzling that he gradually convinces you that this time it will be different.

In the not so distant past, we were close enough to our community to physically see how our actions impacted the group overall. Now it's just too easy to look the other way, or turn off the TV or computer and detach ourselves from the others.

Christianity doesn't demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don't remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.

What I see in the corporate sector is very clearly an issue of a major shortfall in the issue of, what some people call confidence, but whatever you want to call it. Clearly people are looking out in the very distant future and they are saying that it is too complex.

Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

Is it true that the American people are war-weary? Absolutely. We are tired of sending our sons and daughters to distant lands year after year after year, to give their lives trying to transform foreign nations.

There was a time, in the not so distant past, that if you didn't have what you needed on Thanksgiving, you were pretty much going to have to wait until Friday. Not anymore!

Sometime in the not too distant future, denying gays the right to marry will be viewed as historically corrupt - as corrupt as denying slaves their freedom.

No one ever visited him. Eventually we would go to the faculty club every Friday. It's just taking the opportunity to connect with guys who seem distant because their accomplishments are superhuman.

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin .. it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring

There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

Low-cost, high-grade coal, oil and natural gas - the backbone of the Industrial Revolution - will be a distant memory by 2050. Much higher-cost remnants will still be available, but they will not be able to drive our growth, our population and, most critically, our food supply as before.

Mr. Cullen, you look distant and aloof. But I know my words are entering you're disturbed mind.

Most of us are only tuned in to distant stations where all kinds of things are happening to other people. We listen through the static to their heartbreaks as if we were in some well-protected receiving chamber.

She had a sweet, sweet 50 in the prelims last year (26.1), so that was kind of what we were chasing and it just didn't quite come down for her this year. So I was hoping there was a 50 sprinter in there with that distant sprinter.

When the run is over, there will be a closing ceremony and the runners will return to the many distant lands from which they came.

Kindliness and sympathy, fellowship and understanding, are always good, but best when they come from a distant corner of the world.

I would not want the limitations held by the name of a classical musician. I want many people to enjoy my music much beyond just classical music fans. I think the term, 'violinist,' keeps me distant from the audience. I want to communicate with them more.

I encountered a lot of people who were very distant and uncommunicative and misleading and self-contradictory. On the other hand, I did find doctors who were extraordinary and remarkable.

I have been growing daylilies since 1982. I received my first plants from a distant relative, and the following spring, I was hooked,

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.

had a distant and past friendship, but that was more than a year ago.

I have spoken to distance runners who, as exhaustion approaches, pick their stopping places a mile in advance, with the rule that any place more distant can be picked at any time before they reach the current target, and once picked even by the most fleeting resolve it becomes controlling.

If that national championship happens, I'm pretty positive that I'll just be a distant memory. God knows I pray for it all the time.

Historically, propaganda has always merged with recruitment because people must first be conditioned to become soldiers and fight strangers in distant lands. It's not a natural condition but must be manipulated to get people to join unpopular realities.

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument may be distant from our shores, but it will help us understand how healthy marine ecosystems work and how we can revive troubled seas closer to home.

The people I idolized I saw once a year on the Tony Awards. I would buy the cassette tapes of the various Broadway shows and scour the photos inside the recording package. That's how I exposed myself to the arts - New York and professional theater felt like a very distant thing.

London is still seen as the crossroads of all markets. Europe is roughly on its doorstep, one hour distant, New York is five hours distant and there's the cross-over with the Asian markets.

Looking only at 'affected areas' could understate the storm impacts, due to linkages between ports and more distant facilities.... we know that jobless claims have fallen off sharply as we moved past the storm impacts, another hint of underlying labor market vitality.

'Star Trek''s insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places.

Success like we have now was just a very distant dream in 1971.

place him on the distant shores of American jurisprudence.

Open access is the biggest issue. The other one, we think, is interoperability for instant messenger and ICQ. The ability for other ISPs to have instant messaging with, and that is technologically resolvable at some point in the not too distant future and AOL has pledged that they will move towards making that happen. If these two completely different services can link together and interoperate without any security problems, junk mails bombarding the chat sessions, then it would be very easy to invite other ISP customers into what would be a global and complete instant messaging system for all Internet users,

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

It is likely that the relationship ... would become a distinctly cool and distant relationship,

It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear.

THOSE who deny God, the Supreme Will or the First Cause, can give no real satisfactory justification for their stand; nor can those who assert that there is God. Both have to rely on their own experience. After all, how can sweetness be denied by one who refuses to taste sugar? How can one be convinced that sugar is sweet until one tastes it? We have to feel the great marvel of energy, manipulating both, the minutest atom and cell and the vastest, most distant star. How else can we understand the Omnipresence and Omnipotence, except by accepting God as the Architect of the Cosmos?

The announcement had been made taking into account the feelings of the people... There is no offence to make such an announcement about a person living in a distant foreign country.

Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly painted on the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along.

Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.

We are taking on integration in a very Brazilian way - singing a samba in a mix of Spanish and Portuguese. I decided not to get into the whole revolution theme, first of all because it's too distant from the Brazilian people.

With this method, we let the gravity of a dim, intervening star act as a giant natural telescope for us, magnifying a more distant star, which then temporarily looks brighter.

The potential for going through $70 a barrel is certainly there, it wouldn't take a lot of bad news. You've got the U.S. hurricane season in the not too distant future, as well as the driving season.

There is no pain you are receding A distant ship, smoke on the horizon. You are only coming through in waves. Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying. When I was a child I had a fever My hands felt just like two balloons. Now I've got that feeling once again I can't explain you would not understand This is not how I am. I have become comfortably numb.

When we conceived the Mir, we didn't think much about its end, the prospect seemed so distant and we had many other things to do,

Unless draconian laws which give authority to Indian forces to catch and kill people without any reason are withdrawn ... peace in the region will remain a distant dream.

Here in my heart, that is where you will be; you will be with me, here in my heart. No distance can keep us apart, long as you are here in my heart.

At this point, the excitement surrounding what now look to be relatively small health-care concessions is but a distant memory.

Distant disasters shouldn't have any effect on us here, but unfortunately they do. It is like the trickle down effect. Big oil companies use them as a band wagon to raise their prices.

Distant relatives are the best kind, and the further the better

Don't join America's collective amnesia for the suffering that seems so distant but in fact surrounds us, ... Don't forget about the forgotten people in this world.