Grasp Quotes

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle.

Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

One is always considered mad, when one discovers something that others cannot grasp.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.

A life of happiness, peace, and love is all within our grasp.

The willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith.

The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power.

With confidence, you can reach truly amazing heights;

without confidence, even the simplest accomplishments are beyond your grasp.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?

But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.

It's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

Poetry can bridge that gap between what is solid and what is suggested;

poetry can pull cogent meaning from the veiled truths outside of reason's grasp.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp.

The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach.

This is possible but not attractive.

I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

The nation's government has just handed me the bill that grants us our civil rights. I am receiving it before you, certain that I am accepting this on behalf of all Argentinean women, and I can feel my hands tremble with joy as they grasp the laurel proclaiming victory.

I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

If you call 'religious' a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really.

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and the movements and changes in the world around him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, 'This I am today; that I will be tomorrow.' The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth.

It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world;

One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger -- to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man.

The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success but they labor haphazardly at whatever they are assigned, building up with one hand to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty for turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough and ample time, the major ingredients of success, they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle and the real web of their life is never woven.

The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful so compelling that when-in a decade, a century, a millennium-- we grasp it, we will say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How can we have been so blind for so long?

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.

Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...

In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life --subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality --no human being's education can have a safe foundation.

Has it ever struck you that the vast majority of the will of God for your life has already been revealed in the Bible? That is a crucial thing to grasp.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons -- reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.