Straining Quotes

I am always amused by Christians who try so very hard to defend their position with reason and logic. They are like standing on top of a ladder with their tools and gadgets, straining their necks looking skywards for the leaks, trying to fix the roof amidst the rain. What they do not realize, of course, is that the roof isn't leaking -- it isn't there.

It is not the straining for great things that is most effective;

it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky.

Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Someone has broken your heart. I knew there was something about you. That's it, isn't it?' A little, Sara said, suddenly self-conscious. I'm sorry.' It happens. She shrugged, straining for nonchalance. Maybe,' he said. 'But if it's your destiny, what can you do but accept it.

I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me.

I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.