Best 1454 quotes in «roots quotes» category

He came cripping slowly back up the driveway - when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy's bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy's return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin's open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again. His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin's roof. Tears bursting, from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-Earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

If a tree has strong roots, not even the strongest hands can pluck it from where it stands.

If I want to grow and blossom as any tree would, I have to start by knowing my roots and understand how I came to be the tree I am. Learn your ancestry.

If you know where you are from, it will be harder for people to stop you where you are going.

I love your roots, not the flower everybody sees!

In her fury she'd broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was from here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my home town.

In the vessel of your body, you yourself are the world tree, deep roots in the Earth and a crown of stars. Your essence bridges dimensions.

It is in the roots, not the branches, that a tree’s greatest strength lies.

It is the roots which give a tree strength, not its branches.

How do you eat your roots?

I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to you.

If we are the trees, words are our roots; and we grow as we write

If you know where you are from, it is harder for people to stop you where you are going.

I’m not sure which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.

In my mind, I could sense their roots under the soil, creeping in helical tangles of ever-increasing complexity outward and in all directions—out beyond the perimeter of the Helsingør Wood, out below Yami’s Under City, out along the banks of the river, out to the nearest coast and thereupon out into the sea; the roots crept down further along the continental shelf, downward into the abysses, downward into the ocean floor, burrowing under the corals and under trenches, and then back up again to sprout in the darkened forest on a foreign continent: all the trees of the world now had conjoined roots, for they were now of one conjoined consciousness!

It doesn't have many roots,' I say. 'Not yet,' she says. 'That will come.

I think our job as parents is to give our kids roots to grow and wings to fly. Deborah Norville

It hurts, doesn't it? Giving someone everything you can think of. The wings to fly and roots to stay and yet watch them choose none of those, leaving you hanging in the middle of void and nothingness.

It's been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma.

It’s too bad war gets all the attention; it’s too bad the plant is easier to see than the root.

It was a little thing, a baby tree, but still it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she pulled it out, it's roots still clung to Earth from it's old home.

Love people who hate you and their hatred won’t get grounds to gain roots.

Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are uprooted people, and have few deep roots.

Mpelelezi wa Tume ya Dunia kutoka Israeli Daniel Yehuda Ben-Asher Ebenezer, Mhebrania aliyeishi Givat Ram, Jerusalem, na mke wake mrembo Hadara na mtoto wake mzuri Navah Ebenezer, alikuwa Ukanda wa Gaza siku alipopigiwa simu na Kiongozi wa Kanda ya Asia-Australia ya Tume ya Dunia U Nanda – kutoka Copenhagen kuhusiana na wito wa haraka wa kuonana na Rais wa Tume ya Dunia. Yehuda aliondoka usiku kwenda Yangon, Myama, ambapo alionana na U Nanda na kupewa maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata. Mbali na maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata, Nanda alimkabidhi Yehuda kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Dickson Santana (bila kujua kama Mandi ni kachero wa Kolonia Santita) ili amsindikize mpaka stendi ya mabasi ya Maubin, nje ya Yangon. Baada ya hapo Yehuda alisafiri mpaka Copenhagen ambapo yeye na wenzake walikabidhiwa Operation Devil Cross, ya kung’oa mizizi ya Kolonia Santita duniani kote. Yehuda alifanya kosa kubwa kuonana na kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Santana! Kwa sababu hiyo, sauti na picha ya Yehuda vilichukuliwa, watu wengi walikufa katika miji ya Copenhagen na Mexico City.

Never forget where it all began-never forget your roots

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor -- to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades -- even centuries -- will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.

Ofcourse things change course, but in the end they circle back to the source.

On a quiet day, when the wind was still, the creek could be heard all the way up to where the old beech stood. Under its branches, cats would come to dream and be dreamed. Black cats and calicos, white cats and marmalade ones, too. But they hadn't yet gathered on the day the orphan girl fell asleep among its roots, nestling in the weeds and long grass like the gangly, tousle-haired girl she was. Her name was Lillian.

Once you decide to grow out the roses from your heart, and let it spread the roots all over. you should also start to learn to handle the thorns that grow out of their stem.

One of the main roots of ungodliness is being a lover of pleasure more than a lover of God.

...on n'est pas forcément du pays où l'on est né. Il y a des grains que le vent aime semer ailleurs.

Roots, he wrote, symbolize more than underground strong-arms. Roots are also origins, the tendrils of a sprouting seed that give rise to life.

Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.

Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment.

Once the roots of love have grown deep and firm, the flowers will keep on blooming!

On dit père grec, mère suisse-française... On me demande, mais alors, quelle est votre patrie? Je dis que je ne suis ni tout à fait d'ici, ni tout à fait de là-bas. Ma patrie, c'est la relation. La relation est une réalité vitale. Parce qu'elle porte en elle le sens de l'autre. Pour la vie personnelle, et pour la vie collective - surtout aujourd'hui où les mentalités à cause des rapidités de communications coexistent -, si on n'a pas le sens de l'autre on a de la peine à vivre. (Le Temps, 17 Août 2007)

Patriotism is a thing difficult to put into words. It is neither precisely an emotion nor an opinion, nor a mandate, but a state of mind -- a reflection of our own personal sense of worth, and respect for our roots. Love of country plays a part, but it's not merely love. Neither is it pride, although pride too is one of the ingredients. Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all. And it's a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings -- our school, team, city, state, our immediate society -- often ultimately delineated by our ethnic roots and borders... but not always. Indeed, these border lines are so fluid... And we do not pay allegiance as much as we resonate with a shared spirit. We all feel an undeniable bond with the land where we were born. And yet, if we leave it for another, we grow to feel a similar bond, often of a more complex nature. Both are forms of patriotism -- the first, involuntary, by birth, the second by choice. Neither is less worthy than the other. But one is earned.

People aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.

RIH, we love you, Rih we are proud of you- Many go away and forget their roots- But you are not one of them at all-Every Crop over, you return to the island to fete-And meet up with fans you haven't already met. You travel the world-representing your country-Putting 246 down in World History...

Root yourself in this earth and it will root itself in you.

Roots! You stay on the path to avoid the roots, Lilly!

Roots cannot grow into trees if there are no supernatural elements in the soil. Man cannot grow wealthy and famous if he doesn't contribute to either, the good or evil.

Some say that my teaching is nonsense. Other call it lofty but impractical. But to those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense. And to those who put it into practice, this loftiness has roots that go deep.

Sometimes it seems like he just wants to punish someone, anyone, for a long list of grievances that he has never made clear, which you can never ask about because he keeps his emotions so guarded that any question would be interpreted as assault. I wonder if dragging us to this village and the nearby town wear he spent his childhood is a way of sinking us all into his own personal hell so that we can see how this strange combination of poverty and opportunity, these broken and muddy roads, these crumbling houses, these overburdened men and women walking slowly in these streets singing praise songs to keep themselves going, created the strange combination of love and anger and pride and fear that is my father. He always sat in the passenger seat while we drove around the village so he could fully view what he sometimes called a world of wasted opportunity. With OJ or my mother in the car, he pointed out all the things he would make right if only he had the power. With me now, he says nothing. Occasionally he turns to look at me with the same expression that occupies his face when he has to solve a problem at the office. I sink down in my seat and wish that my mother had come.

The forces of desire that sway man's mind are the forces that will eventually destroy him, while a singular love that roots his heart makes him invincible

The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action.

The inner woman is the source of healing. The inner woman is the source of silence. The inner woman is the source of love. The inner woman is the source of belongingness with life. Embracing the inner man and woman is to discover our inner roots and wings.

The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?

The love that I believe in is something that goes beyond the physical aspects of this world. The love that I believe is one that extends its energy and power through the beautiful souls that I encounter along the way, a love that can be seen in the eyes of a little dog or in the confusion of a cute lost cat who wants to be worshiped like a Goddess. This kind of love goes through a divine crafting of a person's inner self, through personal experience and thousands of years of tears and strength, that can only be seen in the familiar eyes of old souls, the eyes that recognize each other even after long times of separation, the eyes that find themselves familiar with places they have probably been to before, but that nevertheless bring great memories with every visit. This kind of love sees hope in the eyes of new-born children that know way much more than they are capable of putting into words and that bring with their innocence a smile on each person's face who'd wish they could start again. The love that I see when I look at you is a love which has roots deep inside each of us, but that needs care and light to grow and unfold its branches so that they can reach outside of ourselves and even further beyond the skies.