Best 78 quotes in «retreat quotes» category

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

Search for the truth. I tell you things and I always ask you to verify what I say. I told you yesterday that there was an attack and a retreat at Saddam's airport.

Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.

Peace is purchased from strength. It's not purchased from weakness or unilateral retreats.

Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

Sin is never at a stay; if we do not retreat from it, we shall advance in it; and the farther on we go, the more we have to come back.

The temptations are great to simply retreat to the domain of private life and give up on our public problems.

The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue

She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.

The march of good fortune has backward slips: to retreat one or two paces gives wings to the jumper.

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

There were times, however, when a man had to make a strategic retreat to win the game.

To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude; it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

When I was in retreat I just did my meditation sessions and, in-between, reading and things I had to do.

We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

When the corpses are cleared no new order will emerge. Power, society, relationships, will descend in all their confusion on a new generation. The old, who started this conflagration, will retreat, worn out, the survivors and the young will continue the dance.

What others regard as retreat from them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.

We are not going back. Not only are we not going to retreat on women's rights, we are going to expand them. We are going forward, not backward.

When your armour is on, it is too late to retreat.

When there are conflicts of observation, when experiments cannot be replicated, scientists may then retreat to a study of the various specific observations so as to explain the conflict, in the course of which they would make use of the concept of observation, or of some specification of that concept.

A lion will only retreat if you stare it in the eyes; likewise, so will fear.

Will we fight or will we retreat? That is the question that is posed to us. Some of my friends on the other side of the aisle often refer to Iraq as a distraction.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

Be bold in life. Seize the moment. There is no surrender, no retreat. There is only conquer or be conquered, victory or defeat. Anything less is to be forgotten to history.

Certain battles were won by retreating.

Astrid had gone to look at the burn zone. Doing the right thing. Kids had yelled at her. Demanded to know why she had let it happen. Demanded to know where Sam was. Deluged her with complaints and worries and crazy theories until she had retreated. She’d hidden out after that. She’d refused to answer the door when kids knocked. She had not gone to her office. It would be the same there. But through the day it had eaten at her. This feeling of uselessness. A feeling of uselessness made so much worse by the growing realization that she needed Sam. Not because they were up against some threat. The threat was mostly past now. She needed Sam because no one had any respect for her. There was only one person right now who could get a crowd of anxious kids to settle down and do what needed to be done. She had wanted to believe that she could do that. But she had tried. And they hadn’t listened. But Sam was still nowhere to be seen. So despite everything it was still on her shoulders. The thought of it made her sick. It made her want to scream.

He tried to get drunk, “to forget about life for awhile,” as that old Billy Joel song once said, but the scotch couldn't anesthetize his pain and provide a retreat from the reality of his latest failures.

Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…

Go deeply into the urge to be silent and not the mental interference of how, where and when. If you follow silence to its source you can be taken by it in a moment.

You know what else I've learnt? That it's all right not to ride the crest of the wave. Every time a wave comes along I retreat, and I haven't come to any harm yet.

Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams' play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that 'the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person'.

I’ll find out who’s inside. Wait here and keep alert!’ Hallam rasped. He skirted the main path to skulk towards one of the shuttered windows on the building’s eastern wall. There was a crack in the wood and he gently inched closer to peer inside. There was a hearth-fire with a pot bubbling away and a battered table made of a length of wood over two pieces of cut timber. A small ham hung from the rafters, away from the rats and mice. He couldn’t see anyone but there was a murmur of voices. Hallam leaned in even closer and a young boy with hair the colour of straw saw the movement to stare. It was Little Jim. Thank God, the child was safe. Snot hung from his nose and he was pale. Hallam put a finger to his lips, but the boy, not even four, did not understand, and just gaped innocently back. Movement near the window. A man wearing a blue jacket took up a stone bottle and wiped his long flowing moustache afterwards. His hair was shoulder-length, falling unruly over the red collar of his jacket. Tied around his neck was a filthy red neckerchief. A woman moaned and the man grinned with tobacco stained teeth at the sound. Laughter and French voices. The woman whimpered and Little Jim turned to watch unseen figures. His eyes glistened and his bottom lip dropped. The woman began to plead and Hallam instinctively growled. The Frenchman, hearing the noise, pushed the shutter open and the pistol’s cold muzzle pressed against his forehead. Hallam watched the man’s eyes narrow and then widen, before his mouth opened. Whatever he intended to shout was never heard, because the ball smashed through his skull to erupt in a bloody spray as it exited the back of the Frenchman’s head. There was a brief moment of silence. ‘28th!’ Hallam shouted, as he stepped back against the wall. ‘Make ready!

He wanted the teahouse to blend in with nature and become more of a backdrop for the tea ceremony, so he helped influence its redesign. Over time, the teahouse became a simple hut set in a garden with mud and plaster walls, a thatched roof, a bamboo lattice ceiling, tatami floors, and small paper-covered windows. It became a refuge in the city meant to echo a mountain retreat, where samurai from warring clans, lowly merchants, and even the emperor could come together on equal footing and focus on nothing more than the sensory pleasures of the tea ceremony, such as the gentle bubbling of the tea water on the brazier, the seasonal flower arrangement in the alcove, and the smell of the particular incense chosen to represent the time of year.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion." [The Minotaur]

...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...

I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.

He who advances without seeking fame, Who retreats without escaping blame, He whose one aim is to protect his people and serve his lord, The man is a jewel of the Realm

If we seek solitary retreat, you will be more often refreshed.

Sometimes advance is the best form of retreat.

I have learned that I must push the pause button occasionally and retreat into that private place in my soul where it is only me and God!

Napoleon's aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l'Empereur.

The land is always there...it is you who has to return

Possession is not only when the devil plays hide and seek in your brain or poison your medula oblongata with negativity, but it is also when you are under the influence of the same specie as you!

Think about it: If you have saved just enough to have your own house, your own car, a modicum of income to pay for food, clothes, and a few conveniences, and your everyday responsibilities start and end only with yourself… You can afford not to do anything outside of breathing, eating, and sleeping. Time would be an endless, white blanket. Without folds and pleats or sudden rips. Monday would look like Sunday, going sans adrenaline, slow, so slow and so unnoticed. Flowing, flowing, time is flowing in phrases, in sentences, in talk exchanges of people that come as pictures and videos, appearing, disappearing, in the safe, distant walls of Facebook. Dial fast food for a pizza, pasta, a burger or a salad. Cooking is for those with entire families to feed. The sala is well appointed. A day-maid comes to clean. Quietly, quietly she dusts a glass figurine here, the flat TV there. No words, just a ho-hum and then she leaves as silently as she came. Press the shower knob and water comes as rain. A TV remote conjures news and movies and soaps. And always, always, there’s the internet for uncomplaining company. Outside, little boys and girls trudge along barefoot. Their tinny, whiny voices climb up your windowsill asking for food. You see them. They don’t see you. The same way the vote-hungry politicians, the power-mad rich, the hey-did-you-know people from newsrooms, and the perpetually angry activists don’t see you. Safely ensconced in your tower of concrete, you retreat. Uncaring and old./HOW EASY IT IS NOT TO CARE

Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ("Paper boats forever" )

This is the supreme anguish of the soul; it realizes itself as itself, as thing separate from that which is not itself, from God. In this spasm there are two ways: if fear and pride are left in the soul, it shuts itself up, like a warlock in a tower, gnashing its teeth with agony. "I am I," it cried, "I will not lose myself," and in that state damned, it is slowly torn by the claws of circumstance disintegrated bitterly, for all its struggles, throughout ages and ages, its rags to be cast piecemeal upon the dungheap without the city. But the soul that has understood the blessedness of that resignation which grasps the universe and devours it, which is without hope or fear, without faith or doubt, without hate or love, dissolves itself ineffable into the abounding bliss of God. It cries with Shelley, as the "chains of lead about its flight of fire" drop molten from its limbs: "I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire," and in that last outbreaking is made one with the primal and final breath, the Holy Spirit of God. Such must be the climax of any retirement to the Desert on the part of any aspirant of the Mysteries who has the spark of that fire in him.

To withdraw isn't a sign of weakness... It is a sign that a man knows the limits of his capabilities and the most probable outcome of the future. One who retreats to fight another day isn't running away, but looking for another road towards the same destination.

A masterful retreat is itself a victory.

When I snatched the gun out of his hand, it fired because the hammer was already pulled back. It made the thunderous sound that the .357 magnum is known for. Even though the sound itself was deafening, it was like beautiful music to my ears. Just a few short seconds ago, the odds were greatly stacked against me. Now the tides had turned. The odds were now stacked against them, and they knew it. When I turned around to face my pursuers, they were in an all-out retreat. All I saw were their backs.