Related Quotes

In the development and the maintenance of a living organism the coordination is very clear. The development of each part can be shown to be dependent on that of other parts, including the immediate environment; and the more closely development and maintenance are studied the more evident does this become. But the particular manner in which the parts and the environment influence one another is such that the specific structure and activities of the organism are maintained. They are unmistakably developed and maintained as a whole, and this is what we mean when we say that the organism lives a specific life. The conception of its life enables us to predict the general behavior of its parts so long as it is alive, and in particular it enables us to predict the general manner of its reproduction from a rudimentary part of the same organism? it is this co-ordinated maintenance that we call life.

Life | Life | Man |

View Author

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.

View Author

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

View Author

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey raincurtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

Dirty | Slavery |

View Author

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

Beginning | Change | Silence | Understand |

View Author