Quotes on Roots

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup."

Let Pirelli's / Miracle Elixir / Activate your roots, sir... Keep it off your boots, sir- / Eats right through. Yes, get Pirelli's! / Use a bottle of it! / Ladies seem to love it... Flies do, too!

We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.

But people who long to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish desires and schemes that plunge them into ruin and destruction. For love of money is the root of all of evil and some having pursued its power, fall from faith and end in sorrow.

Thus it is that "Some things are increased by being diminished, others are diminished by being increased." What others have taught, I also teach; verily, I will make it the root of my teaching.

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?

It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.

Far too many young people today have no spiritual roots. The've been deprived of values by an agnostic, contemporary culture.

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.

A society that does not value its older people denies its roots and endangers its future. Let us strive to enhance their capacity to support themselves for as long as possible and, when they cannot do so anymore, to care for them.

The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own Inferiority.

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.

Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.

When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou have passed through. Forbearance is the root of all quietness and assurance forever.

Selfishness is the most constant of human motives. Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly,burrowing always at the very root of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away.

Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.