Quotes on Roots

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.

Whatever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves... how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.

but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

When the doubters tell you it can't be done and all kind of tragedies will come your way, I say nonsense. If you can get to the very root of who you are and make something happen from it, my sense tells me you are going to surprise yourself.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice, virtue, and the common good, will always have men to promote those ends; and that which intends the advancement of one man's desire and vanity, will abound in those that will foment them.

The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

My mother is my root, my foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

The blues is the roots, the rest is the fruits.

Repentance can become a very, very deep phenomenon in you if you understand the responsibility. Then even a small thing, if it becomes a repentance-- not just verbal, not just on the surface; if it goes deep to the roots, if you repent from the roots; if your whole being shakes and trembles and cries, and tears come out; not only out of your eyes but out of every cell of your body, then repentance can become a transfiguration.

It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.