Quotes on Ruins

Then I’d throw my automatic down the elevator shaft-after I’d wiped off all the fingerprints and all. Then I’d crawl back up to my room and call up Jane and have her come over and bandage up my guts. I pictured her holding a cigarette for me to smoke while I was bleeding and all. The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.

...I can't possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody's business and I'll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Success produces confidence; confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the reputation which accuracy had raised.

I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.

Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

Bottom line is, I didn't return to Apple to make a fortune. I've been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn't going to let it ruin my life. There's no way you could ever spend it all, and I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.

A great hope fell You heard no noise The ruin was within.

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.

Paper money has had the effect in your State that it ever will have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open a door to every species of fraud and injustice.

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

Should the whole frame of nature round him break, In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world.

Since Love has made ruins of my heart The sun must come and illumine them. Such generosity has broken me with shame.