Quotes about Impact

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

What men know and presume about the earth is part of it, passing always back into it, carried on by it into what they do not know. Even their abuses of it, their diminishments and dooms, belong to it.

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.

Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

Literature has the same impact as a match lit in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. The match illuminates relatively little, but it enables us to see how much darkness surrounds it.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; it's always part of the present.

Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.