Top 100 A Fortress Quotes
#1. A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
Marcel Proust
#2. In front of us was not a line but a fortress position, twenty miles deep, entrenched and fortified, defended by masses of machine-gun posts and thousands of guns in a wide arc. No chance for cavalry!
Philip Gibbs
#3. We'll build a fortress to keep them out
And in a world gone silent, I'll be your sound
And if they try to hurt you, I'll tear them down
I'm always with you know
Emma Hewitt
#6. Israel is becoming a fortress. Fences along the borders with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.
Richard Engel
#7. Turning the pages of this encoded codex, I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You're meant to scale the walls, stone by stone.
Robin Sloan
#9. Because my entire life I'd seen those feelings as a fortress protecting me from potential hurts and damages. Instead of a fortress, they had been a cage, holding me back.
Brenna Aubrey
#11. The keys of a fortress are always well worth the retirement of the garrison when it is resolved to yield only on those conditions. On this principle it is always wiser to grant an honorable capitulation to a garrison which has made a vigorous resistance than to risk an assault.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#12. Beyond the snowy trees, the endless high-rises of Seoul have faded to a blurry gray shadow, but their presence hasn't dwindled. Even in the poor visibility, there's no denying that the city feels like the walls of a fortress, a fortress that is both protecting us and trapping us.
Paula Stokes
#13. I mean I think that's a fact and I think that we had a very peculiar type of Catholic Church here in that it was a fortress Church.
John McGahern
#14. Things like this don't happen back in Libertyville, Illinois.
You don't get lost in the woods behind your house.
You don't get trapped inside a fortress-like wall ten feet tall.
Travis Thrasher
#15. You don't need armor if your skin is thick.
You don't need a sword if your mind is sharp.
You don't need a shield if your heart is strong.
You don't need a fortress is your soul is secure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#16. With the Berlin I was able to set up a fortress that he could come near but not breach.
Vladimir Kramnik
#17. There is something about a bathroom that feels like a fortress. A closed bathroom door may only be about two inches of plywood, but it feels like an iron bar.
Ursula Vernon
#18. A fortress with an arsenal of weapons designed to stave off hungry,
Anonymous
#19. A fortress doesn't fall unless its towers are weakened.
S.R. Crawford
#22. The fate of a Nation may sometimes depend upon the position of a fortress.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#23. Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind ... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
Marcel Proust
#24. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.
Rachel Lewis
#25. Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley.
Benjamin Franklin
#26. Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of molybdenum steel which extended into the wall for five feet.
Mark Helprin
#27. I don't think anyone who has followed the progress of the Islamofascist terrorists who have threatened us believe we are going to be safe if we try a fortress mentality, to step back and say no one is going to hit us, they don't care about the United States. They do.
Kit Bond
#28. He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
And how to scale a fortress - or a nunnery.
George Gordon Byron
#29. I don't think of Superman as being angsty, though."
"That's the problem. Most people don't. But really he's pure angst. He has a Fortress of Solitude, you know? What do you think he does there, throw parties? No. He broods.
Ben Monopoli
#30. It's all papers and forms, the entire Civil Service is like a fortress made of papers, forms and red tape.
Alexander Ostrovsky
#31. Do not look at your weakness or your small size; look at the Lord and His greatness that He will demonstrate through you. You now have the authority to tear down the strongholds of the enemy and to make New Zealand a fortress of righteousness.
Rick Joyner
#32. Let the sandcastle collapse. In its place, I will build a fortress - one that the waves of nature and time could never destroy.
Bella Forrest
#33. I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on 'This American Life,' since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It's really hard to get stuff on that show.
Mike Birbiglia
#34. But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.
Sofia Samatar
#35. We are used to facing the United States as a fortress from the outside. Now we are finding a breach to penetrate the country (the U.S.) and confront it from within.
Muammar Al-Gaddafi
#36. It is unfortunate that we have to live in a fortress, but we are forced to do so given the high crime rate in the country. I travel with two bodyguards all the time and there is substantial cost involved
Vivian Reddy
#37. O Lord, make my soul a sanctuary, a fortress within. That no one and nothing can disturb. A place of calm, silence, and serenity, untouched by the outside world. The soul that Allah (swt) calls al-nafs al mutmaina (the reassured soul). (Qur'an 89:27) The soul that Allah (swt) calls back saying:
Yasmin Mogahed
#39. A fortress against ideas and against the
Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors
The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy
Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.
Louis MacNeice
#40. Here, where we had done the most of our growing up, the old family home had been a fortress against the world. This is something that the children of immigrants all know.
Robert Laxalt
#41. My distinguishing feature is the gap between my teeth. I had to wear a brace because my teeth used to stick out like guns from a fortress.
Jane Birkin
#42. If I dream that I'm directing, it's not a film, it's like a commercial for cotton candy, and I've got four feet of cotton candy all around me that I've got to break through, like a brick wall or a fortress.
Mike Birbiglia
#44. It's a fortress of passion, a crash--a fatal collision of neurons and electrons and fibers, my circus of oddities coming together as one, imploding in a fiery blaze. It's . . . I-don't-know-what . . . my collection of shiny.
It's love.
David Arnold
#45. A mother's love is like a fortress, And we seek protection there, When the waves of tribulation, Seem to drown us in despair.
Helen Steiner Rice
#46. It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. - MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER IN HARPER'S WEEKLY, MAY 24, 1883
David McCullough
#47. There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.
Joseph De Maistre
#48. Poverty is a fortress without drawbridges.
Albert Camus
#49. We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#50. His protective wall had become a fortress holding him hostage rather than giving sanctuary.
Tammara Webber
#51. And all the shelves rising up around her like book-lined walls of a fortress, safe in here, always safe in here from the world, guarded by books and all the secrets inside them, all the things hardly anyone else will ever care to learn.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#52. I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss
Rick Yancey
#53. Germany's siege mentality and gnawing sense of encirclement (the need to 'storm out of the fortress' to prevent a Russian attack); Austria-Hungary's hatred of Serbia; Russia's deep fear of Germany; France's vengeful chauvinism; and Britain's ferocious Germanophobia.
Paul Ham
#54. These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
Winifred Holtby
#55. The heroes of the past are untouchable, protected forever by the fortress door of time - unless some mysterious stranger magically turns up with a key.
Christopher McDougall
#56. But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#57. Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.
Stanislaw Ulam
#58. Archer, is there a servant girl in my fortress you haven't taken to bed? I announce you're leaving and within minutes two of them are at each other's throats, and another is crying her eyes out in the scullery. Honestly. You've been here all of nine days."
- Roen, "Fire
Kristin Cashore
#59. In that smooth fortress of glass, I caught a glimpse of my corruption gripping steel, which before I had thought of as my salvation, but now represented my obliteration.
J.D. Stroube
#60. The influence of 'Hidden Fortress' comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it's told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.
George Lucas
#61. That's the Rookery. It is hidden from the eyes of the populace, a secret fortress that protects the normal people even as they remain ignorant of it. It is a testament to the willingness of humanity to ignore the obvious.
Daniel O'Malley
#62. Rahul Dravid being known as 'The Wall' is pretty much spot on. 'The fortress' could also describe Rahul. Because once, Dravid was set, you needed the bowling equivalent of a dozen cannon firing all at once to blast him down.
Shane Warne
#63. At this point the question of Ukraine is the most important. The situation in Ukraine is very bad. If we don't take steps now to improve the situation, we may lose Ukraine. The objective should be to transform Ukraine , in the shortest period of time, into a real fortress of the U.S.S.R.
Joseph Stalin
#64. Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.
Joseph Addison
#66. The Old Fortress at Tirfang, it had a bad name: witches built it, raised it by magic, infecting even the ordinary materials in which they worked - stone, timber, and slate - with their dark sorceries.
Madeline Howard
#67. London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.
Louis Kronenberger
#68. A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing: our helper He amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.
Martin Luther
#69. Constantinople was the principal seat and fortress of Arianism; and, in a long interval of forty years, the faith of the princes and prelates who reigned in the capital of the East was rejected in the purer schools of Rome and Alexandria.
Edward Gibbon
#70. Would I marry again? No. But never say never. Why marry? It's a beautiful fortress, but I don't need it.
Robin Wright
#71. Go to sleep then, safe in the financial fortress you built on a transgression and yet still it stands.
Liane Moriarty
#72. The enemy and his allies are now at the gates of the capitalists' fortress. Is there any hope that the businessman will finally sense the danger to himself and the system of which he is a part and rise to meet the challenge?
Benjamin A. Rogge
#73. And that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude.
Arthur Sinclair
Max Brooks
#74. Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary
and terrible elegant.
Muriel Barbery
#75. Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone, beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid.
Maria Montessori
#76. A big part of the fun of working on Superman has been coming up with new characters and concepts to toss in, helping to design their costumes, things like that. And I spent ages coming up with the name 'Fortress of Solidarity,' so I want to get as much use out of it as I can!
Chris Roberson
#77. Think it's as though everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a private bit that they keep to themselves. It's like a little fortress, where the most private part of you lives - maybe it's your soul, maybe just that bit that makes you yourself and not anyone else.
Diana Gabaldon
#78. You English palisade yourselves up behind 'must nots' and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves. - Caleb
Geraldine Brooks
#79. His Name will never fall. His Name will never be defeated. His Name will never be reduced to rubble. A tower that's stronger than any man-made fortress and large enough to see from a distance, even if we've lost our way.
Liz Curtis Higgs
#80. It was a ludicrous, insane situation in which modern fighting men, possessed all of the highly destructive engines of war, were ordered to attack a medieval fortress using no weapons that would destroy or harm it.
Dale Dye
#81. If Elain's mental gates were those of a sleeping garden, Nesta's...They belonged to an ancient fortress, sharp and brutal. The sort I imagined they once impaled people upon.
Sarah J. Maas
#82. The soul that is yielded to Christ becomes His own fortress, which He holds in a revolted world, and He intends that no authority shall be known in it except His own. A soul thus kept in possession by the heavenly agencies is impregnable to the assaults of Satan.
Ellen G. White
#83. Prayer is a strong wall and fortress of the church; it is a goodly Christian weapon.
Martin Luther
#84. And just like magic, the Isle of the Lost began to form before their eyes, including the hidden and forbidden zones. The Forbidden Fortress appeared, a menacing-looking castle of spiky walls and twisty towers, located on the edge of the island. Right in the middle of Nowhere.
Melissa De La Cruz
#85. You can't turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you've created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can't see it anymore.
Katherine Allred
#86. There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#87. The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.
Salman Rushdie
#88. No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.
C.S. Lewis
#90. If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
E.B. White
#91. There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed.
Kate Atkinson
#92. Each one's no longer conscious
Of the high wall, or the rest:
Since the one enduring fortress,
Is the soldier's iron breast.
If you'd live unconquered,
Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:
Every wife an Amazon bred,
And every child a hero.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#93. Every other year, I was the new boy. I found that the only way to survive was to embrace it, make a little fortress on the outside and to pretend to blend in but not to invest too much because you'll be somewhere else next year.
Padgett Powell
#94. He withdrew then, leaving [him] standing in the bloody morning sunlight, leaving him all alone at the heart of his fortress, for the second time, with nothing but a corpse for company.
Scott Lynch
#95. Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.
C.S. Lewis
#96. Black Dove, let's write. Let's work on a story. Let's work on Glassland."
"Make me a prisoner in the Fortress of Clarity."
"Got to rescue you.
Elizabeth Wein
#97. The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace.
Mahmoud Darwish
#98. If you call [the synagogue] a brothel, a den of vice, the devil's refuge, Satan's fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever else you will, you are still saying less than it deserves.
St. Jerome
#99. The Pashtun tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian Every large house is a real feudal fortress ... Eve ry family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud ... Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.
Winston Churchill
#100. Man is very well defended against himself ... The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.
Friedrich Nietzsche
