
Top 100 A Retreat Quotes
#1. Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.
Anthony Giddens
#2. He wanted to bring up his plan for a retreat, but something told him not to. "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" he opened instead. "Yes," Grant replied chewing on a cigar. "Lick 'em tomorrow, though."75
Robert L. O'Connell
#3. I focus for periods of time on creative work and I'm very insular during those times - not a lot of socializing. I play when I want. That means I can take off on a retreat, catch a matinee, make friends. My core desired feelings are my time management system.
Danielle LaPorte
#4. To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's.
Abraham Cowley
#5. Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher's children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.
Tony Judt
#6. A period recourse into the wilds is not a retreat into secret silent sanctums to escape a wicked world, it is to take breath amid effort to forge a better world.
Benton MacKaye
#7. During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still.
Charles Krauthammer
#8. Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.
Francesco Clemente
#9. A place of solitude offers a retreat from the opposing forces and diverse demands of living, an entry into a state of peace and unity. Mind and body can retire from confusion and conflict to a sanctuary of clarity and harmony
Anthony Lawlor
#10. Search for the truth. I tell you things and I always ask you to verify what I say. I told you yesterday that there was an attack and a retreat at Saddam's airport.
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf
#11. From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax and be peaceful, we may wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#12. A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
Northrop Frye
#13. How sick are you? Holy crap. Are you dying or something? Is that why you're going on
a retreat and eating only lettuce?
Maisey Yates
#14. For an individual as well as a society, there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. To fight in a battle and live in glory is one mode. To beat a retreat, to surrender and to live the life of a captive is also a mode of survival.
B.R. Ambedkar
#15. It was every teenage girl's dream to have a retreat of her own.
Chanda Hahn
#16. Let love lead your soul. Make it a place to retire to, a kind of monastery cave, a retreat for the deepest core of your being.
Farid Al-Din Attar
#17. Is your home a retreat from responsibility, or a place of movement and growth?
Henry Cloud
#19. It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.
George Eliot
#20. The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world.
Max Delbruck
#21. I never stopped studying Buddhism. In the past few years, in between movies, I do a retreat.
Jet Li
#22. Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#23. A retreat from someone or something isn't unusual. Just as how you edge closer to see better, at times you may need to take a step back to get a clearer view.
Rajuda
#24. Running is just such a monestary
a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.
George Sheehan
#25. Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#26. It's no coincidence that the word 'holiday' suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
Pico Iyer
#27. We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.
Nhat Hanh
#28. At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don't want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music.
Sharon Salzberg
#29. He tried to get drunk, "to forget about life for awhile," as that old
Billy Joel song once said, but the scotch couldn't anesthetize his pain
and provide a retreat from the reality of his latest failures.
Keith Steinbaum
#30. A retreat will teach you again and again that you are neither indispensable nor self-sufficient.
Karen Lord
#31. The impossibility of a retreat makes no difference in the situation of men resolved to conquer or die; and, believe me, my friends, if your conquest could be bought with the blood of your general, he would most cheerfully resign a life which he has long devoted to his country.
James Wolfe
#32. Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat.
Nancy Gibbs
#33. In a retreat the lame are formost.
[In a retreat the lame are foremost.]
George Herbert
#34. If you prefer an "academic life" as a retreat from reality, do not go into biology. This field is for a man or woman who wishes to get even closer to life. - Hermann Muller We
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#35. Prayer will never descend to the level where it is nothing more than a retreat house in which we find strength for ourselves,
D. A. Carson
#36. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us.
Patrick Rothfuss
#37. I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#38. Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?
Elena Ferrante
#39. Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat, it's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go
Chuck Palahniuk
#40. There was a part of him (her) that dreamed, and he (she) was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#41. Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.
Martin Walser
#42. Any intelligent woman would have made a dignified retreat, but this was New Jersey, where dignity always runs a poor second to the pleasure of getting in someone's face.
Janet Evanovich
#43. I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
Anais Nin
#44. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.
Robert Greene
#45. That's who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or
Trevor Noah
#47. I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it'd take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn't want to retreat.
Dave Grohl
#48. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#49. And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it.
Jeannette Walls
#50. Don't go any farther, Miss Marina," warned Stanley, a half-grin on his face. " 'Tempt ye not the dragon's wrath when his claws are yet to retreat.' Dragon claws ya just can't mess with.
Kenzie Kovacs-Szabo
#51. Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old.
Lord Chesterfield
#52. NEVERLAND:The imaginary island home of Peter Pan and the lost boys. A place where you never grow up. Michael Jackson's former retreat. An accurate description of the 21st century.
Daniel Prokop
#53. A fool shouts charge when he should retreat, A coward shouts retreat when he should charge and a wise man knows the difference. I charge.
Tonny K. Brown
#54. If someone is depressed they tend to retreat within the inner circle of their comfort zone which in the longer term, may contribute to exacerbating a problem rather than soothing it and if not seeking to expand the comfort zone becomes the norm.
Philippa Perry
#55. Married! Not to retreat, but to be the mistress of a lord's domain; not to be safe in a convent, but to live as some lord's breeding sow.
Katherine Arden
#56. A born Texan has instilled in his system a mind-set of no retreat or no surrender. I wish everyone the world over had the dominating spirit that motivates Texans.
Bill W. Clayton
#57. To establish despotism over such a mighty nation must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retreat: let us retreat when we can, not when we must.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#58. (Bonhoeffer's) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before.
Eric Metaxas
#59. A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#60. Fight them everywhere. Don't give them a chance to breathe until they withdraw and retreat.
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf
#61. You are protected. But if you don't take risks, God will retreat and become only a subject of philosophical speculation ...
Paulo Coelho
#62. Artists have always been the front line; that's part of our responsibility. But a lot of the big actors come out, they get slammed, and then they retreat.
Mark Ruffalo
#63. Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country ... the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late.
Leonid Brezhnev
#64. I don't know how many people there are with a million dollars who are inclined to give it to a writers' retreat.
Dana Stabenow
#65. I'm like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose." she told him. "I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again.
Nancy Horan
#66. Facing the hooves of a rearing stallion is scary enough, but when it's a centaur, armed with a bow and whooping it up in a soda-drinking hat, even the bravest warrior would retreat.
Rick Riordan
#67. what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance.
Willa Cather
#68. We as a people, as a state, and as a community, have too much promise, too much potential, and too much at stake to go any other way than forward. We are too strong in our hearts, too innovative in our minds, and too firm in our beliefs to retreat from our goals.
Bill Richardson
#70. A state of grace is when everything imperfect disappears, leaving just stripped-down harmony. One is left empty, with nothing except a fluid open sensation, similar to becoming the sound from a tuning fork piercing through space.
Darrell Calkins
#71. A stone can be used for building a house, blocking a road, or killing someone. The same is true for any idea.
Darrell Calkins
#72. If you retreat in response to desire rather than deprivation, the deprivation may never come.
Laurie A. Helgoe
#73. Some brave chrysanthemums still stood in the country gardens, but they looked like bedraggled survivors of a battle, barely able to hold their tattered banners upright. October was at the gates and autumn was in full retreat.
Patricia Moyes
#74. In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world , and it is not encouraging.
Paul Johnson
#75. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#76. [T]he unknown should not be a source of suspicion, fear, or retreat to superstition, but motivation to continue asking questions and seeking answers.
Neil Shubin
#77. Pray with a pure heart and pray from where you are. He will answer your prayers. There is no need to abandon the world or retreat to a jungle
Radhe Maa
#78. I retreat to my cave in a very male fashion.
Ed Stoppard
#79. A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#80. The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death's approach. Even when the cancer was in retreat, it cast long shadows. When
Paul Kalanithi
#81. An airport is a potent place, a point of reunions and departures. For the traveler, it's a crossroads at the moment of decision, a flashpoint that separates intention from retreat.
Ginger Bensman
#82. Imminent death didn't terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she'd ever hoped, ...
Dean Koontz
#83. A man must know when to retreat from a woman, but a wise man knows that sometimes he must stand and face her.
Robert Jordan
#85. Retreat might give us a moment of respite but years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.
Tony Blair
#86. The difficult thing about practice isn't learning to sit for an hour, or sit for a weekend, or go on a three-month retreat, as hard as those things are. The difficult thing is to pay attention to what is happening right here and now.
Larry Rosenberg
#87. In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past
Alan Moore
#88. To withdraw isn't a sign of weakness ... It is a sign that a man knows the limits of his capabilities and the most probable outcome of the future. One who retreats to fight another day isn't running away, but looking for another road towards the same destination.
Lionel Suggs
#89. When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London.
Sara Sheridan
#90. To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
David Whyte
#91. Studying with a teacher doesn't simply mean going to an occasional seminar or Zen retreat. It means fully applying yourself to what the teacher says, most of which is not verbal.
Frederick Lenz
#92. For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.
Anton Chekhov
#93. Better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak out and confirm that you didn't do the assigned readings before the strategic planning retreat.
Abraham Lincoln
#94. The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc.
C. Wright Mills
#95. With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.
Guy Debord
#96. Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.
Dan Barker
#97. Maybe late afternoon is autumn; summer's retreat
not being archived, but suspended, as the feathered
vane of a bird wings its way across the avenue.
Michelle Cahill
#98. Don't fret, Grannie. We're going to a Bible retreat to scare the devil out of her
Jeaniene Frost
#99. That in the face of smarter women it was best to beat a continuous retreat, to slash and burn one's own personal convictions before their sure-footed advance.
Gary Shteyngart
#100. The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost.
Evelyn Underhill
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