A Retreat Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. That's who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or

Trevor Noah

#10. Beware of extroverts in retreat center clothing!

Laurie A. Helgoe

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

Anthony Giddens

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. (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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Fight them everywhere. Don't give them a chance to breathe until they withdraw and retreat.

Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

#28. You are protected. But if you don't take risks, God will retreat and become only a subject of philosophical speculation ...

Paulo Coelho

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. The hardest thing of all for a soldier is to retreat.

Duke Of Wellington

#39. 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

#40. A stone can be used for building a house, blocking a road, or killing someone. The same is true for any idea.

Darrell Calkins

#41. If you retreat in response to desire rather than deprivation, the deprivation may never come.

Laurie A. Helgoe

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. [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

#46. 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

#47. I retreat to my cave in a very male fashion.

Ed Stoppard

#48. A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Reform is not a period of retreat.

David Remnick

#54. Retreat might give us a moment of respite but years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.

Tony Blair

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Don't fret, Grannie. We're going to a Bible retreat to scare the devil out of her

Jeaniene Frost

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. After I've done the salesman bit, I like to be quiet and retreat, because that's whereI write from. I'm a sort of quiet little person.

Kate Bush

#71. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing so that you retreat from many aspects of life is a terrible error in itself.

Dean Koontz

#72. 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

#73. I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

Aleksandar Hemon

#74. Any other man would have accepted defeat, put the camera away and made a quick retreat, but he was a Bradford as well as a Marine, which meant that he was going to aggravate the shit out of her for the sheer pleasure of it.

R.L. Mathewson

#75. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Cheryl Strayed

#76. If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.

Alister E. McGrath

#77. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent and, with a few hard blows, they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken.

George W. Bush

#78. 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

#79. If I'm upset, hold me and tell me how beautiful I am.
If I growl, retreat to a safe distance and throw chocolate.
- BEST. ADVICE. EVER.

Darynda Jones

#80. Rather than act like the lord of the manor,
I would rather behave like a guest.
Rather than advance an inch,
I would rather retreat a foot.

Lao-Tzu

#81. This cabin, Mary, in my sight appears,
Built as it has been in our waning years,
A rest afforded to our weary feet,
Preliminary to - the last retreat.

William Cowper

#82. 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

#83. Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.

Agnes Repplier

#84. I would like a UK fully engaged in Europe, but I can't decide in place of the British. I see that for the moment they want to be more in retreat.

Francois Hollande

#85. 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

#86. There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.

Robert Graves

#87. In wrestling, there is no retreat. No way to slow things down. In wrestling, you advance and advance, and being tired is just a lie to make the other guy think he can relax. It's so hard - harder than anything I've ever done.

Channing Tatum

#88. Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

Mary McCarthy

#89. To retreat after a work well done is Heaven's Way.

Laozi

#90. His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.

C. G. Jung

#91. 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

#92. This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.

Albert Camus

#93. What is needed [to combat terrorism], in my view, is resolve, not retreat; courage, not concession. Rather than thinking in terms of an exit strategy, focus on a strategy for success.

Donald Rumsfeld

#94. I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.

Barbara Hambly

#95. You know what else I've learnt? That it's all right not to ride the crest of the wave. Every time a wave comes along I retreat, and I haven't come to any harm yet.

Jennifer Ehle

#96. The art of presenting oneself, he had once told Sybil, lies in creating an immediate shock which is countered by a slow retreat into custom. People never quite recover from my cravats, but they will never find the equal of my tailor. To be memorable is all, when it comes to dress.

Timothy Findley

#97. Would they retreat or move forward? Could they do this thing they were on the verge of doing? Did they have it in them to make a wrong decision just because it felt right?

Emily Giffin

#98. We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

Michel De Montaigne

#99. 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

#100. Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.

Jose Saramago