Downwards Quotes

#1. I love you like stones fall downwards, like the sun rises.

Jo Walton

#2. It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Bill Bryson

#3. A vow must lead one upwards, never downwards towards perdition.

Mahatma Gandhi

#4. I started my career at the top and have been working my way downwards ever since.

Tom Glazer

#5. Well, did Owl always have a letter-box in his ceiling?"
"Has he?"
"Yes, look."
"I can't," said Pooh. "I'm face downwards under something, and that, Piglet, is a very bad position for looking at ceilings."
"Well, he has, Pooh."
"Perhaps he's changed it," said Pooh. "Just for a change.

A.A. Milne

#6. A fall from such a height is rarely straight downwards.

Victor Hugo

#7. The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.

Gary Hamel

#8. He [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder.

Philip Larkin

#9. In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Bertrand Russell

#10. Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors its worst members.

James O'Toole

#11. And while the other creatures on all fours Look downwards, man was made to hold his head Erect in majesty and see the sky, And raise his eyes to the bright stars above.

A.D. Melville

#12. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness.

G.K. Chesterton

#13. The old Greeks dwelt on the tendency of human affairs to drift downwards irresistibly to unhappiness. Guilt - that is, untoward and often involuntary actions - pulls generation after generation heavily as lead down, down, down.

Richard Jefferies

#14. He reached out, put his hands on her shoulders and pressed downwards. She fell into a seated position against a fallen tree.
"Sit," he said. "Stay."
"That's cute," she said. "Tell me to 'heel' and see what happens.

Jena Leigh

#15. Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)

Terry Pratchett

#16. The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards - to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.

Nikolai Berdyaev

#17. If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.

Sam Altman

#18. He had long been curious at leaders intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards

Steve Aylett

#19. At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#20. Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops that seem to warp and curve. The shapes coalesce into the right number. I never write anything down.

Daniel Tammet

#21. Think of the lotus of the heart, with petals downwards, and running through it, the Sushumna; take in the breath, and while throwing the breath out imagine that the lotus is turned with the petals upwards, and inside that lotus is an effulgent light. Meditate on that.

Swami Vivekananda

#22. The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

Douglas Hofstadter

#23. But, you're just a girl!" Ben said, his eyes widening with suprise and indignation.

The green eyes glanced downwards and before he could move, Ben felt a sharp point pricking at his throat.

"No, not just a girl..." the thief answered softly, "a girl with a knife!

Richard Denning

#24. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.

Hermann Hesse

#25. Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a bending downwards.

William Whewell

#26. Figures must be adjusted downwards to take account of the cost of living, which has risen by a factor of nearly seven in my lifetime.

Niall Ferguson

#27. You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.

George Orwell

#28. There are times when we find ourselves pitching downwards, out of control. Yet God is always nearby ...

Shirley Corder

#29. If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil . He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#30. Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.

Keith Richards

#31. I sometimes doubt whether even the friends whose kind thoughts turned downwards me that evening from the distant South and West could realize how cheerful is the recollection of the Christmas spent in the solitude and cold of the desert.

Aurel Stein

#32. Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

Chauncey Wright

#33. Where is the subject that does not branch out into infinity? For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snowflake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.

William Mountford

#34. Water indeed will flow indifferently to the east or west, but will it flow indifferently up or down? The tendency of our nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards. There are none but have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downward.

Mencius

#35. A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners.

Neal Stephenson

#36. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they've been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

Lemony Snicket

#37. An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; A villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards.

John Locke

#38. In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's downwards.

Charles Dickens

#39. Now we see you, you nasty little creature! We will eat you and leave your bones and skin hanging on a tree. Ugh! he's got a sting has he? Well, we'll get him all the same, and then we'll hang him head downwards for a day or two." While

J.R.R. Tolkien

#40. Aspire higher to attain excellence in whatever you do. But be careful when you reach the peak, where the only way is the way downwards. Maintain your standard!

Israelmore Ayivor

#41. I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.

Angela Carter

#42. I don't do close-ups any more. I am better looking from the waist downwards.

Bruce Forsyth

#43. My lord, when you are looking for ... what I am looking for, you have to look in strange places. Men can never look at the sun, except downwards, at his reflection in things of earth. If he is reflected in a dirty puddle, he is still the sun. There is nowhere I will not look, to find him.

Mary Stewart

#44. She gave a little jump and hung in the air a little way above the rug, then she slowly began to be drawn downwards and dropped ..

Mikhail Bulgakov