Top 100 In Ruins Quotes
#2. He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#3. What doesn't kill you leaves scars, ruins your lungs, dries out all your tears, leaves you lying awake at 4 in the morning
wishing you weren't alive.
Walt Whitman
#4. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.
Janet Fitch
#5. I fervently believe that people shouldn't stay in bad relationships just because of some artificial rom-com notion of true love being "forever." In fact, I think that the pressure of conforming to that framework ruins-literally RUINS-a lot of people's lives.
Lindy West
#6. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. Congress, 535 commoditized temple monkeys pawing through the ruins of America in search of bribes. The bicameral whorehouse on Capitol Hill works like a vending machine. You put coins in the slot, select your law, and the desired legislation slides out.
Fred Reed
#8. The American family is failing in its job of turning out stable human beings ... It is failing because Americans do not dare to cultivate in themselves those characteristics which would make family life creative and rewarding. To do so, would ruin them financially.
Margaret Halsey
#9. Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.
Peter Medawar
#11. The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.
Baron De Montesquieu
#12. Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin
#13. Then came upon a world in ruins an anxious youth. The children were drops of burning blood which had inundated the earth; they were born in the bosom of war, for war. For fifteen years they had dreamed of the snows of Moscow and of the sun of the Pyramids.
Alfred De Musset
#14. Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
Marcel Duchamp
#15. The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
#16. A money-lender
he serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the conjunctive; and ruins you in the future.
Joseph Addison
#18. All the labours of ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinciton in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.
Bertrand Russell
#19. I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.
Steven Pinker
#20. What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty ... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.
Elbridge Gerry
#21. I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible only in the catacombs.
Julius Evola
#22. We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.
Rigoberta Menchu
#23. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.
Dorothy Wordsworth
#24. I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.
Joan Baez
#25. It's like ... time is flowing backward. We're caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future.
Dan Wells
#26. But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.
Lewis H. Lapham
#27. You can take me to Petra, and sing for me in the ruins."
"Insha'Allah.
Leslie Cockburn
#28. When someone in power declares that something is broken that means it's actually fine. What they're really saying is, "Let's change this so I like it and ruin it." Nothing is ever broken.
Greg Gutfeld
#29. Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.
Paul Theroux
#30. The rate of profit ... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
Adam Smith
#31. But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.
Paula McLain
#32. My soul is lost, my friend, tell me how do I begin again? My city's in ruins, my city's in ruins.
Bruce Springsteen
#33. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#34. Some people say that you should go to all the parties, to the nightclubs, the Viper Room, and make contacts. And I look at them and say, You dont want to have contacts with those people. Look at what happened to River Phoenix. If you get caught up in that, it ruins you. Hollywood is garbage.
Paul Walker
#35. Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked.
There was always a broken doll.
Why did there always have to be a damn doll?
Sarah Beth Durst
#36. It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
Oscar Wilde
#37. Changes are good for us, but some changes ruins our life as well, so never change for others just change for self.
Debolina
#38. Leave it to you to find beauty in something others would say ruins a day.
Kiera Cass
#39. J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay "The Necessity for Ruins." Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption.
Thomas Moore
#40. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
W.G. Sebald
#41. In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then
ruins more than that, if you're not careful.
Elizabeth Kostova
#42. The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. it was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction
Kobo Abe
#43. The less we show our love to a woman, Or please her less, and neglect our duty, The more we trap and ruin her surely In the flattering toils of philandery.
Alexander Pushkin
#44. We will continue to march, even if everything shatters, because today Germany hears us, and tomorrow, the whole world. And because of the Great War, the world lies in ruins, but devil may care, we build it up again.
Rhidian Brook
#46. I couldn't help but feel a sick sadistic joy as I queued up the C4. So many people were going to die today, and so many families were going to be in devastated ruins tomorrow. They would feel what they made me feel.
Quil Carter
#47. I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles
#48. I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER
The ruins of Canterbury Castle
Russell Hoban
#49. It's a bad place, brother. All ruins and bare rock. Only ever seen it from a distance and it gave me the frights. Something in the air (...) Just feels bad. The Lonak call it Maars Nir-Uhlin Sol, the Place of the Stolen Souls.
Anthony Ryan
#50. He made her think of ruins, of mysterious places in shadow and darkness, of storms and torrents of rain.
Diana Palmer
#51. Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!
Eca De Queiros
#52. When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.
Karan Mahajan
#53. Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.
Charles Dickens
#54. Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best. "Love Among the Ruins," Robert Browning, 1885
Craig Johnson
#55. In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.
Noah Feldman
#56. Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.
Theodore Roosevelt
#57. Still, I love you. In all my human ruins, in all my shining inadequacy, I love you.
Conny Cernik
#58. Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin.
Coleman Barks
#59. When everything else is in ruins, family is all we have. And God, of course.
Chris Womersley
#60. Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.
Tennessee Williams
#61. Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind.
Blake Bailey
#62. Basic services such as electricity have never been worse and the economy of Arab Iraq is in ruins.
Andrew Gilligan
#63. Pouring breakfast cereal into a bowl, he saw his life crashing down in smoking ruins.
Meg Rosoff
#64. It is possible to ruin a chicken in the cooking of it, but not easily. Short of burning it or letting it get dried out, you can hardly go wrong.
Jo Coudert
#65. During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.
Chris Bohjalian
#66. It is from the graves and ruins and rubbish-heaps of Egypt that writings have been restored to us in great numbers.
Frederic G. Kenyon
#67. The whole track of history is marked with the ruin of empires which having been founded in injustice, or perpetuated by wrong, were ultimately destroyed.
William Mackergo Taylor
#68. All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.
And this one is Teddy's.
Kate Atkinson
#69. I sometimes wonder whether century-old ruins look so beautiful to us beacause they were *meant* to ruin in a beautiful way. There was a Romantic facination with structural decay; wealthy gentry had custom-built ruins erected on their estates, their own little Country Churchyards to elegize in
Paul Collins
#70. The march of intellect is proceeding at quick time; and if its progress be not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals and religion, the faster it proceeds, with the more violence will you be hurried down the road to ruin.
Robert Southey
#71. In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
#72. Women of forty always fancy they have found the Fountain of Youth, and that they remain young in the midst of the ruins of their day.
Arsene Houssaye
#73. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
Theodore Roosevelt
#74. Today's warm houses will be the cold ruins in the very distant future!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#75. Careers are here and they're gone. No matter how great we think we are, we're nothing but the temples of Ozymandias-we're ruins in the making.
William Shatner
#76. What's old collapses, times change, and new life blossoms in the ruins.
Friedrich Schiller
#77. The fastest way to bring financial ruin upon yourself is to go for a drive in the United States without proof of insurance and current license and registration.
Hank Stuever
#78. You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
#79. Is it a time for you, you I say, to dwell in your roofed-in houses?' (Haggai 1:4). The reply might have been that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to live in a roofless house, but the question made its point. What worth did they set on their God, when they left His Temple in ruins?
Joyce G. Baldwin
#80. Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old.
John Muir
#81. My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you
Augustine Of Hippo
#82. Sometimes it does me good to look back at the days when the living wasn't so good. I remember in 1945 the dressing-rooms were gone, the park was in ruins, no stand, nothing.
Matt Busby
#83. If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.
Milan Kundera
#84. It is a wretched thing to rest upon the fame of others, lest, the supporting pillar being removed, the superstructure should collapse in ruin.
Juvenal
#85. In the end, an impatience with the Word of God can be explained only by an impatience with God. We all, both individually and congregationally, neglect God's Word to our own ruin.
Albert Mohler
#86. The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.
Daphne Du Maurier
#87. Suspicion ruins the atmosphere of trust in a team and makes it ineffective
Sunday Adelaja
#88. I am deeply saddened for the people of Ferguson who woke up to see parts of their community in ruins. No one should have to live like this; no one deserves this. We must do better, and we will.
Jay Nixon
#89. Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
Caroline Leavitt
#90. Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.
Jacob Bronowski
#91. In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake.
William Hazlitt
#92. Consider that it is not failing in this or that attempt to come to Christ, but a giving-over of your endeavors, that will be your ruin.
John Owen
#93. The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#94. What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance.
Clara Barton
#95. Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.
P. J. O'Rourke
#96. The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.
Simon Schama
#97. Anger is like a ruin, which, in falling upon its victim, breaks itself to pieces.
Seneca The Younger
#98. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I, too, am here." However,
Thomas Ligotti
#99. Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.
Howard Nemerov
#100. When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.
Janet Flanner
