Quotes About Bearings

#1. I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

George Saunders

#2. Once I had gotten my bearings and turned back to the room in front of me, I found myself staring directly into the eyes of Queen Julia. Well, her and about twenty Hunters who seemed only too happy to display their bouncing balls of crackling orange magic and wicked stares.

Stormy Smith

#3. There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings.

Jo Coudert

#4. It was a pity that there was no radar to guide one across the trackless seas of life. Every man had to find his own way, steered by some secret compass of the soul. And sometimes, late or early, the compass lost its power and spun aimlessly on its bearings.
Alan Bishop

Arthur C. Clarke

#5. It is funny that some of must not only get our bearings but must also know all the details of the world before we venture out into it.

Jack Henry Abbott

#6. So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.

Craig Davidson

#7. The cross is not just a badge to identify us ... it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.

John Stott

#8. And even if one tried, it would be very hard to give a true account, for there were no thoughts in Ivan's mind but something very vague. He felt that he had lost his bearings.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#9. I said I would do all the films about the commercials, and the films about ball-bearings and Ford tractors and so on, if once a year they gave me money for a free film.

Karel Reisz

#10. Commitment isn't about being perfect, always following through, or never going astray. Commitment means that when you (inevitably) stumble or get off track, you pick yourself up, find your bearings, and carry on in the direction you want to go.

Russ Harris

#11. Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.

George Will

#12. If engines of love and power drive mankind, surely the bearings would burn to a frazzle without the oil of laughter.

Smoke Blanchard

#13. You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn't been working out so great for me. Now never has.

Charles Yu

#14. It's always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don't understand. [p. 336]

Kim Edwards

#15. They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies.

Masha Gessen

#16. Communists should set an example in being practical as well as far-sighted. For only by being practical can they fulfil the appointed tasks, and only far-sightedness can prevent them from losing their bearings in the march forward.

Mao Zedong

#17. I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

Khaled Hosseini

#18. The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#19. I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.

Christopher Columbus

#20. Into the cultural and technological system of the modern world, the patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings. Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern mankind.

Thorstein Veblen

#21. We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

John Updike

#22. The space reminded me of the small hay-bale clubhouses and scrap-wood tree forts that my brothers and I had made as kids - high up spaces where you could see things differently, where you could get your bearings.

Dee Williams

#23. Nor had she missed when they zigzagged between levels, even though the building was a standard grid of hallways and stairwells. As if she'd lose her bearings that easily.
She might have been insulted if he wasn't trying so hard.

Sarah J. Maas

#24. Sometimes good countries are so traumatized by events that they lose their bearings and embrace bad leaders.

David Ignatius

#25. I delight to come to my bearings, ... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sitthoughtfully while it goes by.

Henry David Thoreau

#26. I thought it would fix everything, but it just made everything worse. Lies do. Remember when I told you white lies were like ball bearings in the machinery of society? Wrong. Lies are like incendiary bombs, burning and melting and mangling everything- trust, hopes, everyone you love.

Sarah Sundin

#27. Who said anything about panicking?' snapped Arthur. 'This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking!

Douglas Adams

#28. Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.

William Godwin

#29. Flux, n.
The natural state. Our moods change. Our lives change. Our feelings for each other change. Our bearings change. The song changes. The air changes. The temperature of the shower changes.
Accept this. We must accept this.

David Levithan

#30. I was so sure I'd heard the doorbell and simultaneously certain that I hadn't. How could a smart and competent 23-year-old not be able to distinguish the edges of dreams from the tips of reality? How had the picture gone so horribly blurry that I'd looked to a dog to regain my bearings?

Julie Flygare

#31. Bearings

You are my dear compass,
who knows no way but true,
so when I'm lost and drifting,
I find myself in you.

Yet when I ask you, fearful,
if I should set you free,
imagine my surprise to hear
you take your north from me.

Louise Hawes

#32. Alice twists a lock of her hair as she sucks on her straw and swivels back and forth on her seat. The shush of the ball bearings sounds like the sea to her, like waves retreating through the sand. She is a thousand miles away. I know this, but I'm not going to let her know I know.

Jan Strnad

#33. I have better use for my brain than to poison it with alcohol. To put alcohol in the human brain is like putting sand in the bearings of an engine.

Thomas A. Edison

#34. People suit their star sign. If someone is annoying me over and over, and I know they're a Sagittarius, say, I'm more likely to forgive them. It comes down to my need for structure as a way of finding my bearings with people.

Jessie Cave

#35. No one hit home runs the way Babe did. They were something special. They were like homing pigeons. The ball would leave the bat, pause briefly, suddenly gain its bearings, then take off for the stands.

Lefty Gomez

#36. As the sailor locates his position on the sea by "shooting" the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God.

A.W. Tozer

#37. But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings.

Nick Hornby

#38. If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.

Seamus Heaney

#39. There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

Tim Winton

#40. One tended to lose one's bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.

Tom Robbins

#41. I well remember how the thoughts I had up to the time of my discharge from the jail on every occasion were modified immediately after discharge, and after getting first-hand information myself. Somehow or other the jail atmosphere does not allow you to have all the bearings in your mind.

Mahatma Gandhi

#42. ... you don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings ... serendipitously.
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

John Barth

#43. The reason so many of us lose our bearings about practising early in life is that we practice in living rooms with other family members in earshot - and healthy practice would simply sound too obnoxious, intrusive, repetitious and unmusical for others to hear without annoyance.

William Westney

#44. You make me come alive- too alive. It's breathless, like a disaster. Ravishing, like crossing over into the desert and losing your bearings. Nothing's the same again.

Margaret Way

#45. I didn't revel in death, but I didn't hate it either. Death had raised me, like an older sibling. Amidst death, I had found my bearings as a soldier. Surrounded by death, I had found my place as a leader.

Roshani Chokshi

#46. A man must abide somewhere, a physical roof over his head is not enough; his mind needs its bearings, its points of reference, vertically as well as horizontally. Do we not speak of edifying readings?

Stephen McNeilly

#47. Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

Gregory Benford

#48. It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.

Alan Moore

#49. contact points are larger and instead of the current being led through the bearings as in an ordinary

Archie Frederick Collins

#50. The greatest gift a parent can give a child is unconditional love. As a child wanders and strays, finding his bearings, he needs a sense of absolute love from a parent. There's nothing wrong with tough love, as long as the love is unconditional.

George W. Bush

#51. The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

Colm Toibin

#52. The phone conversations about a possible TV series of 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' stretch back years, but now that the moment has come, now that I am actually here at Wentworth Woodhouse, I lose my bearings.

Susanna Clarke

#53. How many of us, myself included, have lost our bearings; we are no longer attentive to the world in which we live; we don't care; we don't protect what God created for everyone, and we end up unable even to care for one another.

Pope Francis

#54. For him, to get one's bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment. This

Mikhail Bakhtin

#55. A man's most vivid emotional and sensuous experience is inevitably bound up with the language that he actually speaks. (New Bearings in English Poetry)

F.R. Leavis

#56. It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.

Samuel Butler

#57. Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#58. Whenever I go to a new city, whether visiting or vacationing, I would always make that a point to get to the record store early on, just to get my bearings and see what was going on around town.

Gary Calamar

#59. He pointed out to him the bearings of the coast, explained to him the variations of the compass, and taught him to read in that vast book opened over our heads which they call heaven, and where God writes in azure with letters of diamonds.

Alexandre Dumas

#60. A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

Zygmunt Bauman

#61. His voice, which always carried right across the lawn. A voice like a foghorn. A voice that tankers and container vessels might use to find their bearings in distant estuaries and foreign ports.

Herman Koch

#62. Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

Andrew O'Hagan

#63. Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings.

Zia Haider Rahman

#64. Clearly, sharing something could take you a long way, or at least to a different place than you'd planned. Like a friendship or a family, or even jsut alone on a curb on a Saturday, trying to get your bearings as best you can.

Sarah Dessen

#65. I got my bearings, I began to focus. My mother was very supportive. When I came back to New York I landed a job at Hot 97.

Angie Martinez

#66. My head was spinning. I felt like I'd been drifting, lost at sea all my life, and now that I'd found dry land, I couldn't quite get my bearings.

Carolee Dean

#67. The bearings of this observation lays in the application of it.

Charles Dickens

#68. If the nation is not capable of preserving itself and reproducing, if it loses it vital bearings and ideals, then it doesn't need foreign enemies - it will fall apart on its own.

Vladimir Putin

#69. When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.

M.L. Stedman