Top 100 The Descent Quotes
#1. Mountaineers are one of the few groups to celebrate before the finish line. More mountaineers die on the descent than on the ascent.
Susan Oakey-Baker
#3. After the departure of the land parties, I embarked with six men on thursday, the 21st april, on board my newly made boat and began the descent of the river.
William Henry Ashley
#4. He stood for a moment on the melting snow, distracted, and then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as the descent became more rapid, and thinking: I can climb back up. If it's wrong, I can always climb back up.
James Baldwin
#5. Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
#6. Facilis descensus averno - The descent into hell is easy
Cassandra Clare
#7. Tragically, of the first five women to reach the summit of K2, three died on the descent and two were later to die on other mountains.
Mike Trueman
#8. Easy is the descent to hell; all night long, all day, the doors of dark Hades stand open; but to retrace the path; to come out again to the sweet air of Heaven - there is the task, there is the burden.
Virgil
#9. often in The Descent of Man, "my dog" steps forth as major evidence.
Tom Wolfe
#10. Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
Immanuel Kant
#11. the descent was going to be more difficult than the ascent.
Jeffrey Archer
#12. Indeed he had worn that piece of furniture - or symbol of bone-laziness - into such a shape as made the descent of any other body than his own into that crater of undulating horsehair a hazardous enterprise.
Mervyn Peake
#13. The descent into matter must be complete before the ascent to spirit can commence.
Dion Fortune
#14. A representative form of government rests nor more on political contributions than on those laws which regulate the descent and transmission of property.
Daniel Webster
#15. But of course we don't notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.
Dean Koontz
#16. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery
Marvin Harris
#17. 'The Descent,' 'Dog Soldiers,' those films, I've loved for years, and the tones of those.
Matt Ryan
#18. It is not the descent toward the shadow nor the rise toward the light that makes us superior. It is the endless struggle between the two that greatness of character lies. We are tested, and we do not break.
Sanguinius
#19. It was very difficult to control the descent. At a height of seven kilometres, I catapulted out of my capsule and parachuted down to Earth. I was very familiar with parachutes because I was a sky diver before.
Valentina Tereshkova
#20. Oh you who are born of the gods, easy is the descent into Hell. The door of darkness stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps, and come back out into the brightness above, that is the work, that is the labor.
Virgil
#21. He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to.
Hugh Howey
#22. My only regret involved the sad knowledge that I could not handle the amount of alcohol I would have enjoyed. Easy is the descent into Hell.
Robert A. Heinlein
#23. The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism,
Errol White
#24. At Peter's court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#25. To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.
Gretel Ehrlich
#26. I'm Peter on the mountaintop, stirring to see The Glory in all its God-radiance, stammering out that it's good to be here; let's build shelters and never depart. But there's always the descent from the mount. The meeting of the crowd, the complaining, the cursing. Page 124
Ann Voskamp
#27. Basia coquum," Simon said. "Or whatever their motto is."
"It's 'Descensus Averno facilis est.' 'The descent into hell is easy," said Alec. "You just said "Kiss the cook."
"Dammit," said Simon. "I knew Jace was screwing with me.
Cassandra Clare
#28. After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.
Arthur Erickson
#29. Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he lay dying in a foreign land, "The descent to hell is the same from every place.
Diogenes Laertius
#30. But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.
Iris Murdoch
#31. I find that most people that zealously defend Darwin have not actually read Darwin; definitely not Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man.
A.E. Samaan
#32. The descent into Hell is easy
Virgil
#33. The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.
C.S. Lewis
#34. Facilis descensus Averni," he whispered, his ominous and preternatural words striking her very soul. "The descent to Hell is easy.
Sylvain Reynard
#35. Man has regarded woman as his tool. She has learnt to be his tool and in the end found it is easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall, the descent is easy.
Mahatma Gandhi
#36. I will follow him to hell, and that is saying not a little, as I believe him entirely capable of the descent.
Alexandre Dumas
#37. Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.
T. S. Eliot
#38. The descent of sport into spectacle is not unique to the age of genetic engineering. But it illustrates how performance-enhancing technologies, genetic or otherwise, can erode the part of athletic and artistic performance that celebrates natural talents and gifts.
Michael J. Sandel
#39. Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration ... and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose - as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
Joseph Conrad
#40. Jesus is the descent of God to our lives, just as they are, not the ascent of our lives to God, hoping he might approve when he sees how hard we try.
Eugene H. Peterson
#41. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.
Albert Camus
#42. Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
George Eliot
#43. The descent into Hades is much the same from whatever place we start.
Anaxagoras
#44. The descent to Hades is the same from every place.
Anaxagoras
#45. Facilis decensus averni. The descent into hell is easy.
Virgil
#46. The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.
Carl Jung
#47. I wish to descend in the social scale.
High society is low society.
I am a social climber
climbing downward
And the descent is difficult.
(- Junkman's Obbligato)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#48. No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent.
Carl Jung
#49. I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning.
Diego Rivera
#50. III THE DESCENT BECKONS The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. - William Carlos Williams, The Descent
Cassandra Clare
#51. The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.
Virgil
#52. The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.
David McReynolds
#54. The descent to the infernal regions is easy enough, but to retrace one's steps, and reach the air above, there's the rub.
Virgil
#55. PUBLISHER'S NOTE To seize the knowledge of the UNKNOWABLE needs a language, which is at once symbolically creative, revealingly poetic, infinitely plastic, luminously rhythmic, automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable descent of truth of idea, word and action.
Maa Krishna Sri Aurobindo
#56. The classic business story is much like the classic human story. There is rise and fall; the overcoming of great odds, the upholding of principles despite the cost, questions of rivalry and succession, and even the possibility of descent into madness.
Mark Helprin
#57. Happiness lies not in the position, descent, or any property, but, that happiness lies in religion, science, manners, and achieve my goals.
Rifhi Siddiq
#58. Who, in the midst of just provocation to anger, instantly finds the fit word which settles all around him in silence is more than wise or just; he is, were he a beggar, of more than royal blood, he is of celestial descent.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#59. I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour.
Lance Armstrong
#60. Whether we're conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals, including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication.
Chip Conley
#61. I'm a half-breed. You know, I'm Puerto Rican and Norwegian from descent, and I grew up, born and raised in New York City, and I stood out amongst my friends in my community. I was very blond-haired, white, and 'Lemonhead' was the name that they gave me.
Lemon Andersen
#63. They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever.
Laini Taylor
#64. I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
Charles Darwin
#65. Let no man trust the first false step of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice, whose steep descent in last perdition ends.
Edward Young
#66. In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.
John Green
#67. The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H Gass
#68. The child now shewed her a narrow and rugged descent, made by cutting the red clay and stones, of which the cliffs are here composed, into a sort of rude steps.
Charlotte Smith
#69. Because if feels so much like falling
Into love
Into you and me
Being in love is scary
So much like falling
A frightening descent into
Beautiful madness
Yes, you and we
We're
Falling into Us
And I don't dare stop the fall
Because I need it far too much
Jasinda Wilder
#70. There is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
Karen Armstrong
#71. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.
Bernie Sanders
#72. For my part, if I'm working while flying, I'm often a bit relieved to be forced to shut down the computer on final descent. But I guess I'm a slacker.
Meghan Daum
#73. We went through a period of time when if you were of Asian descent, you would play a terrorist or you would play, you know, like, the 7-Eleven guy or you would play that. And then really watch television now.
Reshma Shetty
#74. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.
Pat Buchanan
#75. The implacable logic of retribution will prove as appalling as the crime itself, consisting of the soul's slow agonizing descent into a state of such loneliness and despair as to be finally indistinguishable from Hell.
William Shakespeare
#76. Being that the *historical* Jesus was of pure Hebraic descent- lineage of Eber- He was not an Arab or of Arabic descent, therefore He was not dark skinned as most Israeli's are not."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#77. And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains ...
Bill Bryson
#78. The woman with the horned helmet - who had to be of Viking descent - spoke.
James Rollins
#79. Compromise, while at times morally necessary or at least justifiable, is more often only the first permission for a person (or society) to begin a long downhill descent.
Dennis Prager
#80. And sure enough, in seeking to become superhuman this foolhardy young man renders himself inhuman. The heart that he has locked away slowly shrivels and grows hair, symbolising his own descent to beasthood.
J.K. Rowling
#81. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
William Carlos Williams
#82. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.
Charles Dickens
#83. Anyone who writes about Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
Ernst Mayr
#84. His voice reminded me of the slow stretching descent of honey from a highly placed silver spoon.
J.A. George
#85. I'm of Nigerian descent, from the Yoruba tribe. Names are very significant in that culture. It basically states your purpose in life.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
#86. If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.
John Lancaster Spalding
#87. He'd been let down so often
His brow was on the floor
But then they found
A small hole in the ground
And let him down some more
David Thewlis
#88. My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye.
Joni Mitchell
#89. And she began the oft-told tale of a lady of imperial descent who could find no husband in the narrow circle where her pride permitted her to mate, and had lived on unwed, her age now thirty, and would die unwed, for no one would have her now.
E. M. Forster
#90. Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.
Charles Darwin
#91. When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.
Candice Millard
#92. The premise of 'Descent' may sound pretty straightforward: One summer morning while vacationing with her family in the foothills of the Rockies, a young girl, a high-school athlete in her senior year, goes out for a run in the higher altitudes - and disappears.
Alan Cheuse
#93. Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Terence McKenna
#94. Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#95. The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.
Richard Rohr
#96. In Germany they had no kings. They developed them in Britain from leaders who claimed descent from the ancient gods.
Winston S. Churchill
#97. Now he knew that it was only love when you knew there could be no end to it. When it was as inevitable as gravity. Falling in love, a helpless descent in which the only way to avoid being hurt was to keep going. Keep falling.
Lisa Kleypas
#98. I care not whether the soldiers are of Milesian, Teutonic, African or Angelo-Saxon descent. I despise the principle that make a difference between them in the hour of battle and of death.
Thaddeus Stevens
#99. And the worst possible thing we could know - worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms - is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.
Thomas Ligotti
#100. All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.
Kwame Nkrumah
