Top 100 The Descent Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Happiness lies not in the position, descent, or any property, but, that happiness lies in religion, science, manners, and achieve my goals.
Rifhi Siddiq
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
Charles Darwin
#12. Let no man trust the first false step of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice, whose steep descent in last perdition ends.
Edward Young
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H Gass
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
#20. Facilis descensus averno - The descent into hell is easy
Cassandra Clare
#21. 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
#22. There is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
Karen Armstrong
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The woman with the horned helmet - who had to be of Viking descent - spoke.
James Rollins
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. often in The Descent of Man, "my dog" steps forth as major evidence.
Tom Wolfe
#36. 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
#37. Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
Immanuel Kant
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. His voice reminded me of the slow stretching descent of honey from a highly placed silver spoon.
J.A. George
#41. 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
#42. If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.
John Lancaster Spalding
#43. 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
#44. My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye.
Joni Mitchell
#45. 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
#46. Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.
Charles Darwin
#47. 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
#48. the descent was going to be more difficult than the ascent.
Jeffrey Archer
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. In Germany they had no kings. They developed them in Britain from leaders who claimed descent from the ancient gods.
Winston S. Churchill
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The descent into matter must be complete before the ascent to spirit can commence.
Dion Fortune
#60. Natto, Japanese ferment bean paste, will never cross my lips again. Spam Musubi, on the other hand, is something I love. I used to have a roommate of Vietnamese descent, and he would eat it all the time. It looked gross, but I finally had it - wrapped in seaweed and rice - it was terrific.
Adam Richman
#61. 'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial.
Jesse Plemons
#62. The vast majority of a significant portion of Americans of Hispanic descent will vote - happen to be working class people who are desperate to not only achieve the American dream but leave their kids better off than themselves.
Marco Rubio
#63. [Prince Stefan's] family was of Eastern European descent, with some real royalty thrown in via a connection to Vlad the Impaler - who hung from a branch that Ian wouldn't kept secret had the family tree been growing in his yard.
Suzanne Brockmann
#64. The worlds represent increasing phases of densification, the involuting descent of spirit into matter, where the way becomes harder and longer ...
Rudolf Steiner
#65. Half of San Antonio's population is of Mexican descent; the other half just eats that way.
Mike Greenberg
#66. 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
#67. I would say to you that Americans of Hispanic descent want desperately to give their children the chances they never had.
Marco Rubio
#68. It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.
Hosea Ballou
#69. I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.
Stewart O'Nan
#70. A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.
Terry Tempest Williams
#71. So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.
Isocrates
#72. I live for books that produce a mood of gathering creepy fascination, a true descent in the Weird.
Gemma Files
#73. But of course we don't notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.
Dean Koontz
#74. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery
Marvin Harris
#75. Yeah, cause that would be a smart choice. So, I should just forget about the whole lying to me thing when you pronounce you will never do it again?"
"Yes."
"You'd have a better chance getting a donkey to shit gold.
Elizabeth J. Kolodziej
#76. I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'
Andre Dubus III
#77. 'The Descent,' 'Dog Soldiers,' those films, I've loved for years, and the tones of those.
Matt Ryan
#78. American Progressivism - the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent - is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.
Jonah Goldberg
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.
Scott Adams
#83. I'm of Irish descent, so I'm practically flammable in sunlight, and there's nothing quite as vicious as the cruel dry heat of the southern Nevada desert.
Bethany Walker
#84. If tomorrow the Muslims of France were to convert to Catholicism or renounce all religion, it wouldn't make the least bit of difference to the racists - they would continue to hold these foreigners or French citizens of foreign descent responsible for every affliction.
Charb
#85. With the exception of 'Descent,' that was a very conscious thing to make an action or horror movie that was an all-female cast because I hadn't seen anything like that before.
Neil Marshall
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.
H.P. Lovecraft
#90. The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism,
Errol White
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.
Dan Harmon
#94. What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.
James Sallis
#95. God's downward descent to us in grace reversed by our upward ascent in pragmatic enthusiasm, we are increasingly becoming a sheep without a Shepherd - and all in the name of mission. Instead of churching the unchurched, we are well on our way to even unchurching the churched.
Michael S. Horton
#96. Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are the principal design faults that lead to accidents.
Bill Bryson
#97. I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.
Sandra Cisneros
#98. 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
#99. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross
at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.
Edgar Allan Poe
#100. 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
