Torpid Quotes

#1. No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.

Oliver Goldsmith

#2. Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.

Dalai Lama

#3. We can't tell our life from our wish

Randall Jarrell

#4. It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.

Samuel Johnson

#5. In some sense, we're all cavemen - we can't imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality - that's actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts ... or Rubinstein's monsters ... or is that Wallenstein?"
"Frankenstein.

Arkady Strugatsky

#6. When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder

Adrienne Rich

#7. Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.

Ralph Ellison

#8. The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

Carl Schmitt

#9. Torpid systems - it was pleasant to hear them

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#10. Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

Virginia Woolf

#11. The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#12. Ignorance is mere privation by which nothing can be produced: it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction: and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget.

Samuel Johnson

#13. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. But he's so cute when he gets all determined and commanding, isn't he?"
...
"It's not cute, it's very manly!

M.R. Merrick

#15. Life has much uneasiness; that is certain. Always remember that, and it will never surprise you. - James Boswell

Mason Currey

#16. I must do what my conscience bids. I have borne long with self-reproach that would have roused any mind less torpid and cowardly than mine.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#17. No, I have no desire for riches. Honest poverty and a conscience, torpid through virtuous inaction, are more to me than corner lots and praise.

Mark Twain

#18. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#19. Solitude and boredom. It's what happens to something that's felt itself gathered together too long, too...exclusively. The vacuum that occurs at its frontiers--a kind of numbness which is generated on its torpid surface as if it had lost the sense of touch--lost contact.

Julien Gracq

#20. Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

Gustave Flaubert

#21. If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion.

Samuel Johnson

#22. We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.

George Will

#23. The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.

Marcus Aurelius