« All Us Quotes · John Updike's Page
Us Quotes by John Updike
- Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
- Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows…
- What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.
- Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we…
- Women are an alien race set down among us.
- It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
- What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid…
- President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance,…
- Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
- Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
- Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past…
- The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent…
- The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some…
- Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing…
- Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can…
- Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier…
- We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death…
- Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
More Us Quotes
- Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really… — Hannah Arendt
- I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or… — Pietro Aretino
- Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius. — Pietro Aretino
- The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela, Colombia and… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first. — Aristotle
- It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those… — Aristotle
- Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in… — Aristotle
- The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for… — Aristotle