Grasping quotes:

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Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.' -- Angela Davis
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it. -- Elizabeth Bowen
Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. -- Aesop
You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology. -- Deepak Chopra
If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. -- Soren Kierkegaard
I find that you learn from others. It's very much about watching TV and watching movies for me and grasping that way and watching other people act. -- Callan McAuliffe
I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.' -- Abigail Adams
Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing. -- Thomas Fuller
All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone. -- Christian Lous Lange
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree. -- T. S. Eliot
I think we lost a great deal of sympathy and support with the way in which the crisis was handled, most importantly I think when we appeared to be grasping for too much at one time instead of identifying our priorities in a much more responsible fashion. -- Billy Tauzin
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. -- Henry James
Grasping at things can only yield one of two results: Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear. It is only a matter of which occurs first. -- S. N. Goenka
Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality from breaking through. -- Elliott Abrams
Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure in short, is to learn how things are related. -- Jerome Bruner
Opportunity: A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment. -- Ambrose Bierce
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. -- Aesop
Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible. -- George Bancroft
Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. -- Matt Taibbi
I'm grasping with how you do something on a large scale with multiple operations and not have quality decrease. -- David Chang
For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics. -- Brian Greene
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. -- Buddha
I see many black males grasping for some thread of hope. There are so many destructive practices, glimpses into a psychic abyss. That must be very frightening. -- Yusef Komunyakaa
Goverment is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are the most tolerable are arbitary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent. -- H. L. Mencken
People are still grasping for the miracle, and unfortunately, there are no miracles, if you do not exercise for a year, and let your body remain dormant, then you will gain weight. -- Richard Simmons
All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks. -- Rick Perlstein
It was my dream that I had clenched in a fist of discontent and wouldn't release. But time had now pried every finger open. There is peace in an open and upraised hand that isn't grasping for anything. -- Laurel Lea
Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary. -- Frans de Waal
It all started off with stirring speeches, Greek columns, the thrill of something new. Now all that's left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired, grasping at a moment that has already passed, like a ship trying to sail on yesterday's wind. -- Paul Ryan
I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don't have their hands open, there's something they're grasping because there's a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country. -- Philip Yancey
We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute. -- Thomas Paine
The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. -- Sharon Salzberg
No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future. -- Ludwig von Mises
One must remember that in the '70s, Democrats still grasping for Camelot were desperately pinning their hopes on Teddy while Republicans were doing everything they could politically to turn him into a punch line post-Chappaquiddick. And the idea of Ted Kennedy - rather than the actual man - dominated his political legacy through the early '90s. -- Chuck Todd
People who supported Obama felt like they formed a relationship, that they were being spoken to. The way that campaign worked and the way he's worked during his first term is to make people feel like he's grasping their hand, whether it's by tweeting or email, moments after an event, sometimes during an event. It makes people relate to him. -- James Spader
Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man. -- Erich Fromm
Free passion is radiation without a radiator, a fluid, pervasive warmth that flows effortlessly. It is not destructive because it is a balanced state of being and highly intelligent. Self-consciousness inhibits this intelligent, balanced state of being. By opening, by dropping our self-conscious grasping, we see not only the surface of an object, but we see the whole way through. -- Chogyam Trungpa
Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience. -- Immanuel Kant
In grasping at uncertainties we lost that which is certain. -- Plautus
Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them. -- Paulo Freire
The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality. -- Harvey Cox
Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections. -- Jaggi Vasudev
The usual disease of princes, grasping covetousness, had made them suspicious and quarrelsome neighbors. -- Plutarch
We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. -- Charlie Munger
Difficulty attracts the characterful man, for it is by grasping it that he fulfils himself. -- Charles de Gaulle
Simply allow your thoughts and experiences to come and go, without ever grasping at them. -- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
[Heraclitus had] pride not in logical knowledge but rather in intuitive grasping of the truth. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
The only cause of happiness is love. The only cause of suffering is self grasping. -- Garchen Rinpoche
Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail. -- Rudolf Arnheim
Nature gives all, without reservation, and loses nothing; man or woman, grasping all, loses everything. -- James Allen
A hand up is worthier than one's own fist grasping a higher rung of the ladder. -- Doris Grumbach
Establish your mind as necessary for knowledge and remembrance. Establish a mind free of grasping to anything. -- Gautama Buddha
Let new India arise out of peasants' cottage, grasping the plough, out of huts, cobbler and sweeper. -- Swami Vivekananda
People who are hard, grasping and always ready to take advantage of their neighbors become very rich. -- George Bernard Shaw
Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art. -- Dave Barry
Most pastors have a hard time grasping a vision. But vision is the indispensable quality of a leader. -- John C. Maxwell
To lay hold of the mean without taking into account the occasion is like grasping one thing only. -- Mencius
To cultivate equanimity we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity. -- Pema Chodron
The State is a gang of thieves writ large - the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society. -- Murray Rothbard
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Meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear, trust the unfolding of life, and you will attain true serenity. -- Jack Kornfield
By renouncing samsara, we renounce our habitual grasping, unhappy minds. And by renouncing samsara, we embrace our potential for enlightenment. -- Thubten Zopa Rinpoche
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal while blaming our misery on the person who started the fire. -- Bill Crawford
Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems. -- Henry David Thoreau
Buddhism helps us to overcome our endless ego grasping mind to open up to something so much more spacious and genuinely meaningful. -- Tenzin Palmo
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. -- Walter Lippmann
One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim. -- Frank Herbert
Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night. -- Neil Gaiman
We can not escape tragic roads. It is like grasping at the sun & trying to catch air. We must take one step at-a-time. Keep going. -- Ace Antonio Hall
The Way of Tea lies in studying the ceremony, in understanding the principles, and in grasping the reality of things. These are its three rules. -- Hosokawa Tadaoki
The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it. -- Jeremy Campbell
There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. -- Louis Aragon
Meditation isn't really about getting rid of thoughts, it's about changing the pattern of grasping on to things, which in our everyday experience is our thoughts. -- Pema Chodron
They can fly and they howl, they slaughter depression and headaches, they daydream like gangbanging daffodils, orchids and cherry blossoms grasping mauve toffee clouds, they breastfeed laughter. -- Laura Gentile
Mystery is a birthright of theology and faith, but you often do find religious people grasping for answers that shut things down and narrow what is possible. -- Krista Tippett
To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever. -- George Eliot
If we seek to be loved - if we expect to be loved - this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping not genuinely loving. -- M. Scott Peck
We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want. -- Carol Shields
The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin. -- Lewis H. Lapham
He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other. -- W. Somerset Maugham
We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms. -- Peter Adamson
This child, who is grasping the stone, facing the tank, is it not the greatest message to the world when that hero becomes a martyr? We are proud of them. -- Yasser Arafat
Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations. -- Sogyal Rinpoche
Endings are the toughest, harder than beginnings. They must satisfy the expectations you have hopefully generated in your reader - not frustrate them, leave the reader grasping at elusive strings. -- Jeffrey Thomas
Wherefore the mere practical architect is not able to assign sufficient reasons for the forms he adopts; and the theoretic architect also fails, grasping the shadow instead of the substance. -- Vitruvius
Since form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then instead of a hand grasping at nothing, it is better to grasp at someone's nose because this is closer to reality. -- Dalai Lama
The experience of emptiness is not found outside the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth, we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance. -- Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. -- Sogyal Rinpoche
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The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas. -- Paul Fry
Most people never realize that 80% of the work is done before you step in a room. That's why they spend their entire lives grasping for magical tactics instead of changing their entire mindset. -- Ramit Sethi
She could not mourn. She could no longer weep grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening. -- Tanith Lee
If a child is inclined to be grasping, or to cling to any of his or her little possessions, legends are related about the contempt and disgrace falling upon the ungenerous and mean person.... -- Charles Alexander Eastman
The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement. -- Henry Giroux
Sitting peacefully on a cushion day and night seeking to attain Buddhahood, rejecting life and death in hopes of realizing enlightenment, is all like a monkey grasping at the moon reflected in the water. -- Shoitsu Omatsu
The United States has lost her unique position as a leader in the progress of civilization and has taken up her place simply as one of the grasping and selfish nations of the present day. -- Charles Eliot Norton
The practice is to make the non-arising of grasping and clinging absolute, final, and eternally void, so that no grasping and clinging can ever return. Just that is enough. There is nothing else to do. -- Buddhadasa
There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth ... namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and the concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge. -- Roger Bacon

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