Quotes about Vitality

Running water is perceived as being filled with vitality.

Whether we give away too much or too little of ourselves, our vitality dwindles.

Here and now is our day of torment! Here and now is our day of joy! Here and now is our opportunity... Choose ye this day, this hour, for no Redeemer liveth!

If, as Nalungiaq says, "in the very earliest time... people and animals... spoke the same language," then the rectification of language requires closeness with our animal nature. Then the vitality of our language resides as much in the sound of our words and beat of their rhythms as in their meanings. That's why Lorca puts the poetry of duende together with song, dance, and bull-fighting, and that's why poems belong more to speaking than to reading, more to passionate declamation and ecstatic jubilation, keening, crying, and screaming, and to the secret whispers of lovers' lips than to typed lines on bleached paper. Good language asks to be spoken aloud, mind to mind and heart to heart, by embodied voices that still retain the animal and by tongues that still delight in savoring vowels and the clipped splitting of explosive consonants.

Look now: the Beast that I made:
he eats grass like a bull.
Look: the power in his thighs
the pulsing sinews in his belly.
His penis stiffens like a pine;
his testicles bulge with vigor.
His ribs are bars of bronze,
his bones iron beams.
He is first of the works of God,
created to be my plaything.
He lies under the lotus,
hidden by reeds and shadows.
He is calm though the river rages,
though the torrent beats against his mouth.
Who then will take him by the eyes
or pierce his nose with a peg?
Will you catch the Serpent with a fishhook
or tie his tongue with a thread?
Will you pass a string through his nose
or crack his jaw with a pin?
Will he plead with you for mercy
and timidly beg your pardon?
Will he come to terms of surrender
and promise to be your slave?
Will you play with him like a sparrow
or put him on a leash for your girls?
Will merchants bid for his carcass
and parcel him out to shops?
Will you riddle his skin with spears,
split his head with harpoons?
Go ahead: attack him:
you will never try it again.

The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?

Aliveness
Aliveness is energy. It's the juice,the vitality, and the passion that wakes up our cells every morning. It's what makes us want to dance. It's the energy that moves a relationship from the status quo to something grander and much more expansive, something that makes our hearts beat faster, our minds, and our eyes open wider than ever before. Everything is of interest to a person who is truly alive, whether it's a challenge, a loving moment, a bucket of grief, or a glimpse of beauty.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is
translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you
in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will
 never exist through any other medium and be lost.  The world will not
 have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how
 valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions.  It is your
 business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel
 open.... You have to keep open and aware directly to the urge that
 motivates you.  Keep the channel open.

 

Get at the root of things: The gold mines of the scriptures are not the topsoil; you must open a shaft. The precious diamonds of experience are not picked up in the roadway; their secret places are far down. Get down into the vitality, the solidity, the veracity, the divinity of the Word of God, and seek to possess with it the inward workings of the Spirit.

Our forebears labored without wages. They made cotton "king." And yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to thrive and develop.

When, from a long distant past, nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering . . . the vast structure of recollection.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

The heart's affections are divided like the branches of the cedar tree; if the tree loses one strong branch; it will suffer but it does not die; it will pour all its vitality into the next branch so that it will grow and fill the empty place.

The moral life of any people rises or falls with the vitality or decay of its religious life.

When Rome's youth became debased and enervated, when regard was lost for men's honor and women's purity, when the sanctity of the home was violated, when her literature became cynical and debased, her dominion ended. The moral life of any people rises or falls with the vitality or decay of its religious life.

I do not attach much importance to America's bombs. I attach importance to her great vitality and integrity. The strength of America is deeper and more significant than her financial power.

The mere lapse of years is not life. To eat, to drink, and sleep; to be exposed to darkness and the light; to pace around in the mill of habit, and turn thought into an instrument of trade-this is not life. Knowledge, truth, love, beauty, goodness, faith, alone can give vitality to the mechanism of existence.

Age to me means nothing. I can't get old; I'm working. I was old when I was twenty-one and out of work. As long as you're working, you stay young. When I'm in front of an audience, all that love and vitality sweeps over me and I forget my age.

Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.

Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object. Among them all, man alone is more than an object. Though, like objects, he has form and semblance, He is not limited to form. He is more. He can attain to formlessness. When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond "this" and "that," where is the comparison with another object? Where is the conflict? What can stand in his way? He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place. He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret. His nature sinks to its root in the One. His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao.