Famous quotes containing the word owe:
“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”
—Thomas Mann (18751955)
“Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be an injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord’s or a banker’s?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Much as I own I owe
The passers of the past
Because their to and fro
Has cut this road to last,
I owe them more today
Because they’ve gone away....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)