Stand

Famous quotes containing the word stand:

    Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man. But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because others have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us—through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.
    Urie Bronfenbrenner (20th century)

    Our fathers water’d with their tears
    This sea of time whereon we sail,
    Their voices were in all men’s ears
    Who pass’d within their puissant hail.
    Still the same ocean round us raves,
    But we stand mute, and watch the waves.
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

    Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)