Famous quotes containing the word straining:
“A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“it is best then that the buried word remain buried for we were intended to appreciate only its fruits and not the secret principle activating them to know this would be to know too much. Meanwhile it is possible to know just enough, and this is all we were supposed to know, toward which we have been straining all our lives.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the intercourse of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)