Slough Quotes:

The name of the Slough was Despond.

- John Bunyan

source: The Pilgrim's Progress pt. 1 (1678)

topic: Names, Pilgrims Progress, Slough

We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present.

- Maria Edgeworth

topic: Use, May, Moments, Have A Great Day, Slough

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

- Henry David Thoreau

topic: Nature, Moon, Fire, Wisps, Bogs

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

- Arthur Miller

topic: Art, Writing, Long, Slough

Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.

- Farley Mowat

topic: Men, Causes, Without A Trace, Slough

Any area you slough off in your life will reflect in your meditation. Be happy when you could be depressed. Push jealous, fear, and anger out of your mind. Don't feel sorry for yourself.

- Frederick Lenz

topic: Sorry, Jealous, Buddhism, Feel Sorry For You, Slough

The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation.

- Eric Hoffer

source: ERIC HOFFER (1963). “THE TRUE BELIEVER”

topic: Self, Frustrated, Desire, Slough

Our lives show the accumulation of all of our varied wishes. Wanting something with all your heart will begin to slough away all of your untrue and idle wishes. Success comes from an undivided heart.

- Chuck Spezzano

topic: Heart, Wish, Accumulation, Slough

If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishab

- D. H. Lawrence

topic: Religious, Irreverence, Dirt, Slough

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

source: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.10, Library of America

topic: Children, Men, Years, Plantations, Decorum

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

topic: Life, Nature, Children, Slough

Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moonnor firefly has shown me the causeway to it.

- Henry David Thoreau

source: Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Natural History Essays”, p.130, Gibbs Smith

topic: Firefly, Bogs, Natural, Wisps, Slough

It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.

- Kate Richards O'Hare

topic: Mother, Running, War, Slough

I have seen so much obstructed potential among people who lack personal discipline, who just slough it off, whatever it is, and who think that nothing matters very much. I want my daughter to have what I think of as a capacity for self-discipline. Not the sort of self-discipline that diminishes her own wild passions, but that makes it safer for her to own those wild passions.

- Marianne Williamson

source: Source: scottlondon.com

topic: Daughter, Passion, Thinking, Nothing Matters, Wild Passion

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.

- Eric Hoffer

topic: Sacrifice, Self, Society, Compact, Unwanted

You can drive 1,000 miles across America and find yourself, whereas if you drive a few miles from Slough you're in London anyway, or you hit Wales and you're in another country! Also, wherever you are in England it's still raining.

- Ricky Gervais

topic: Country, Rain, America, Wales, Slough

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

source: Friedrich Nietzsche (1997). “Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations”, p.179, Cambridge University Press

topic: Dark, Men, Skins, Hares, Slough

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.

- Abdu'l-Bahá

topic: Fall, Men, Hands, Quagmire, Slough

The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.

- Joel Salatin

topic: Roots, Oxygen, Ecosystems, Solar Energy, Slough

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

- Edward Abbey

source: Edward Abbey (1988). “One Life at a Time, Please”, p.172, Macmillan

topic: Speaks Out, Shopping, Rivers, Cascade, Soap Operas

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

- Jeffrey Eugenides

source: Interview with Juliette Lewis, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 24, 2011.

topic: Doubt, Excitement, Moments, Slough

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.

- Henry David Thoreau

source: Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.189, Penguin

topic: Reality, Ideas, Savages, Semblance, Slough

The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired.

- Susan Orlean

source: "Perchance to Dream" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. September 23, 2010.

topic: Morning, Tired, Thinking, Slough

It's often difficult to slough off all that we've acquired, all the comforts and safety nets modern life provides for us, and realize that in those days, people were living very much on the edge - life was incredibly hard!

- Derek Jacobi

topic: People, Safety, Comfort, Slough

I do so many things. Like when I was younger, if I drove past a house that I didn't want to live in, I'd hold my breath. Driving around somewhere like Slough I'd go blue in the face.

- Jessica Brown Findlay

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Past, Blue, House, Slough

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

- Brenda Ueland

source: Brenda Ueland (1987). “If You Want to Write”

topic: Believe, Writing, People, Pretentiousness, Slough

And we passed through the cavern of rats. And we passed through the path of boiling steam. And we passed through the country of the blind. And we passed through the slough of despond. And we passed through the vale of tears. And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.

- Harlan Ellison

topic: Country, Ice, Tears, Caverns, Slough

Loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. Losing and losing again, is the very basis of the process, til all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence.

- Rohinton Mistry

topic: Loss, Essence, Snakes, Parcel, Slough

I was born to love - but none of you wanted to believe it, and that misunderstanding was crucial in forming my character. It's true that nature was strangely inconsistent in giving me a warm heart, but also a face that was like a stone mask and a tongue that was heavy and slow. She refused me what she bestowed freely on even the most loutish of my fellow men. . . . People judged my inner character by my outer covering, and like a sterile fruit, I withered under the rough husk I couldn't slough off.

- George Sand

topic: Believe, Heart, Character, Warm Heart, Withered

Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?' 'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.

- Anne Bronte

topic: Real, Moving, Thinking, Slough

He pulled the Carstairs family ring from his finger and held it out to Will. "Take it." Will let his eyes drift down toward it, and then up to Jem's face. A dozen awful things he could say, or do, went through his mind. One did not slough off a persona so quickly, he had found. He had pretended to be cruel for so many years that the pretense was still what he reached for first, as a man might absently turn his carriage toward the home he had lived in for all his life, despite the fact that he had recently moved. "You wish to marry me now?" he said, at last.

- Cassandra Clare

source: Cassandra Clare (2015). “Clockwork Princess”, p.79, Simon and Schuster

topic: Home, Eye, Men, Slough

Science can never be a closed book. It is like a tree, ever growing, ever reaching new heights. Occasionally the lower branches, no longer giving nourishment to the tree, slough off. We should not be ashamed to change our methods; rather we should be ashamed never to do so.

- Charles V. Chapin

topic: Book, Science, Giving, Slough

I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

- J. A. Baker

topic: Smell, Water, Silence, Arrivals, Slough

Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

- D. H. Lawrence

source: D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey (2003). “Studies in Classic American Literature”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

topic: Rip, Real, Snakes, Recklessness, Slough

As the snake is separate from its slough, even so is the Spirit separate from the body.

- Ramakrishna

source: Ramakrishna (1960). “Sayings: The Most Exhaustive Collection of Them, Their Number Being 1120”

topic: Snakes, Body, Spirit, Slough

It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.

- Anthony Trollope

source: Anthony Trollope (2016). “Ayala's Angel”, p.523, Jester House Publishing

topic: Men, Luxury, Cradle, Slough

Because you know how you say I've got to really get down and really do some training and then of course, you never do or you do it for a couple of weeks and slough it back off again but I'm being forced to do something that I really want to do and I loved it.

- David Carradine

topic: Couple, Training, Want, Slough

We human beings have not secured happiness; on the contrary, science gives us catastrophes. We are like travelers losing their way in a desert. They see a big black shadow ahead and desperately run to it, thinking it may lead them somewhere. But after running a long way, they no longer see the shadow and fall into the slough of despond. What is that shadow? It is this ""Mr. Science.

- Liang Qichao

topic: Running, Fall, Technology, Slough

It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.

- Edward Albee

source: Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.61, Univ. Press of Mississippi

topic: Answers, Invasion, Privacy, Invasion Of Privacy, Slough

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

- Susan Sontag

topic: Understanding, Promise, Ease, Slough