Owe

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)

    The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    If we meet someone who owes us thanks, we right away remember that. But how often do we meet someone to whom we owe thanks without remembering that?
    Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)