Famous quotes containing the word pause:
“The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will;
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“As between these two, the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated and the need that is the absolute predicament of particular human identity, one does not presume to suggest a relation of worth. Yet the distinction is perhaps not idle, for it is from the failure to make it that proceeds the common rejection as “obscure” of most that is significant in modern music, painting and literature.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)