Recoil Force Applied

Famous quotes containing the words recoil, force and/or applied:

    A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    It’s the old captain’s dark fate
    Who failed to find or force a strait
    In its two-thousand-mile coast;
    And his crew left him where he failed,
    And nothing came of all he sailed.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
    —Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)