Search For The Holy Grail Quotes

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The gods know what's important, what's wrong about you. They know everything. If you go out searching for the Holy Grail, they won't let you find it.
Tom Spanbauer (In the City of Shy Hunters)
My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with secondhand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don't; it's a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unaffected. True, they're not for the faint of heart. Wild and chaotic, capricious and frustrating, there are certain physical laws that govern secondhand bookstores and like gravity, they're pretty much nonnegotiable. Paperback editions of D. H. Lawrence must constitute no less than 55 percent of all stock in any shop. Natural law also dictates that the remaining 45 percent consist of at least two shelves worth of literary criticism on Paradise Lost and there should always be an entire room in the basement devoted to military history which, by sheer coincidence, will be haunted by a man in his seventies. (Personal studies prove it's the same man. No matter how quickly you move from one bookshop to the next, he's always there. He's forgotten something about the war that no book can contain, but like a figure in Greek mythology, is doomed to spend his days wandering from basement room to basement room, searching through memoirs of the best/worst days of his life.) Modern booksellers can't really compare with these eccentric charms. They keep regular hours, have central heating, and are staffed by freshly scrubbed young people in black T-shirts. They're devoid of both basement rooms and fallen Greek heroes in smelly tweeds. You'll find no dogs or cats curled up next to ancient space heathers like familiars nor the intoxicating smell of mold and mildew that could emanate equally from the unevenly stacked volumes or from the owner himself. People visit Waterstone's and leave. But secondhand bookshops have pilgrims. The words out of print are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink.
Kathleen Tessaro (Elegance)
This is the kind of writer who gets the ball rolling in his search for the holy grail, but finds that it's neither magic bullet nor a slam dunk, so he rolls with the punches and lets the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half-full, which is easier said than done.
Steven Pinker
If you have seen in silent prayer How the soul of the earth fashions crystals, If you have seen the flame in the growing seed And death in life and birth in decay, If you have found brothers in men and beasts, And if you recognized in the brother, the brother and God, Then you will celebrate at the table of the holy grail Communion with the messiah of love. You will search and you will find, just like God said, The way to the lost paradise.
Manfred Kyber
Why is it that because ye use hard drugs every cunt feels that they have a right tae dissect and analyse ye? Once ye accept that they huv that right, ye’ll join them in the search fir this holy grail, this thing that makes ye tick. Ye’ll then defer tae them, allowin yersel tae be conned intae believin any biscuit-ersed theory ay behaviour they choose tae attach tae ye. Then yir theirs, no yir ain; the dependency shifts from the drug to them. Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae’s behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah’m gaunnae huv a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won’t let ye dae it. They won’t let ye dae it, because it’s seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it’s thair fuckin problem. As Harry Lauder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road …
Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
I survived,” would be my meek reply. Might as well have said “Blue! No, No, Yellow!!” Right before I was launched into the abyss. (You would have to be a fan of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail to catch the reference. If you have by some chance gone this far in your life and have not witnessed one of the greatest comedies created then odds are you’re not going to find a DVD player that works now, sorry.)
Mark Tufo (A Plague Upon Your Family (Zombie Fallout, #2))
Where is what you most want to be found? Where you are least likely to look. “In sterquiliniis invenitur” King Arthur’s knights sit at a round table, because they are all equal. They set off to look for the holy grail – which is a symbol of salvation, container of the “nourishing” blood of Christ, keeper of redemption. Each knight leaves on his quest, individually. Each knight enters the forest, to begin his search, at the point that looks darkest to him.
Jordan Peterson
We constantly search for that elusive holy grail quaintly described by magazines as ‘work/life balance’. But anyone who sincerely believes that such an equilibrium might be possible has not begun to understand the logic of capitalism.
The School of Life (The Sorrows of Work (Essay Books))
Libraries are medieval forests masking opportunity and danger; every aisle is a path, every catalog reference a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. It is here that I become privy to the sacred songs of kings and the ballads of rogues. Here are tales of life-and-death struggles of other wayfarers as they battle personal dragons and woo fair maidens. Walking down this hallway, I am a knight entering the forest in search of the truth...
Jack Cavanaugh (A Hideous Beauty (Kingdom Wars Series #1))
I went up to my room, showered, and paged through a copy of the medieval legend Parsifal I had recently bought. People often read books to search for themselves and find someone who agrees with them. And, right now, the nature of Parsifal agreed with me a lot more than the nature of the scorpion. As I interpreted the legend, it’s the story of a sheltered mother’s boy who meets some knights and decides he wants to be just like them. So he goes off into the world, has a series of adventures, and progresses from legendary fool to legendary knight. The country, at the time, has become a wasteland because the grail king (who guards the holy grail) has been wounded. And it just so happens that Parsifal is led to the grail castle, where he sees the king in terrible pain. As a compassionate human being, he wants to ask, “What is wrong?” And, according to legend, if someone pure of heart asks that question of the king, he will be healed and the blight on the land will be lifted. However, Parsifal does not know this. And as a knight he has been trained to observe a strict code of conduct, which includes the rule of never asking questions or speaking unless he is addressed first. So he goes to bed without talking to the king. In the morning, he wakes to discover that the grail castle has disappeared. He has blown his chance to save king and country by obeying his training instead of his heart. Unlike the scorpion, Parsifal had a choice. He just made the wrong one. When
Neil Strauss (The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists)
Every bit of evidence would suggest that the will to be moving is as old as mankind. Take the people in the Old Testament. They were always on the move. First, it's Adam and Eve moving out of Eden. Then it's Cain condemned to be a restless wanderer, Noah drifting on the waters of the Flood, and Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt toward the Promised Land. Some of these figures were out of the Lord's favor and some of them were in it, but all of them were on the move. And as far as the New Testament goes, Our Lord Jesus Christ was what they call a peripatetic--someone who's always going from place to place--whether on foot, on the back of a donkey, or on the wings of angels. But the proof of the will to move is hardly limited to the pages of the Good Book. Any child of ten can tell you that getting-up-and-going is topic number one in the record of man's endeavors. Take that big red book that Billy is always lugging around. It's got twenty-six stories in it that have come down through the ages and almost every one of them is about some man going somewhere. Napoleon heading off on one of his conquests, or King Arthur in search of the Holy Grail. Some of the men in the book are figures from history and some from fancy, but whether real or imagined, almost every one of them is on his way to someplace different from where he started. So, if the will to move is as old as mankind and every child can tell you so, what happens to a man like my father? What switch is flicked in the hallway of his mind that takes the God-given will for motion and transforms it into the will for staying put? It isn't due to a loss of vigor. For the transformation doesn't come when men like my father are growing old and infirm. It comes when they are hale, hearty, and at the peak of their vitality. If you asked them what brought about the change, they will cloak it in the language of virtue. They will tell you that the American Dream is to settle down, raise a family, and make an honest living. They'll speak with pride of their ties to the community through the church and the Rotary and the chamber of commerce, and all other manner of stay-puttery. But maybe, I was thinking as I was driving over the Hudson River, just maybe the will to stay put stems not from a man's virtues but from his vices. After all, aren't gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying put? Don't they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more? In a way, pride and envy are about staying put too. For just as pride is founded on what you've built up around you, envy is founded on what your neighbor has built across the street. A man's home may be his castle, but the moat, it seems to me, is just as good at keeping people in as it is at keeping people out.
Amor Towles (The Lincoln Highway)
Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at Dover, the other at Barbara Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy's called Wart—long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might—to have ended it— to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent. Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength with strength—in his battles against the Gaelic confederation—only to find that two wrongs did not make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil —to put down the individual might of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done so—until, in the course of time, the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.
T.H. White (The Once and Future King)
A child’s world is very narrow, and no matter how abusive, the parents still represent the only available source of love and comfort. The battered child spends his entire childhood searching for the Holy Grail of parental love. That search continues into adulthood. Kate, too, remembered: When I was a baby, my father would hold me, love me, and rock me. And when I was a little older, he was always there taking me to dance classes on the weekend or to the movies. He really loved me at one point in his life. I guess my greatest wish is for him to love me again the way he used to.
Susan Forward (Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life)
It finally occurred to me that maybe studying losses was more important than searching for some Holy Grail to making money.
Jim Paul (What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars)
The Course In Miracles, as expressed in perhaps mystical Christianity, is nothing but the search for the Holy Grail. It is nothing but that. The whole idea of the purification of you through service and forgiving is to do nothing but bring your perceptual mind together to formulate a new reality, which is the Grail.
Master Teacher (ILLUMINATION: Discourses With Master Teacher)
Guy Kawasaki, the well-known marketing specialist and venture capitalist, also thinks that we shouldn’t be afraid of polarization. Large companies search for the “Holy Grail” of products that appeal to every demographic, socioeconomic background, and geographical location, but this “one size fits all” approach rarely works and often leads to mediocrity (and vanilla ice cream). Instead, Kawasaki believes, we should create products that make specifically identified groups of people very happy and ignore everyone else. The worst-case scenario is inciting no passionate reactions from anyone — no one caring enough about a product to talk about it at all, either positively or negatively.
Paul Jarvis (Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business)
I envy you. I have this idea that there’s a perfect man out there for me. I tend to become jaded easily because no one ever meets my standards.I feel like I’m on an infinite search for the Holy Grail.
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
I envy you. I have this idea that there's a perfect man out there for me. I tend to become jaded easily, because no one ever meets my standards. I feel like I'm on an infinite search for the Holy Grail." -pg 23
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
I envy you. I have this idea that there's a perfect man out there for me. I tend to become jaded easily, because no one ever meets my standards. I feel like I'm on an infinite search for the Holy Grail.
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
Holy Grail?” Mika shrugged, sheepish. “Well, it is. To be loved and accepted exactly as we are? Isn’t that the thing we’re all searching for?” “Maybe,” Jamie said, almost to himself, “but we don’t always know it when we’ve found it.
Sangu Mandanna (The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches)
unless you do the “homework” with your own investigation, look at yourself in the mirror and commit to correct the situation, you will continue to wander aimlessly in search of the elusive “Holy Grail” while just getting more frustrated.
Karen Curry Parker (Abundance by Design: Discover Your Unique Code for Health, Wealth and Happiness with Human Design (Life by Human Design))
To be human was to be melodramatic, to feel things acutely, love and hate and lust, to search for the Holy Grail, outrun the other kids in the fifty-yard dash and care mightily about it.
Nevada Barr (Deep South (Anna Pigeon, #8))
Care is in order, because the very beginning – by which we mean the events that happened during the Planck epoch – the time period before a million million million million million million millionths of a second after the Big Bang, is currently beyond our understanding. This is because we lack a theory of space and time before this point, and consequently have very little to say about it. Such a theory, known as quantum gravity, is the holy grail of modern theoretical physics and is being energetically searched for by hundreds of scientists across the world. (Albert Einstein spent the last decades of his life searching in vain for it.) Conventional thinking holds that both time and space began at time zero, the beginning of the Planck era. The Big Bang can therefore be regarded as the beginning of time itself, and as such it was the beginning of the Universe.
Brian Cox (Wonders of the Universe)
If Aphrodite had an avatar on earth, it was her. It was her- the Holy Grail men keep searching all through their lives! - O Amor
Nikhil Bhardwaj (O Amor)
If Aphrodite had an avatar on earth, it was her. It was her- the Holy Grail men keep searching all through their lives!
Nikhil Bhardwaj (O Amor)
A school will get much better results if it spends less time searching for the Holy Grail and more time working in collaborative teacher teams to find the most effective teaching practices for its students.
Austin Buffum (Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (What Principals Need to Know))
I feel like i'm on an infinite search for the holy grail.
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
I have this idea that there's a perfect man out there for me. I tend to become jaded easily, because no one ever meets my standards. I feel like I'm on an infinite search for the Holy Grail.
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
In the latter part of the twentieth century, much emphasis was placed on finding a soul mate with whom we would share enduring, unconditional love. As a result, many people left “good-enough” marriages in search of the holy grail of romance and intimacy. Like many desperados, they never arrived at their destination but instead found themselves poorer in both pocket and spirit.
Linda Carroll (Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love)
Let me get it,” he says, standing much too close for my comfort. It’s downright suffocating. “Not a chance, darlin’,” I drawl, giving him a dose of his own medicine. I hand the youngish sales lady my tags and bury my gaze inside my purse in search of my wallet. When I look up, I find a loopy smile on her face and it’s directed at him. The happy bastard smiles right back. “Are you two done? Can I pay for these, or would you like to go on a date before you ring me up?” They both turn to stare. She’s cherry red and pushing all the wrong buttons on the register while Dane’s busy scowling at me. I hand her my credit card without taking my eyes off of him. “Did I do something to you, Stella?” The thing is, I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at myself. I cannot believe that I allowed myself to fall under his spell. I don’t blame the sales girl either. She never stood a chance under the magnetic force that is Dane Wylder. I fell for it and I’ve been vaccinated against this particular virulent disease. I have Paul Donovan to thank for that. Turning back to the sales person, I take the receipt she hands me. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “Hormones––they’re wreaking havoc.” “Oh, I get the same way when I get my period,” she replies in the sweetest drawl. “Thanks for your help,” I tell her in an apologetic tone. With that I walk away from the counter, and the two of them. A second later a big hand grabs a hold of my upper arm. I stop and turn, my expression not a happy one. “You didn’t answer me?” “No, Dane. You did nothing. Like I said, it’s the hormones.” He looks pensive, his sexy lips pursed as he’s mulling this over. “We should get you some ice cream.” I don’t know whether to laugh, or cry. He genuinely thinks ice cream is the solution to our problem? Then again he doesn’t have a problem. I’m the one with the urge. I’m the one with the craving. Unless ice cream comes in a flavor called Sweaty Sex With Dane, I don’t want it…and about as smart as jumping out of a plane with no parachute. The ride will be fast and thrilling and most certainly prove painful when I hit bottom. “What does ice cream have to do with it?” “Maybe it’ll make you nicer. You know, take the edge off.” My eyes automatically narrow. “Maybe we need to give each other space.” “No,” he huffs, arms crossed in front of his broad chest, his shirt straining against the swell of his pecs, expression locked in the determined position. “No?” “No. No space. I see what you’re doing here. This is some kinda female mental jujitsu. You say you want space, but you don’t really want it.” I’m seconds from punching him in the nut sac, which is almost directly in my line of sight. There is something to be said about being short. Or for him being grotesquely tall. “I…I’m going to…I can’t.” I flee to the cosmetics department in search of the Holy Grail, a flat iron, before I do or say something I’ll regret. And find one. Thank the Lord. This goes a small way to propping up my mood. I’m almost tempted to purchase two.
P. Dangelico (Baby Maker (It Takes Two, #1))
Once ye accept that they huv that right, ye’ll join them in the search fir this holy grail, this thing that makes ye tick. Ye’ll then defer tae them, allowin yersel tae be conned intae believin any biscuit-ersed theory ay behaviour they choose tae attach tae ye. Then yir theirs, no yir ain; the dependency shifts from the drug to them.
Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
The Promethean = the Faustian = the eternal seeker = the eternal wanderer = the eternal quester. The Promethean is a romantic, a striving figure, an outsider, a non-conformist. He’s often alone. Conventional society has rejected him and, more importantly, he has rejected conventional society. The HyperHuman plays the Great Game – the God Game. His objective it to transform himself into God ... to undergo the ultimate metamorphosis. The HyperHuman is a new kind of knight, a knight of the mind. He seeks to merit the title of “knight” and lives courageously by a noble code. His life has total focus and purpose. His mind is always focused on the Holy Grail. The search for the Grail is the symbol of the HyperHuman’s search for heaven, for God, to become God.
Mike Hockney (HyperHumanity (The God Series Book 11))
The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (‘But you are home,’ cries the Witch of the North. ‘All you have to do is wake up!’) The journey is hard, for the secret place where we always have been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ‘ideas,’ of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions. The holy grail is what Zen Buddhists call our own ‘true nature’; each man is his own savior after all.
Peter Matthiessen (The Snow Leopard)
The “treasure hard to attain” is the power of psychological rebirth and renewal, the holy grail of life which humans have sought and yearned for since the beginning of time. Nietzsche descended into his unconscious in search of this rare psychological treasure; he needed the power to transform his great pain into gold – into a newfound great health and affirmation of life. But Nietzsche knew that to attain this power he would have to contend with the perilous forces of the unconscious which threaten to engulf the conscious mind in its labyrinthine depths.
Academy of Ideas
Hawking and Bekenstein had shown that the three great ideas of modern physics—general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics—work in harmony. For these reasons, black hole entropy and radiation have come to dominate contemporary physics as scientists search for a so-called grand unified theory, the Holy Grail of a single principle that explains nature—the world, the universe, everything—at its most fundamental level.
Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
America, to redeem itself, needs the Grail … the Grail of people power. Rise up, Americans. Free yourselves of the tyrants who oppress you. Reclaim your land. Remove the curse. Turn the Wasteland into an Oasis. Give every American a proper chance to go as far as their talents deserve. Throw open every door that the elite have closed with their inheritance and privilege, with their nepotism and cronyism. A new America is needed. No one needs to go back to the American past. True American greatness lies in the future.
Mark Romel (The Wasteland: America's Search for Redemption)
To have both motherhood and work was to have two lives instead of one, was a stunning refinement of historical female experience, and to the people who complained that having it all meant doing it all I would have said, yes, of course it does. You don’t get ‘all’ for nothing. ‘Having it all’, like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires the adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise of the fact that she is essentially alone.
Rachel Cusk (Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation)
I know people who repeatedly jump from one guru to the next in search of the Holy Grail of trading. Of course, it doesn’t exist, but you need to know this fact to stop looking for it.
Naved Abdali