Here I must say, in my eighty-sixth year, I do not feel greatly different from when I was eighty-five. This is my final word. It is time for me to become an apprentice once more. I have not settled in which direction. But somewhere, sometime soon.

-Baron
  Address at a farewellbanquet in London, hostedfor him by Roy Thomson, Lord Thomson of Fleet, 25 May. He died two weeks later.

We must travel in the direction of our fears.

-Berryman,John originally John Allyn Smith
  'A Point of  Age'.

Time has three dimensions and one positive pitch or direction. It is therefore not so much like any river or any sea as like the Sea of Galilee, which has the Jordan running through it and giving a current to the whole.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'Creation and Redemption: The Great Sacrifice'. Collected in C Devlin (ed)  The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1959), ch.8.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

-Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)
  'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through'.

It's a right step in the wrong direction.

-Levant, Oscar
   Attributed remark at the first performance of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. He infact had the deepest respect for Gershwin's music.

Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae et fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur. The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

-Newton, Sir Isaac
  Second Law of Motion. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (translated by Andrew Motte,1729).

I feel pretty glum and devote myself to reviewing. There is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I try very hard indeed to understand that book but fail completely. It is almost impossible to decipher, and when one or two lines of understanding emerge like telegraph poles above a flood, theyareat once countered byother polesgoing in the opposite direction.

-Nicolson, Sir Harold
  Diary entry, 29  Apr.

   In a march of onlya few hours, I had passed from the western to the eastern hemisphere and had verified my position at the summit of the world.It was hard to realise that on the first miles of the brief march we had been travelling due north, while on the last few miles of the same march we had been travelling due south, although we had all the time been travelling precisely in the same direction.

-Peary, Robert Edwin
  Description of crossing and then passing the Pole. The North Pole (published1910).

All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear,'Whatever Is, is.'

-Pope, Alexander
RIGHT1733  An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.289^94.

A society†which is riven by a dozen oppositions along lines running in every direction, mayactually be in less danger of being torn with violence or falling to pieces than one split along just one line. For each new cleavage contributes to narrow the cross clefts, so that one might say that society is sewn together by its internal conflicts.

-Ross, Edward Alsworth
  The Principles of Sociology.

L'expe¤  rience nous montre qu'aimer ce n'est point nous regarder l'un l'autre mais regarder ensemble dans la me"  me direction. Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

-Saint-Exupe¤  ry, Antoine de
  Terre des hommes.

Ihaveno doubtthat it ispossibletogiveanewdirectionto technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.

-Schumacher, E(rnst) F(riedrich)
  Small Is Beautiful.

Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

-Thatcher, Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness
  General election campaign speech, Bolton, 2 May.

Why, as civilization spreads, do outstanding men become fewer? Why, when attainments are the lot of all, do great intellectual talents become rarer? Why, when there are no longer lower classes, are there no longer upper classes? Why, when knowledge of how to rule reaches the masses, is there a lackof great abilities in the direction of society? America clearly poses these questions.But who can answer them?

-Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Cle¤  rel de
  Translated by George Lawrence. Quoted in J P Mayer (ed) Journey toAmerica (1960).

'God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction,'she said.'It's different with us,I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sinonmyconscience, but I know when I'mdoing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me.' 'Of course, duckie,'said Jeremy†'once a Catholic always a Catholic.'

-Wilson, SirAngus FrankJohnstone
  TheWrong Set,'Significant Experience'.