When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage
Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.
It is clear that no one will achieve any kind of objective through the force of violence, and that no one will make Spaniards yield to threats of guns, whoever may be holding them
The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.
An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.
I yield to nobody in my admiration for God, but he's no good in bed.
As people around the world become more affluent, they are demanding diets richer in animal protein, which will require ever more robust feed crop yields to sustain.
The best real-estate investments with the highest yields are in working-class neighborhoods, because fancy properties are overpriced.
Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
Only that which is got by hard effort will yield lasting benefit.
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?
Nothing is to be feared but fear itself. Nothing grievous but to yield to grief.
There are three kinds of praise, that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.
When we succumb to believing that we are victims of our circumstances and yield to the plight of determinism, we lose hope, we lose drive, and we settle into resignation and stagnation.
Our answer is the world's hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and the obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress. This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease. . .
The truth frequently seems unreasonable; the truth frequently is depressing; the truth sometimes seems to be evil, but it has the eternal advantage, it is the truth and what is built thereon neither brings nor yields to confusion.
So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
Yet, so far from laboring to know the forbidden tree of worldly pleasures and its various fruits, man gives himself up to a careless and thoughtless state of life, and yields to the lust of the flesh, not considering that this lust is really the forbidden tree.
Never say anything about a person you wouldn't say to them directly, and don't try people without accusing them to their face. Badmouthing people behind their backs shows a serious lack of integrity and is counterproductive. It doesn't yield any beneficial change, and it subverts both the people you are badmouthing and the environment as a whole.
