These fugitive quotes will inspire you. A fugitive is a person who has escaped from a place or is in hiding, especially to avoid arrest or persecution or quick to disappear; fleeting.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging fugitive quotes, fugitive sayings, and fugitive proverbs.
Famous Fugitive Quotes
- “There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” ~ John Milton
- “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area.” ~ Tommy Lee Jones
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“I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.” ~ Bill Mauldin
- “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.” ~ George Santayana
- “The ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never found.” ~ Joan Rivers
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“Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.” ~ Frederick Douglass
- “We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time. But if we fail to do this, then unless we intend hereafter to violate the Constitution, we shall have a fugitive slave law in operation whenever the war is over.” ~ Jay Sekulow
- “Any given moment – no matter how casual, how ordinary – is poised, full of gaping life.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart’s strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.” ~ Anne Michaels
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“Assuredly we bring not innocence not the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.” ~ John Milton
- “The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “There’s a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you’ll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone’s grief…is the weight of a sleeping child.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “When you are alone – at sea, in the polar dark – an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she’s merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, nothing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.” ~ Anne Michaels
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“Every time I look in the mirror, God looks back.” ~ Liam Gallagher
- “Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “I’m naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.” ~ Anne Michaels
- “Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.” ~ Anne Michaels
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“Remember to be submissive, thou art an alien, a fugitive, and in need.” ~ Aeschylus
- “When I reflect upon what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have done, I can hardly persuade myself that all that frivolous hurry and bustle and pleasure of the world had any reality; and I look on what has passed as one of those wild dreams which opium occasions, and I by no means wish to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive illusion.” ~ Lord Chesterfield
- “But what’s your ultimate goal, you’ll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh
- “Not even for an hour can you bear to be alone, nor can you advantageously apply your leisure time, but you endeavor, a fugitive and wanderer, to escape from yourself, now vainly seeking to banish remorse by wine, and now by sleep; but the gloomy companion presses on you, and pursues you as you fly.” ~ Horace
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“Let us enjoy the fugitive hour. Man has no harbor, time has no shore; it rushes on, and carries us with it.” ~ Alphonse de Lamartine
- “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” ~ Thomas Paine
- “Memory, with its fugitive adjustments, is the merciful veil to the grim enactments of the first law. It hides the anguish in the human heart which is always craving for perpetuity.” ~ Stacy Aumonier
- “In youth alone, unhappy mortals live; But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive: Discolour’d sickness, anxious labour, come, And age, and death’s inexorable doom.” ~ Virgil
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“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.” ~ Eavan Boland
- “The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.” ~ Claude Monet
- “The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.” ~ Marcel Proust
- “Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.” ~ Eliphas Levi
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“Before the start of the 2000 season, ‘C.S.I.’ wasn’t supposed to be the hit. We all thought it would be ‘The Fugitive.” ~ Leslie Moonves
- “O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive!” ~ William Wordsworth
- “Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflectios of the eternal.” ~ Eliphas Levi
- “I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.” ~ Bertrand Russell
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“And come, blue deeps! magnificently strown With coloured clouds – large, light, and fugitive.” ~ David Gray
- “A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, monster incomprehensible, raised to the second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.” ~ Henri Frederic Amiel
- “You know, back in the 1950s and ’60s, when J. Edgar Hoover was making the FBI the respected organization it used to be, oftentimes they would find a fugitive and basically have his house surrounded, and then put out a press release saying he was on the top 10 most wanted list. And 10 minutes later, he’d be arrested.” ~ Howie Carr
- “How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.” ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich
- “What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the “sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind.” Did everyone so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?” ~ Jane Addams
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“How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.” ~ Allen Ginsberg
- “The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.” ~ Kenneth Rexroth
- “Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico. The art called popular is fugitive in character, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community – rather than being taken from the experiences of painters in other times and other cultures.” ~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo
- “What are you to us, you who are cut off from God, a fugitive for Heaven, and a slave of evil? You dare not do anything to us: Christ, the Son of God, has dominion over us and over all. Leave us, you thing of bane. We are made steadfast by the uprightness of His Cross. Serpent, we trample on your head.” ~ Seraphim of Sarov
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“To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.”” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
- “I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive: he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of the high ones for
the savage Juno’s unforgetting anger.” ~ Virgil - “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “Many of the finest and most interesting emotions perish forever, because too complex and fugitive for expression. Of all things relating to man, his feelings are perhaps the most evanescent, the greater part dying in the moment of their birth. But while emotions perish, thought blended in diction is immortal.” ~ William Benton Clulow
- “To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced “the sum of all villainies,” and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.” ~ Horace Mann
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“There is no reality on this earth except religion and the power of love; all the rest is even more fugitive than life itself.” ~ Madame de Stael
- “One must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.” ~ Simone Weil
- “Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.” ~ Ellen Glasgow
- “The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace – the handcuff, the last – the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives – the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart – these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave’s experience.” ~ Fanny Kemble
- “Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.” ~ Jack Vance
- “Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest know set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don’t concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.” ~ Derrick Jensen
- “I’m like the Fugitive, running from the one-armed indie-rock community!” ~ Billy Corgan
- “I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.” ~ Annie Dillard
- “The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. ‘A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth’; and ‘Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!” ~ Barbara Kruger
- “Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens. If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city. You’re somebody that we want to protect, and we want you to get out from under what is often a life of being like a fugitive, which is really unfair.” ~ Rudy Giuliani
- “Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
