Acquire Quotes - Page 40

• Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

  Jimmy Buffett

  Song, Writing, Self

  "Writing away again in Margaritaville". Interview with Tom Corcoran, bookpage.com. June, 1998.

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• Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

  Clive James

  Reading, School, Glamour

  "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Ellen Rolfes, December 3, 2013.

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• I think we acquire habits of mind when we're little, and I lived in the future because I was always imagining being a grown-up, when I could get out.

  Gloria Steinem

  Thinking, Mind, Littles

  Interview with Maria Shriver, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 11, 2011.

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• Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower his. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Luxury, Numbers, People

  Eugene H. Peterson (2012). “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society”, p.118, InterVarsity Press

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• It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth-this was the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting.

  Jacques Ellul

  Spiritual, Fighting, Numbers

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• The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Character, Fighting

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.201, Counterpoint

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• The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

  Adam Smith

  Business, Real, Men

  1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, bk.1, ch.5.

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• Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.

  Felix Adler

  God, Religious, Real

  "Life and Destiny". Book by Felix Adler, 1903.

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• I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Responsibility, Thinking, Government

  "Only Integrity is Going to Count". Book by R. Buckminster Fuller, 1983.

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• I think it is no small attraction in a painter to be able to give a pleasing air to his figures, and whoever is not naturally possessed of this grace may acquire it by study, as opportunity offers in the following manner: be on the watch to take good parts of many beautiful faces of which the beautiful parts are established by general repute rather than by your own judgement, for you may deceive yourself by selecting faces that resemble your own, since it often seems that such similarities please us; ... so therefore choose the beautiful ones as I tell you and fix them in your mind.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Beautiful, Opportunity, Thinking

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• [Should] Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.

  George W. Bush

  Years, Iraq, Would Be

  Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, delivered 12 September 2002, New York, NY

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• The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there.... Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Struggle, Hands

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• The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Wise, Reality, Men

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1965). “Ethics”

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• The goal of good health is to enable a person to acquire wisdom.

  Maimonides

  Goal, Good Health, Persons

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• If the State does not acquire supremacy over [vast private] enterprises, it becomes their puppet, and they become the real State.

  Bertrand Russell

  Real, Puppets, Doe

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.652, Routledge

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• The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Temperature, Phrases, Pages

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.21, Routledge

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• A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Creativity, Thinking, Ideas

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• It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Flames, Voice, Greek

  Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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• Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity.

  Daniel Dennett

  Mistake, Opportunity, Practice

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• It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

  William Faulkner

  Regret, Habit, Idle

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.79, Modern Library

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• A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

  Joseph Conrad

  Romance, Tasks, Merit

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “A Personal Record”, p.87, Booklassic

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• You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Wise, May, Bases

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• Those who are free from common prejudices acquire others.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Prejudice, Common

  "Memoirs of Napoleon" published by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, (1829-1831).

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• The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

  Ayn Rand

  Beautiful, Exercise, Giving

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• Training a child is exactly like training a puppy; a little heedless inattention and it is out of hand immediately; the great thing is not to let it acquire bad habits that must afterward be broken.

  Emily Post

  Children, Hands, Broken

  Emily Post (2007). “Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home”, p.571, Cosimo, Inc.

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