Capacity Quotes - Page 38

• One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: 'light' food. In buying 'light' food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place.

  Margaret Visser

  Light, Needs, Cost

  Margaret Visser (2010). “Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea”, p.109, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Beauty, Art, Voice

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1915). “The Bent Twig”

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world -- constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Struggle, Thinking, Race

  Lorraine Hansberry (1972). “Les blancs: the collected last plays of Lorraine Hansberry”, Random House Inc

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted.

  Horace Walpole

  Men, Effort, Style

  Horace Walpole (1848). “Letters Addressed to the Countess of Ossory, from the Year 1769 to 1797: Now First Printed from Original Mss. Edited, with Notes, by R. Vernon Smith”, p.538

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute.

  Betty Friedan

  Children, Powerful, Men

  35 Copy quote

• No one culture has ever developed all human potentialities; it has always selected certain capacities, mental and emotional and moral, and stifled others. Each culture is a system of values which may well complement the values in another.

  Ruth Benedict

  Emotional, Culture, May

  Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.441, Transaction Publishers

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

  Susan Sontag

  Beauty, Beautiful, Overwhelmed

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.14, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

  Susan Sontag

  People, May, Energy

  4 Copy quote

• The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Real, Character, Mean

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.204, Library of America

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Rights, Ordinary, Needs

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.182, Library of America

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

  Horace Mann

  Spring, Ambition, Men

  Horace Mann (2008). “Slavery”, p.33, Applewood Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.

  Freya Stark

  Art, Law, Doors

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

  Mary McCarthy

  Elements, Comedy, Creation

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

  Hannah Arendt

  Thinking, Men, Political

  The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development - the full use of one's best faculties - this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Work, Men, Use

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (2015). “Collected Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Short Stories, Novels, Poems and Essays: The Yellow Wallpaper, What Diantha Did, Women and Economics, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Herland and other works from the prominent American feminist, sociologist and novelist”, p.921, e-artnow

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the Doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Religion, Damnation, Doctrine

  5 Copy quote

• Such technological tools ... are helping us now in the hot war against terrorists who would bomb this theater if they had the capacity to do so.

  Alan Dershowitz

  War, Nsa, Hot

  4 Copy quote

• I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.

  Frank Sinatra

  Sadness, Emotional, Elation

  "Read Playboy … for the Interviews". Interview with Joe Hyams, www.slate.com. February 1963.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• You have to have a very strong cash flow for a film to really stay in theaters. You have to have the advertising capacity to sustain and follow the kind of press coverage.

  Haile Gerima

  Strong, Cash Flow, Kind

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would say, if you're a musician then you probably have some capacity and some intuition. You've got to trust that intuition and be true to what compels you. There will be a lot of things along the way that will try to remove you from that, and if you do, then I think you are diminished. If you stay with it, then you have something that's real.

  Stephan Jenkins

  Real, Thinking, Intuition

  "Get Back to That Place: Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins Talks Touring Again and Why He Adores Tove Lo". Interview with Kelli Bender, people.com. June 30, 2015.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Imagine a kind of system where you have lightweight electric vehicles relatively small battery capacity, and then picking up charge wherever they park. You never have to worry about filling up your car, never go to the gas station, never plug it in, never do any of these things.

  William J. Mitchell

  Filling Up, Electric Vehicles, Worry

  Source: bigthink.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

  Mark Nepo

  Heart, Space, Mind

  Mark Nepo (2013). “Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.

  Richard Rohr

  Talking, Goal, Empathy

  Source: ryanthomasneace.com

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• In my experience of women, women have a greater capacity. Maybe women, even very pragmatic ones, are less guarded about showing emotions.

  David Bezmozgis

  Emotion, Men Women, Pragmatic

  Interview with Ratik Asokan, logger.believermag.com. September 23, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A valuable qualification of a modern politician seems to be a capacity for concealing or explaining away the truth.

  Dorothy Nevill

  Politician, Modern, Explaining

  Lady Dorothy Nevill (1912). “My own times”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source