Characteristics Quotes - Page 25

• The leading and characteristic features of the morbid state to which I would direct your attention are, anaemia, general languor and debility, remarkable feebleness of the heart's action, irritability of the stomach, and a peculiar change of the colour in the skin, occurring in connection with a diseased condition of the suprarenal capsules.

  Thomas Addison

  Change, Heart, Skins

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• There is no permanent status quo in nature; all is the process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure. But man is the first being yet evolved on earth which has the power to note this changefulness, and, if he will, to turn it to his own advantage, to work out genetic methods, eugenic ideas, yes, to invent new characteristics, organs, and biological systems that will work out to further the interests, the happiness, the glory of the God-like being whose meager foreshadowings we the present ailing creatures are.

  Hermann Joseph Muller

  Men, Ideas, Eugenics

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• We weren't getting a fair deal on the budget and I wasn't going to have it. There's a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people - this is our characteristic. There's not a strand of equity and fairness in Europe - they're out to get as much as they can. That's one of those enormous differences. So I tackled it on that basis.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Europe, Differences, People

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• The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.

  Jerome Bruner

  Children, Play, Adults

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• What is necessary for 'the very existence of science,' and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself. We look, and we see what we find, and we cannot say ahead of time successfully what it is going to look like. ... It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Math, Science, Mind

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• To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

  Arthur Eddington

  Cat, Math, Would Be

  Arthur Eddington (1933). “The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900-1931”, p.103, Cambridge University Press

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• Self-production: the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained. It is a natural process which supports the quest for structure, process renewal and integrity.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Integrity, Learning, Self

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• Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.

  John Dewey

  Learning, School, Mean

  John Dewey (2004). “Democracy and Education”, p.51, Courier Corporation

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• Passion is not a quality that is foreign to you. It is not a characteristic that some people are born with and some must do without. To be passionate is as natural to you as breathing, as natural as being alive. It is the source of who you are.

  Barbara De Angelis

  Passion, Psychics, Breathing

  Barbara De Angelis (2009). “Passion”, p.15, Dell

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• The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past.

  Clinton Rossiter

  Past, Men, America

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• Actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.

  Aristotle

  Kindness, Action, Determine

  Aristotle (1962). “Nicomachean Ethics”

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• ...to characterize the import of pure geometry, we might use the standard form of a movie-disclaimer: No portrayal of the characteristics of geometrical figures or of the spatial properties of relationships of actual bodies is intended, and any similarities between the primitive concepts and their customary geometrical connotations are purely coincidental.

  Carl Gustav Hempel

  Math, Might Use, Body

  Carl Gustav Hempel (2001). “The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in Science, Explanation, and Rationality”, p.24, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago. It's time to strike out anew....Mars is where the action is for the next thousand years....The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration. When we stop doing that, we won't be humans anymore. I've seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology....The next step is in space. It's inevitable.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Technology, Years, America

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• I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

  John Forbes Nash

  Math, Suffering, Doubt

  Statement of 1996, as quoted in "Dr. Riemann's Zeros" by Karl Sabbagh, (p. 88), 2003.

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• The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  History, Forever, Mind

  John Morley, Thomas B. Macaulay (2016). “Machiavelli : the Founder of the Political”, p.94, Editions Le Mono

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• Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

  Eric Hoffer

  Frustration, Frustrated, Mind

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• A vital team characteristic is the ability to overcome adversity. Any team acquires experience and endurance as it learns to fight back. This in turn builds the kind of character which seldom crumbles at a time of crisis or testing.

  Tom Landry

  Sports, Team, Character

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• Perseverance is a positive, active characteristic. It is not idly, passively waiting and hoping for some good thing to happen.

  Joseph B. Wirthlin

  Perseverance, Waiting, Perseverence

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• Disability is a characteristic like hair color; it's not a defining principle.

  Jean Driscoll

  Leadership, Sports, Hair

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• Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

  Aristotle

  Mean, Men, Class

  Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.1748, Princeton University Press

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• The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

  Plato

  Divine Order, Divinity, Philosopher

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• Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Two, Arbitrary, Way

  Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay (1947). “Point and Line to Plane”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Confused, Believe, Men

  "Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, ("Two Concepts of Liberty"), 2002.

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• As Buddhism moved to the West, one of the big characteristics was the strong place of women. That didn't exist in the countries of origin. It's just a sign of our culture.

  Pema Chodron

  Country, Strong, Buddhism

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• Let's face it: Serious self-scrutiny has not been one of our notable characteristics. We are far more aware of what we want to change in others than we are of how we need to change. Salvation for our educational ills is only secondarily "out there." Primarily it will have to come from within an educational community willing to say that we have met the enemy and it is us.

  Seymour Sarason

  Educational, Discovery, Self

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