Characteristics Quotes - Page 30

• The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Rejection, Leaving, Soul

  Alexander MacLaren “MacLaren's Commentary- Expositions of Holy Scripture”, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.

  George Henry Lewes

  Philosophy, Finals, Causes

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.86, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• The way of a creative mind is always positive, it always asserts; it does not know the doubts which are so characteristic of the scientific mind.

  Naum Gabo

  Optimism, Creative, Doubt

  Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

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• The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.

  Titian

  Essence, Essentials, Portraiture

  "The Quotable Artist". Book by Peggy Hadden, p. 71, 2002.

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• What we think of as 'Physical beauty' is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness - intelligence - among them.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Thinking, Survival, Tag

  "I Will Fear No Evil" by Robert A. Heinlein, Ace Books, (p. 35), 1987.

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• The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

  Willa Cather

  Notebook, Attitude, Heart

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• Various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools.

  John Dewey

  Educational, Struggle, School

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.187, 谷月社

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• The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.

  Aristotle

  Common, Reason, Currency

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• But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sex, Character, Rights

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.245, OUP Oxford

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• The authority of science promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies. Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality. In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

  Cornel West

  Thinking, Objectivity, Ideas

  "Prophesy Deliverance!". Book by Cornel West, 1982.

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• First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.

  Malcolm X

  Believe, Mean, Goal

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• When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics.

  Lance Armstrong

  Winning, Quality, Assuming

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• As much as we admire all the characteristics of a Ronald Reagan, as soon as something goes wrong, people will hate those same characteristics.

  Robert Orben

  Hate, People, Admire

  "A former president's gag order - Ford's symposium examines humor in the Oval Office". Dave Hoekstra, Chicago Sun-Times, September 28, 1986.

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• Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

  Robertson Davies

  Spirit, Clarity, Humans

  Robertson Davies (1996). “The Cunning Man”, Penguin Group USA

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• A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

  John Cage

  Views, Sound, Doe

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.28, Wesleyan University Press

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• The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.

  Max Beerbohm

  Beautiful, Mean, Perfect

  Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.284, New York Review of Books

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• The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Power, Men

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• The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created

  Walter Bagehot

  Long, May, Lasts

  Walter Bagehot (1915). “The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot”

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• If I were but sure that I should live to see the coming of the Lord, it would be the joyfulest tidings in the world. O that I might see His kingdom come! It is the characteristic of His saints to love His appearing, and to look for that blessed hope. "The Spirit and the bride say, Come." "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."

  Richard Baxter

  Jesus, Blessed, Saint

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 102, 1895.

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• The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.

  Hannah Arendt

  Differences, Psychology, Body

  "The Life of the Mind" by Hannah Arendt, New York, Harcourt, (pp. 34-35), 1978.

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• Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

  Erving Goffman

  Principles, Way, Moral

  "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life". Book by Erving Goffman, p. 13, 1959.

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• I have the highest veneration of those Gentleman, -- but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of the confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one of great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.

  Patrick Henry

  Government, Giving, People

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• One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Writing, Race

  Letter to "Weird Tales" editor Edwin Baird, printed in "Weird Tales" 3, no. 3 (March 1924); Quoted in "Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 122), 2000.

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• Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

  John Forbes Nash

  Thinking, Rejection, Effort

  "John F. Nash Jr. - Biographical". "Les Prix Nobel" ("The Nobel Prizes 1994") edited by Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. 1995.

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• Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.

  J. L. Austin

  Real, Names, Dimensions

  "Philosophical Papers". Book by J. L. Austin, edited by James Opie Urmson, Geoffrey James Warnock, p. 180, 1979.

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