Constraints Quotes

• Design is the beauty of turning constraints into advantages.

  Aza Raskin

  Design, Advantage

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• Constraints can spur creativity and incite action, as long as you have the confidence to embrace them.

  Tom Kelley

  Creativity, Long, Spurs

  Tom Kelley, David Kelley (2013). “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All”, p.145, Crown Business

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• Embrace your constraints. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better.

  Biz Stone

  Creative, Challenges, Wakes You

  Biz Stone (2014). “Things A Little Bird Told Me”, p.41, Pan Macmillan

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• I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

  Jeff Bezos

  Thinking, Innovation, Way

  "Bezos On Innovation". Interview with Peter Burrows, www.bloomberg.com. April 17, 2008.

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• There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

  Ronald Reagan

  Wall, Mind, Progress

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Self, Execution, Precision

  Igor Stravinsky (1970). “Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons”, p.65, Harvard University Press

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• The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

  Igor Stravinsky

  Freedom, Precision, Constrain

  Igor Stravinsky (1970). “Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons”, p.65, Harvard University Press

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• Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

  Naomi Wolf

  Self Esteem, Stereotype, Materials

  Naomi Wolf (2009). “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women”, p.15, Harper Collins

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• Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

  Robert Delaunay

  Art, Architecture, Horror

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• The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

  Walt Whitman

  Wise, Freedom, Men

  "Democratic Vistas And Other Papers".

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• The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

  John Updike

  Firsts, Adultery, Breaths

  Couples ch. 5 (1968)

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• Virtuous people often revenge themselves for the constraints to which they submit by the boredom which they inspire.

  Confucius

  Revenge, Blessing, Boredom

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• Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Passion, Men, Justice

  The Federalist no. 15 (1788)

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• Today, many companies are reporting that their number one constraint on growth is the inability to hire workers with the necessary skills.

  William J. Clinton

  Success, Business, Knowledge

  Clinton, William J. (2000). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 2000-2001”, p.2214, Best Books on

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• Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

  Harry Mathews

  Running, Thinking, Vocabulary

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• Art chooses its constraints.

  Mason Cooley

  Art

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• There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

  Edward de Bono

  Creativity, Imagination, Creative

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• After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.

  Jerry Saltz

  Years, Land, Gnarly

  New York Volume 43, Issues 14-21, New York Magazine Company, p. 1, 2010.

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• To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Women, Order, Law

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.11, Grove Press

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• You don't have to travel, but I find extended travel to be a helpful tool for reexamining yourself and the constraints you've artificially placed on your life. It's easy to believe everything has to be done one way if you're always in one place around the same people.

  Tim Ferriss

  Believe, People, Tools

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• There is no doubt that directing television has helped hone my directing skills. What television teaches you is to be efficient and to think on your feet. You have to adhere to strict deadlines and budget constraints.

  Emilio Estevez

  Thinking, Skills, Feet

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• It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

  Sigmund Freud

  Nature, Children, Humanity

  Sigmund Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1962). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Early psycho-analytic publications”

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• This is the holy reasoning of love; it draws no license from grace, but rather feels the strong constraints of gratitude leading it to holiness.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Thanksgiving, Christian, Gratitude

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon “Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 19: 1873”, Lulu.com

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• But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.

  Herman Melville

  Heart, Law, Long

  Herman Melville (2009). “Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales”, p.259, OUP Oxford

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• In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Marriage, Girl, Husband

  "Democracy in America". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II. Book Three, Chapter X, 1840.

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