Describing Quotes - Page 14

• Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, "If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron.

  Kelley Armstrong

  Karma, Coffee, Ignorant

  Kelley Armstrong (2011). “Spell Bound: A Novel”, p.81, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some people as a result of adversity are sadder, wiser, kinder, more human. Most of us are better, though, when things go better. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut is invariably more important than opening it at the right time. Always listen to a man when he describes the faults of others. Often times, most times, he's describing his own, revealing himself.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Adversity, Men, Knowing

  4 Copy quote

• Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

  William Hazlitt

  Funny, Art, Growth

  William Hazlitt (1841). “Lectures on the English Comic Writers”, p.23

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In describing someone's character, I reveal my own.

  Mason Cooley

  Character, My Own

  5 Copy quote

• (Brazil:) I've never beheld such a paradise. The people are enchanting and--a mercy on this earth of ours--this is the only placewhere there isn't any race question. Negroes and whites and Indians, three-quarters, oneeighth, the wonderful Mulatto and Creole women, Jews and Christians, all dwell together in a peace that passes describing. The Jewish immigrants are in seventh heaven; all of them have jobs and feel at home.

  Stefan Zweig

  Christian, Jobs, Freedom

  10 Copy quote

• It's so glamorous, you have to see it." (describing the $92 million Rock & Roll Hall of Fame)

  Aretha Franklin

  Rocks, Fame, Glamorous

  4 Copy quote

• In 2056, I think you'll be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universe.

  Max Tegmark

  Thinking, Law, Able

  15 Copy quote

• The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

  Sigmund Freud

  Views, Definitions, Facts

  Sigmund Freud (2008). “General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.

  Quinn Norton

  Falling In Love, War, World

  5 Copy quote

• Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Mean, Color, Ordinary

  5 Copy quote

• There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades.

  Lloyd deMause

  War, Years, Battle

  Lloyd DeMause (1975). “The New Psychohistory”, New York : Psychohistory Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult.

  Gao Xingjian

  Way, Language, Cliche

  "A Conversation with Gao Xingjian". Interview with David Der-Wei Wang, asiasociety.org.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea...I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery.

  Sergei Prokofiev

  Laughter, Quality, Nausea

  43 Copy quote

• Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Reality, Law, Effectiveness

  "Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers". Book by Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritzsch, 2010.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that leadership more than anything is about setting a course and describing a vision for people.

  Barack Obama

  Thinking, People, Vision

  "60 Minutes" with Steve Kroft, www.foxnews.com. September 24, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I heard the term "mamisma" when describing Speaker of the House [Nancy] Pelosi, how she was speaking from that place which is kind of like a strong mother. Like when your mom says like, "put that down!" you know that is coming from a place of both love and strength. And at this critical stage in human history we need both action and caring.

  Elizabeth Lesser

  Mom, Mother, Strong

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have trouble actually describing myself because I'm always suspicious of people who start describing themselves. I'm like, "OK, why are you trying to tell me what you are?"

  Zooey Deschanel

  People, Trying, Trouble

  "Zooey sings!". Matt Pais, Metromix, July 21, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The laws of thought are natural laws with which we have no power to interfere, and which are of course not to be in any way confused with the artificial laws of a country, which are invented by men and can be altered by them. Every science is occupied in detecting and describing the natural laws which are inflexibly observed by the objects treated in the Science.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Country, Confused, Men

  William Stanley Jevons (1965). “Elementary lessons in logic”, p.1, Ludwig von Mises Institute

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Believe, Intelligent, Track

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p.312, 1980.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

  Willa Cather

  Attitude, Numbers, Mind

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.45, U of Nebraska Press

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

  R. D. Laing

  Understanding, Defining, Description

  4 Copy quote

• I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Writing, Wish, Want Him

  4 Copy quote

• Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

  Karl Marx

  Doe, Labels, Stalking

  Karl Marx (2007). “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - The Process of Capitalist Production”, p.85, Cosimo, Inc.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Premie'  re approximation: j'e  cris pour de  truire, en les de  crivant avec pre  cision, des monstres nocturnes qui menacent d'envahir ma vie e  veille  e. First general point: I write to destroy, by describing exactly the nocturnal monsters that threaten to invade my waking life.

  Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Writing, Monsters, Waking Life

  1984 LeMiroir qui revient.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

  Julian Jaynes

  Expression, Events, Becoming

  Julian Jaynes (2000). “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, p.284, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

  Show source