Description Quotes - Page 21

• Stories--from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings--appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.

  Michael Ruhlman

  Dream, Sleep, Culture

  Michael Ruhlman (2005). “House: A Memoir”, Viking Press

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• The spirit of tanka interests me more than following rigid conventions. As I understand it, the tradition allows a variety of approaches, from simple description and heartfelt expression to classical allusion and evocative wordplay. Succeeding generations rediscover and renew the form so that it retains its vitality.

  Harryette Mullen

  Simple, Expression, Heartfelt

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• The functional freedom that anybody can buy a gun and go out and murder a lot of people at a McDonald's is prevalent, yes. But through the effects of TV and interactive video systems and so forth, we'll also have the freedom to pretend to be a mass murderer for the evening. I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer controlledthe TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.

  J. G. Ballard

  Drama, Gun, Reality

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• The only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And, incomprehensibly difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it, from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Names, Ideas

  Thomas Paine (1794). “Paine's Age of Reason, with Remarks, Containing a Vindication of the Doctrines of Christianity from the Aspersions of that Author. By a Citizen of the World [i.e. James Tytler]”, p.73

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• It is not a nature cure, a system of faith healing, or a physical culture, or a medical treatment, or a semi-occult philosophy. As to what it is, Dewey's brief but striking description appeals most and has the least chance of being proved incorrect: 'It the Alexander Technique bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities.'

  John Dewey

  Philosophy, Healing, Technique

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• It seems to me the worst of all the plagues is the slug, the snail without a shell. He is beyond description repulsive, a mass of sooty, shapeless slime, and he devours everything.

  Celia Thaxter

  Animal, Shells, Slime

  Celia Thaxter (2008). “An Island Garden”, p.7, Applewood Books

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• For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

  John le Carre

  Political, Conflict, Involved

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• Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

  William Golding

  Exercise, Simple, Long

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• Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.

  Andy Warhol

  Art, Jobs, Directors

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• The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health.

  Ann Radcliffe

  Pain, Health, Views

  Ann Radcliffe (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ann Radcliffe (Illustrated)”, p.586, Delphi Classics

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• All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

  John Shelby Spong

  Respect, Race, Ethnicity

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• There is nothing like wine for conjuring up feelings of contentment and goodwill. It is less of a drink than an experience, an evocation, a spirit. It produces sensations that defy description.

  Thomas Conklin

  Wine, Feelings, Contentment

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• I have this tattooed on my left side! I love the saying and it's a perfect description of Karma, don't judge/discriminate and don't do to someone what you wouldn't want done to you.

  Plato

  Karma, Perfect, Judging

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• When we first meet what we love, we could become poets for our longing. When we are removed from what we love, we become singers of grief and weavers of elegant description.

  Martin Prechtel

  Music, Grief, Singers

  Martín Prechtel (2013). “The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan Tale of Ecstasy, Time, and Finding One's True Form”, p.83, North Atlantic Books

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• In those same decades, most UFO sightings were made in the daytime and frequently at close range, when shapes and surface features could be distinguished, thus making positive identification of normal sights easier and the descriptions of unusual sights more detailed. When all normal explanations had been eliminated, the witnesses could concentrate on those aspects of the experience which were most abnormal.

  Don Berliner

  Sight, Abnormal, Shapes

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• Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders provides clinicians with essential guidelines to treat patients in the era of managed care. Seven psychiatric disorders are described and conceptualized in cognitive-behavioral terms. The authors then provided an unusually clear, reader-friendly description of how to assess and treat each disorder with illustrative case examples, and patient forms and handouts. It should prove very useful for clinicians or clinicians-in-training who want to learn how to conduct short-term treatment through an empirically validated approach.

  Judith S. Beck

  Anxiety Disorder, Training, Friendly

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• My job description is that I'm a rock star. And I'm good at it.

  Billie Joe Armstrong

  Jobs, Stars, Rocks

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• Recipes are just descriptions of one person’s take on one moment in time. They’re not rules.

  Mario Batali

  Recipes, Moments, Persons

  "The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons From Extraordinary Lives". Book by Katie Couric, www.today.com. 2011.

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• The artist's morality lies in the force and truth of his description.

  Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly

  Art, Lying, Morality

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• The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, god makes no more sense than unie; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd.

  George H. Smith

  Religion, Atheism, Doe

  George H. Smith (2010). “Atheism: The Case Against God”, p.30, Prometheus Books

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• The King saw them with no common satisfaction, expressing his desire in no particular to have yt Stellar fish engraven and printed. We wish very much, Sir, yt you could procure for us a particular description of yesd Fish, viz. whether it be common there; what is observable in it when alive; what colour it then hath; what kind of motion in the water; what use it maketh of all that curious workmanship, wch Nature hath adorn'd it with?

  Henry Oldenburg

  Kings, Science, Water

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• As a progressive discipline [biochemistry] belongs to the present century. From the experimental physiologists of the last century it obtained a charter, and, from a few pioneers of its own, a promise of success; but for the furtherance of its essential aim that century left it but a small inheritance of facts and methods. By its essential or ultimate aim I myself mean an adequate and acceptable description of molecular dynamics in living cells and tissues.

  Frederick Gowland Hopkins

  Mean, Cells, Discipline

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• I am ever more intrigued by the correspondence between mathematics and physical facts. The adaptability of mathematics to the description of physical phenomena is uncanny.

  Nicolaas Bloembergen

  Science, Facts, Mathematics

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• Descriptive geometry has two objects: the first is to establish methods to represent on drawing paper which has only two dimensions,-namely, length and width,-all solids of nature which have three dimensions,-length, width, and depth,-provided, however, that these solids are capable of rigorous definition.
  The second object is to furnish means to recognize accordingly an exact description of the forms of solids and to derive thereby all truths which result from their forms and their respective positions.

  Gaspard Monge

  Nature, Truth, Mean

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• A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

  Garry Winogrand

  Photography, Art, Creativity

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