Excellent Quotes - Page 25

• A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.

  Edmund Burke

  Practice, Evil, May

  Edmund Burke (1852). “The Works and Correspondance of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke”, p.449

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• It is an excellent sign, that after the cares and labors of the day, you can return to your pious exercises and meditations with undiminished attention.

  Hannah More

  Exercise, Meditation, Return

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 406, 1895.

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• There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Past

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• Excellent outcomes with much lower intervention rates are achieved at home births. This may be because the overuse of interventions in hospital births introduces risks or the home environment promotes problem-free labors.

  Henci Goer

  Home, Risk, May

  Henci Goer (1995). “Obstetric Myths Versus Research Realities: A Guide to the Medical Literature”, p.334, Greenwood Publishing Group

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• What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.

  Matthew Arnold

  Independent, Race, Feelings

  Matthew Arnold, Robert Henry Super (1960). “On the Classical Tradition”, p.4, University of Michigan Press

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• A natural talent is required; for, when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place, which the student must try to appropriate to himself by reflection, becoming an early pupil in a place well adapted for instruction. He must also bring to the task a love of labor and perseverance, so that the instruction taking root may bring forth proper and abundant fruits.

  Hippocrates

  Perseverance, Art, Reflection

  Hippocrates (1941). “Selected works”

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• No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance -- and a whole lot of luck.

  George Lucas

  Luck, Thanks, Film

  George Lucas, Sally Kline (1999). “George Lucas: Interviews”, p.13, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I prefer you to take as your model a mediocre sculpture rather than an excellent painting, for from painted objects we train our hand only to make a likeness, whereas from sculptures we learn to represent both likeness and correct incidence of light.

  Leon Battista Alberti

  Light, Hands, Sculpture

  1436 On Painting (translated by Cecil Grayson).

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• Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

  A. J. Muste

  Fashion, Real, Struggle

  "American Power and the New Mandarins". Book by Noam Chomsky, 1969.

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• Learning that you have stamina is an excellent thing to know. If a project fails, I know I can pick myself up.

  Eddie Izzard

  Failing, Projects, Stamina

  "I Believe That Eddie Izzard Is Our Future". Interview with Ali MacLean, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2010.

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• Artists are often excellent businessmen. They have to be. Otherwise they do not remain artists.

  A. Y. Jackson

  Business, Artist, Businessman

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• Women can also be creative in total isolation. I know excellent women artists who do original work without any response to speak of. Maybe they are used to lack of feedback. Maybe they are tougher.

  Elaine de Kooning

  Artist, Creative, Isolation

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• When a mother takes pictures of her children on the beach, she doesn't take herself for an artist; she does it for love, which is an excellent reason, from my point of view.

  Martin Parr

  Mother, Beach, Children

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• I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.

  John Steinbeck

  Dog, Men, Years

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• Josh Bard is a catcher with excellent defensive tools and someone ... whose best days are ahead of him. He's not coming off his best [offensive] season, but we still think there is some ceiling on him. He has outstanding makeup and calls a good game. [He's] a solid receiver with a plus arm, and he's going to be coming to camp with a chance to open some eyes.

  Theo Epstein

  Eye, Makeup, Thinking

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• A stiff letter galls one like a stiff shirt collar -- whilst a sheet garnished here and there with a careless blot -- and here and there a dash -- but in the main full of excellent matter, is like a clever fellow in a dirty shirt whom we value for the good humour he brings with him and not for the garb he wears.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Clever, Dirty, Letters

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• Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow-beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious Being is more or less excellent and perfect — resembles more or less its original — in proportion to the perfection of the mind on which it is impressed.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  God, Character, Perfect

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1859). “Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources : Now First Printed”, p.270

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• To think of education as a means of preserving institutions however excellent, is to have a superficial notion of its end and purpose, which is to mould and fashion men who are more than institutions, who create, outgrow, and re-create them.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Fashion, Mean, Men

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling.

  Max Stirner

  Lying, College, Men

  Max Stirner (1967). “The False Principle of Our Education: Or, Humanism and Realism”, Ralph Myles Pub

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• Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Nonsense, Dictionary, Objections

  Ambrose Bierce (2012). “The Devil's Dictionary”, p.85, Courier Corporation

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• Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species.

  Charles Lamb

  Spurs, Might, Kind

  Charles Lamb (1845). “The Essays of Elia: First Series - Second Series”, p.128

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• For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.

  Margaret Mead

  Reflection, Ideas, Political

  "Continuities in Cultural Evolution". Book by Margaret Mead, 1964.

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• I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents.

  Edward Teller

  Believe, Ambition, Soul

  Edward Teller (1987). “Better a shield than a sword: perspectives on defense and technology”, Free Pr

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• Wealth--the most excellent of all gods.

  Aristophanes

  Wealth

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• When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition.

  Anthony Trollope

  Father, Book, Blessed

  Anthony Trollope (1862). “Framley Parsonage: A Novel”, p.9

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