Faculty Quotes - Page 24

• When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

  Mark Twain

  Happy Birthday, Growing Up, 50th Birthday

  Mark Twain (2010). “Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review”, p.113, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

  Albert Camus

  Memories, Mean, Moments

  ALBERT CAMUS (1971). “NOBEL PRIZE LIBRARY”

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• If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

  Jane Austen

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  Jane Austen (2013). “Mansfield Park”, p.172, Lulu Press, Inc

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• All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthens by exercise.

  Anne Bronte

  Strength, Exercise, Talent

  Anne Bronte (2016). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Diversion Illustrated Classics)”, p.232, Diversion Books

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• Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

  Wilkie Collins

  Men, Ideas, Intellectual

  Wilkie Collins (2013). “The Woman in White”, p.475, Courier Corporation

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• A man should always have these two rules in readiness. First, to do only what the reason of your ruling and legislating faculties suggest for the service of man. Second, to change your opinion whenever anyone at hand sets you right and unsettles you in an opinion, but this change of opinion should come only because you are persuaded that something is just or to the public advantage, not because it appears pleasant or increases your reputation.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Men, Hands, Two

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• All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Psychics, Humans

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Ambition, Character

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2800, Delphi Classics

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• ...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Men, Space, Office

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1935). “The Scarlet Letter (Sparklesoup Classics)”, p.81, Sparklesoup LLC

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• If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

  Michael Cunningham

  Running, Religious, Soul

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• Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Strong, Catholic, Identity

  1881 Virginibus Puerisque,'An Apology for Idlers'.

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• I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Growing Up, Believe

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

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• Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

  Andre Breton

  Past, Two, Intellectual

  Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (1997). “Anthology of Black Humor”, p.113, City Lights Books

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• It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

  Oscar Wilde

  Names, Giving, Lovely

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.812, GENERAL PRESS

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• Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.

  Milan Kundera

  Running, Men, Thinking

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• There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one's own, to be precisely "like other people.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Nice, Intelligent, Ideas

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• If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other

  Epictetus

  Stupid, Choices, Wish

  Epictetus (2012). “The Handbook of Epictetus”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Stars, Loneliness, Wings

  Charlotte Bronte (2016). “Villette”, p.56, Xist Publishing

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• I experienced in myself a certain capacity for judging which I have doubtless received from God, like all the other things that I possess; and as He could not desire to deceive me, it is clear that He has not given me a faculty that will lead me to err if I use it aright.

  Rene Descartes

  Judging, Desire, Use

  Rene Descartes, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane, G. R. T. Ross (2003). “Discourse on Method and Meditations”, p.94, Courier Corporation

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• You have been compelled to cultivate your reflective faculties, for want of occasions for frittering your life away in silly trifles.

  Emily Bronte

  Silly, Want, Trifles

  "Wuthering Heights".

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• Idealism does not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but in truth it has been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture...Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect just like outward appearance without inner value, and never creative force....The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

  Adolf Hitler

  Attitude, Expression, Creative

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• Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

  Jonathan Swift

  Justice, Judging, Office

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• What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, School, Technology

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.11, Anchor

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• That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

  Steven Millhauser

  Dream, Art, Book

  FaceBook post by Steven Millhauser from Aug 19, 2015

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• The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Philosopher, Wonder, Be Good

  Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Sophie's World”, p.23, Hachette UK

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