Familiar Quotes - Page 3

• To the untraveled, territory other than their own familiar heath is invariably fascinating. Next to love it is the one thing that solaces and delights.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Delight, Territory, Next

  Theodore Dreiser (2017). “Delphi Complete Works of Theodore Dreiser (Illustrated)”, p.325, Delphi Classics

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• And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Discovery, Piano

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• Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Art, Struggle, Science

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (2013). “Uncommon Sense”, p.87, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Other people--grandparents, sisters and brothers, the mother's best friend, the next-door neighbor--get to be familiar to the baby. If the mother communicates her trust in these people, the baby will regard them as delicious novelties. Anybody the mother trusts whom the baby sees often enough partakes a bit of the presence of the mother.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Mother, Baby, Brother

  Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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• Fairs are good places to eat, particularly for stand-up eaters--which is one of the kinds of eaters I am, although when I eat standing up away from home I sometimes miss the familiar cool breeze coming from the open refrigerator.

  Calvin Trillin

  Home, Missing, Kind

  Calvin Trillin (1974). “American fried; adventures of a happy eater”

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• ... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.

  Ruth Benedict

  Country, Fall, Ignorance

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• The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?

  Samuel Richardson

  Character, Heart, Interesting

  Samuel Richardson (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Richardson (Illustrated)”, p.3951, Delphi Classics

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• Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.

  Florence King

  Knowing, Mediocrity, Singers

  Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.58, Macmillan

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• The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to it.

  David Hume

  Running, Men, Order

  David Hume (1793). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.180

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• When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?

  David Hume

  World, Stones, Coherence

  David Hume (1824). “The Philosophical Works of David Hume ... Containing Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Essays on the Immortality of the Soul, Suicide ... &c. A New Edition”, p.6

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• During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of politicaldiscourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.... These were therequirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.

  Michel Foucault

  Dream, Writing, Thinking

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• In 'Before and After,' I identify the sixteen strategies that we can use to make or break our habits. Some are quite familiar, such as 'Monitoring,' 'Scheduling,' and 'Convenience.' Some took me a lot of effort to identify, such as 'Thinking,' 'Identity,' and 'Clarity.'

  Gretchen Rubin

  Thinking, Effort, Identity

  Gretchen Rubin (2016). “The Best of the Happiness Project Blog: Ten Years of Happiness, Good Habits, and More”, p.50, Hachette UK

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• Language is filled
  with words for deprivation
  images so familiar
  it is hard to crack language open
  into that other country
  the country of being.

  Susan Griffin

  Country, Cracks, Language

  Susan Griffin (1987). “Unremembered country: poems”, Copper Canyon Pr

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• A photographer who wants to see....must recognize the value of the familiar. Your ability to see is not increased by the distance you put between yourself and your home. If you do not see what is all around you every day, what will you see when you go to Tangiers?....Good seeing doesn't ensure good photographs, but good photographic expression is impossible without it.

  Freeman Patterson

  Distance, Home, Expression

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• We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.

  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  Dog, Cat, Hierarchy

  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2001). “The Tribe of Tiger”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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• Collage has been one of the most relevant forms of art making. It's resonant because it is made of the stuff that we see every day. It's familiar. It reflects our reality.

  Elliott Hundley

  Art, Reality, Stuff

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• As an actor the best thing you have is your imagination. You're not going to have all the experiences, but you draw on the things that you know. So I think you definitely use the things that you're familiar with to your advantage.

  Vince Vaughn

  Thinking, Imagination, Use

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• People can relate to horses. Horses, I think, are basically in our genetic history. Horses were part of our culture, part of our collective society, for hundreds of years, and so, the horse is one of the most familiar animals to people of any race or culture or country.

  Steven Spielberg

  Country, Horse, Animal

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• There is nothing far-fetched about disappointment as a subject for comedy. It's something we are all too familiar with.

  Martin Freeman

  Disappointment, Comedy, Subjects

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• If we only do what we're familiar with, we might miss what we've been made for.

  Bob Goff

  Missing, Might, Made

  Twitter post from Jun 17, 2015

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• Very few women have become famous for being who they actually are, nuanced and imperfect. When honesty happens, it's usually couched in self-ridicule or self-help. Dunham doesn't apologize like that-she simply tells her story as if it might be interesting. The result is shocking and radical because it is utterly familiar. Not That Kind of Girl is hilarious, artful, and staggeringly intimate; I read it shivering with recognition.

  Miranda July

  Girl, Honesty, Self

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• We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world.

  Laura Lippman

  Wise, Sexy, Crazy

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• Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Addresses

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.105, Xist Publishing

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• Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Book, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.77, Courier Corporation

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• A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

  William Butler Yeats

  Spiritual, Expression, Flames

  William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Finneran, George Bornstein (2007). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays”, p.88, Simon and Schuster

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