Familiar Quotes - Page 39

• We cannot alter the essential shape of a single letter without at the same time destroying the familiar printed face of our language, and thereby rendering it useless.

  Jan Tschichold

  Essentials, Useless, Shapes

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• The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Artist, Devil, Popular Song

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• Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

  Cesare Pavese

  Travel, Home, Strangers And Friends

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• You think, eventually, that nothing can disturb you and that your nerves are impregnable. Yet, looking down at that familiar face, I realized that death is something to which we never become calloused.

  Eliot Ness

  Thinking, Nerves, Faces

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• Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference

  Ambrose Bierce

  Military, Silence, Form

  Ambrose Bierce (2015). “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians”, p.11, Ambrose Bierce

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• Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes I can sing along with. I like those notes very, very much. Give me a beat. Not a fancy one. Give me a GOOD BEAT -- something I can dance to. It has to go boom-bap, boom-boom-BAP. If it doesn't, I will hate it very, very much. Also, I want it right away -- and then, write me some more songs like that -- over and over and over again, because I'm really into music.

  Frank Zappa

  Song, Hate, Writing

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• I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager. . .and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. . .

  Ntozake Shange

  Teenager, Writing, Thinking

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• Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Change, Ideas, Society

  Patricia Hill Collins (2002). “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment”, p.7, Routledge

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• Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

  Henry Watson Fowler

  Long, Romance, Abstract

  Henry Watson Fowler, Francis George Fowler (1931). “The King's English”, Oxford University Press

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• It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, containing marine shells of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea.

  Charles Lyell

  Beach, Marine, Scotland

  Sir Charles Lyell (1863). “The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man”, p.47

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• Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

  Karen Russell

  Mother, Grief, Flower

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• A fascinating, insightful, and new treatment from the perspective of an intimately involved former Iranian senior official on Iran's nuclear program and responses to it. For those familiar with the details, there is much new information about the Iran side, its ideas, strategies, disputes, and aims. U.S. experts will have some key questions but will learn much from this extraordinary book.

  Thomas R. Pickering

  Senior, Book, Keys

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• My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

  Herman Wouk

  Son, Two, Literature

  Herman Wouk (1970). “This is my God: the Jewish way of life”, Touchstone

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• For the most part, most people most often choose comfort - the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have.

  Peter McWilliams

  People, Choices, Risk

  Peter McWilliams (1997). “Do It!: Let's Get Off Our Buts”, Mary Book / Prelude Press

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• The real friends of the space voyager are the stars. Their friendly, familiar patterns are constant companions, unchanging, out there.

  Jim Lovell

  Stars, Real, Space

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• Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Ideas, Two, Long

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2015). “Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography”, p.846, e-artnow

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• One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day that will be an airborne life.

  Beryl Markham

  Stars, Future, Men

  Beryl Markham (1994). “The Illustrated West with the Night”, Stewart, Tabori, & Chang

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• The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems...I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occurred to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why.

  M. C. Escher

  Years, Light, Trying

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• The Nephilim was something I'd known about since I was really young. If you're familiar with the first book of the Bible, Genesis, you see the sons of God seduce some of the women on the earth and they produce a race of people known as the Nephilim. According to legend they taught man about war, astrology, and magic. I'm fascinated by the idea.

  Carl McCoy

  War, Book, Son

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• To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

  Novalis

  Magic, World, Sacred

  "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser. "Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives". Book edited by Amélie Rorty, p. 294, 1998.

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• All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

  Joseph Conrad

  Art, Creativity, Creative

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad - All 20 Works in One Premium Edition: Including Unforgettable Titles like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and Many More (With Author’s Letters, Memoirs and Critical Essays)”, p.4543, e-artnow

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• Magic is a sudden opening of the mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited views that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us; that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts.

  John Welwood

  Views, Mind, Magic

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• Into all our lives, in many simple, familiar, homely ways, God infuses this element of joy from the surprises of life, which unexpectedly brighten our days and fill our eyes with light.

  Samuel Longfellow

  Eye, Simple, Light

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• In all honesty, I'm not really familiar with Stevie Wonder's music, since country is more of my style. I really have no idea what I am doing.

  Kellie Pickler

  Country, Honesty, Ideas

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• It's one thing to dream, but when the moment is right, you've got to be willing to leave what's familiar and go out to find your own sound.

  Howard Schultz

  Dream, Sound, Execution

  Howard Schultz, Dori Jones Yang (1997). “Pour your heart into it: how Starbucks built a company one cup at a time”

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