Grandiose Quotes - Page 3

I don't make art with grandiose delusions. I do know there are limits to what art is capable of. That makes it all the more appealing to me. And I can do as I will whenever I choose.

Raymond Pettibon

Art, Limits, Delusion

Interview with John O’Connor, www.believermag.com. December 2004/ January 2005.

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The only criticism heard with any frequency of Elton John's first American album, 'Elton John,' was that the production was too grandiose. The melodies were superb, and lyrics frequently very good, and the performances flawless.

Jon Landau

Criticism, Albums, Flawless

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Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.

Chalmers Johnson

Military, America, Safety

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I feel no shame about having paintings be as grandiose and ridiculous as possible.

Laura Owens

Ridiculous, Painting, Shame

Interview with Rachel Kushner, www.believermag.com. May 2003.

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Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I'd rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose; it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh.

Jerry Saltz

Italian, Feelings, Looks

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Songs are like a form of chaos that you can control. It's a form of intelligence that maybe you only understand and you hope that someone else can understand. And you can be anyone you want: you can be as grandiose as you want or you can be as down in the gutter as you want. It's just sort of whatever emotional freeway you're on at the time.

Billie Joe Armstrong

Song, Emotional, Gutters

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I'm sure if one turned one's mind back from grandiose faults to what is happening to the average man or woman or child in the rural areas, we will probably find that's where the energy for development is.

Chinua Achebe

Children, Men, Average

Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

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That's when I began drinking coffee. I was hung up on every little thing. I loved Paris, and felt straightaway at home. Not to be grandiose, but it seemed like all the city had been waiting for me.

Rosecrans Baldwin

Drinking, Coffee, Home

Rosecrans Baldwin (2012). “Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down”, p.11, Macmillan

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Without sounding too grandiose, the survival of the planet itself is at stake, you have rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, immigration sparked by climate change, droughts that are much more severe.

Laurent Fabius

Change, Ocean, Sea

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These people are often authoritarian and rigid in their views, exerting power over others in an effort to keep others from having power over them. Persecutors may act grandiose and self-righteous to mask their own insecurity.

David Emerald Womeldorff

Inspirational, Self, Views

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I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick.

Muhammad Yunus

Inspirational, Roots, Bricks

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The grandiose plans of what Macintosh was gonna be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing. And the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible, it was salvageable. But the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something, and that somebody was John Sculley.

Chris Espinosa

Two, Gaps, Macintosh

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I take a less gloomy view. A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying. I stopped trying, but my life was so full of strenuous routines that I wouldn't have noticed had it been not for my disease. My whole professional life was a diseased and grandiose attack on my humanity. It is an achievement to know that I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man?

Alasdair Gray

Good Life, Mean, Fighting

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A universe comes to contribute to our happiness when reverie comes to accentuate our repose. You must tell the man who wants to dream well to begin by being happy. Then reverie plays out its veritable destiny; it becomes poetic reverie and by it, in it, everything becomes beautiful. If the dreamer had "the gift" he would turn his reverie into a work. And this work would be grandiose since the dreamed world is automatically grandiose.

Gaston Bachelard

Beautiful, Dream, Destiny

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I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.

Stephen Jay Gould

Philosophy, Support, Borders

Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.185, W. W. Norton & Company

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By way of personal instinct, I have an inherent distaste for grandiose rhetorical statements, which don't have any substantive dimension to them

Kevin Rudd

Humor, Australia, Way

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Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Religious, Men, Hunting

Jose Ortega y Gasset (2007). “Meditations on Hunting”, p.106, Wilderness Adventures Press

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You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof of an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion.

Neil Gaiman

Successful, Rocks, Sea

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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries you have these great nation states hurling their young men at one another. The victory was really going to rest on who could do the best job of bringing up their kids to become efficient and effective soldiers. That's pretty grandiose, I guess, but I do think that, and thank God it's been the armies of democracy that have emerged from this as the triumphant armies.

Stephen Ambrose

Peace, Jobs, War

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I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see -- one has to keep oneself afloat.

Neal Ascherson

Writing, Littles, Way

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It's so easy to wish for death when nothing's wrong with you! It's so easy to fall in love with death, and I've been all my life, and seen it's most faithful worshippers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lillies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave meant nothing. I knew that. But I always wished I was dead. It was a way to go on living

Anne Rice

Falling In Love, Dark, Smell

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When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small?

Sue Monk Kidd

Broken, Desire, Moments

Sue Monk Kidd (2006). “The Mermaid Chair”, p.148, Penguin

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A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

Peter Drucker

Years, Decision, Risk

Peter Drucker (2013). “People and Performance”, p.31, Routledge

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For me, cinema becomes grandiose when it imposes its own mythology and its own reality.

Gaspard Ulliel

Reality, Cinema, Mythology

Source: collider.com

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Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.

Octavio Paz

Power, Gestures, Terrible

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