Instruments Quotes - Page 28

• Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Light, Law

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• The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful.

  Janice Galloway

  Thinking, Phones, Order

  Janice Galloway (1989). “The Trick is to Keep Breathing: A Novel”

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• What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

  Keith Richards

  Running, Song, Taken

  Keith Richards (2010). “Life”, p.193, Hachette UK

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• The girl doesn’t need a violin,” he added. “She needs to have her hands bound so she can never touch an instrument again.

  Julia Quinn

  Girl, Hands, Needs

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• You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.

  Abraham Verghese

  Son, Play, Three

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• But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.

  John Boyne

  Brother, Speak, Moments

  John Boyne (2012). “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”, p.158, Random House

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• What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. —Archibald MacLeish

  Sheena Iyengar

  Freedom, Men, Choices

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• The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, "Well, where do I go from here?

  Thomas Wolfe

  Healing, Order, Self

  Thomas Wolfe (2016). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.48, Thomas Wolfe

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• She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Sunday, Revelations

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• The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

  Michel Foucault

  Political, Soul, Body

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.27, Vintage

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• Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

  Michel Foucault

  Educational, Mean, Political

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The Archaeology of Knowledge”, p.373, Vintage

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• It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.

  Graham Hancock

  Dark, Dmt, May

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• Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

  Milton Friedman

  Exercise, Men, Hands

  Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

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• Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Communication, Years, Law

  Lawrence M. Krauss (2012). “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing”, p.146, Simon and Schuster

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• Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so better than they could.

  Paulo Coelho

  Tools, Done, Fear Of Failure

  Paulo Coelho (1992). “The diary of a magus”, Harpercollins

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• I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So... I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill.

  Jane Austen

  Children, Play, Maids

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• The body on the ground is nothing more than a shell, a husk, and I am filled with a sense of peace. Yes, I think. Yes. This is what I want to be. An instrument of mercy, not vengeance.

  R.L. LaFevers

  Thinking, Shells, Body

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• I learned to play the instruments of war," he said, "and paint in blood.

  Cassandra Clare

  War, Blood, Play

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.2118, Simon and Schuster

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• In attempting to construct such (artificially intelligent) machines we should not be irreverently usurping His (God's) power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.

  Alan Turing

  Children, Intelligent, Creating

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• You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.

  Audrey Hepburn

  Trying, Looks, Faces

  "Audrey Hepburn" by Barry Paris, (p. 108), 2002.

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• Among other things, neuroplasticity means that emotions such as happiness and compassion can be cultivated in much the same way that a person can learn through repetition to play golf and basketball or master a musical instrument, and that such practice changes the activity and physical aspects of specific brain areas.

  Andrew Weil

  Basketball, Mean, Golf

  Andrew Weil (2011). “Spontaneous Happiness: Step-by-step to peak emotional wellbeing”, p.41, Hachette UK

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• This is what I want to be. An instrument of mercy, not vengeance.

  R.L. LaFevers

  Want, Vengeance, Mercy

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• Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of "sovereignty" of the nation, where "sovereignty" denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality.

  Judith Butler

  Law, Names, Population

  Judith Butler (2006). “Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence”, p.55, Verso

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• What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.

  David Mitchell

  War, Law, Kitchen

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• In order to succeed we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls. The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Dream, Order, Fire

  Theodore Roosevelt (1913). “Progressive Principles: Selections from Addresses Made During the Presidential Campaign of 1912”

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