Length Quotes - Page 13

• The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

  John Dos Passos

  Civilization, America, People

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• Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

  Rebecca West

  Book, Writing, Might

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.169, Open Road Media

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• From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

  Noam Chomsky

  Elements, Language, Infinite

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.13, Walter de Gruyter

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• Country music was a part of my life. Now it isn't. We had a good relationship, really, but we wanted each other at arm's length. The people in Nashville didn't want to be responsible for my looks or my actions. But they sure did like the listeners I brought.

  K. D. Lang

  Country, Art, Nashville

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• I am a little jet lagged from my trip to Malaysia...The lengths we have to go to to get CNN coverage these days.

  Barack Obama

  Cnn, Politics, Littles

  "Transcript: Obama remarks at White House Correspondents' Association dinner", www.foxnews.com. May 4, 2014.

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• The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and indignation, the glow of moral approbation if they do not lead to action, grow less and less vivid every time they occur, till at length the mind grows absolutely callous.

  Anna Letitia Barbauld

  Mind, Vivid, Awakening

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• The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.

  David Elkind

  Children, Writing, Ideas

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• Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Work, Organization, Groups

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• We spoke of ourselves as "emancipated" when we got the vote. Yet we are still slaves to the superficial and the superfluous. We are concerned with the length of our skirts, with the latest lipstick, with the newest thrill in hats. We are impressed by advertisements that insist we must be alluring; we must adopt a time-consuming coiffure, we must spend hours with the "beautician," we must attend fashion shows. As long as women are preoccupied with nonessentials we shall be afflicted with infantilism, passivity, and the eventual disillusionment that results from trivial, unproductive lives.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Fashion, Long, Thrill

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• All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, Expression, Doe

  Henry David Thoreau (2007). “My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau's Essays on Political Philosophy”, p.133, David M Gross

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• When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Imagination, Understanding

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The finished man of the world must eat of every apple at once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Hate, Men, Apples

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.377

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• Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Knowledge, Science, Light

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.621, Delphi Classics

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• It's (baseball) on the radio and in the newspapers every day, the only game you can follow on that basis. From whatever arm's length you choose, it's always there.

  Tom Seaver

  Baseball, Games, Radio

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• Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Distance, Perfect, Silence

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.192, Harvard University Press

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• The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Believe, Men

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• A dancer differeth from a madman only in length of time; one is mad so long as he liveth, the other while he danceth.

  Alphonsus Liguori

  Dance, Long, Mad

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• In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead.

  Mary Hunter Austin

  Racism, Sacred, Common

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• Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was wearing them at length.

  Hall Caine

  Book, Men, Shoes

  Hall Caine (2016). “The Deemster”, p.5, The Floating Press

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• The leaves of these [larch] trees are like those of the pine; timber from them comes in long lengths, is as easily wrought in joiner's work as is the clearwood of fir, and contains a liquid resin, of the color of Attic honey, which is good for consumptives.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Color, Long, Tree

  "De architectura". Book by Vitruvius. Book II, Chapter IX, Section 17,

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• When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Discovery, Years, Law

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• The grace of novelty and the length of habit, though so very opposite to one another, yet agree in this, that they both alike keepus from discovering the faults of our friends.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Friendship, Opposites, Grace

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• There's nothing that builds up a toil-weary soul
  Like a day on a stream,
  Back on the banks of the old fishing hole
  Where a fellow can dream.
  There's nothing so good for a man as to flee
  From the city and lie
  Full length in the shade of a whispering tree
  And gaze at the sky.
  . . . .
  It is good for the world that men hunger to go
  To the banks of a stream,
  And weary of sham and of pomp and of show
  They have somewhere to dream.
  For this life would be dreary and sordid and base
  Did they not now and then
  Seek refreshment and calm in God's wide, open space
  And come back to be men.

  Edgar Guest

  Dream, Lying, Men

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• He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Shadow, Body, Firsts

  Michel de Montaigne, Bayle St. John (1866). “Essays [tr. by Cotton”, p.366

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• Length of saying makes languor of hearing.

  Philibert Joseph Roux

  Talking, Hearing

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