Materials Quotes - Page 28

• Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.

  Yoko Ogawa

  Emotion, Invisible, Natural

  Yoko Ogawa (2009). “The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel”, p.116, Picador

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• We too often let the material things serve as indicators that we're doing well, even though something inside us tells us that were not doing our best. That we are avoiding that which is hard, but also necessary. That we are shrinking from rather than rising to the challenges of the age.

  Barack Obama

  Inspirational, Challenges, Age

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• Now one does not think during creative work: any more than one thinks when driving a car. One has a background of years — learning — unlearning— success — failure — dreaming — thinking — experience — back it goes — farther back than one's ancestors: all this, — then the moment of creation, the focussing of all into the moment. So I can make — "without thought" — fifteen carefully-considered negatives one every fifteen minutes, — given material with as many possibilities.

  Edward Weston

  Dream, Eye, Thinking

  "Daybooks".

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• Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

  Edward Abbey

  Spiritual, Food, Cooking

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.16, RosettaBooks

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• And Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences, whether we consider its subjects as furnishing the principal subsistence of life to man and beast, delicious varieties for our tables, refreshments from our orchards, the adornments of our flower-borders, shade and perfume of our groves, materials for our buildings, or medicaments for our bodies.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Flower, Men, Body

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private : Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State”, p.390

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• I don't think I'm going to be priest material.

  Lionel Richie

  Thinking, Priests

  "Lionel Richie: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. March 22, 2012.

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• The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

  James Truslow Adams

  Dream, Simple, Men

  "The epic of America". Book by James Truslow Adams, 1931.

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• That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom - these are the traits of the frontier.

  Frederick Jackson Turner

  Powerful, Evil, Mind

  Frederick Jackson Turner (2012). “The Frontier in American History”, p.37, Courier Corporation

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• Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross.

  John Milton

  Fighting, Dark, Fire

  John Milton, Elijah Fenton, Samuel Johnson (1821). “Paradise lost”, p.63

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• I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

  Vikram Seth

  Dream, Drinking, California

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• Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

  Allan Bloom

  Struggle, Hunting, Views

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• When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

  William James

  Children, Men, Thinking

  William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.293, Harvard University Press

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• How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Art, Wish, Cost

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1998). “Sight-readings: American Fictions”, Random House Incorporated

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• Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.

  Max Horkheimer

  Judgment, Form, Synthetic

  "Critical Theory: Selected Essays" by Max Horkheimer, (p. 146), 1982.

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• Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God.

  Karl Marx

  Existence, Existence Of God, Known

  Karl Marx, David McLellan (2000). “Karl Marx: Selected Writings”, p.167, Oxford University Press, USA

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• As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

  Karl Marx

  Individual, Produce, Depends

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1970). “The German Ideology”, p.42, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO

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• I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body.

  Seneca the Younger

  Husband, Clothes, Wife

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• The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits—not animals…. There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

  Winston Churchill

  Time, Moving, Learning

  A radio speech broadcast from London to America on receiving the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws of the University of Rochester, June 16, 1941.

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• Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

  William Carlos Williams

  Different, Use, Demand

  William Carlos Williams' detail and prosody for his poem "Paterson" given to James Laughlin (now at Houghton Library), 1939.

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• As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Philosophical, Reading, Book

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• Being creative is not so much the desire  to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.

  Anni Albers

  Art, Creativity, Creative

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• Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.

  Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

  Attitude, Thinking, Color

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• Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artists power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

  Paul Klee

  Spiritual, Artist, Civilization

  Paul Klee, Felix Klee (1968). “The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918”, p.194, Univ of California Press

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• I just continue to look for different material, great material, as good as I can find, and try to go in there and do as good a job as I can do in making it a record. That's all you can expect. That's all that you can do.

  George Strait

  Jobs, Trying, Different

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• The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Book, Inspiration, Names

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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