Particular Quotes - Page 14

• You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Song, Your Side, Long

  Wilfrid Sheed (1990). “Essays in Disguise”, Alfred A. Knopf

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.

  Aldous Huxley

  Damnation, Sitting, May

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fall, Order, Track

  Henry David Thoreau (2010). “Walden”, p.300, Bibliolis Books

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Poetry, Criticism, Taste

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1056, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

  Robert Musil

  Numbers, People, Temptation

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.274, University of Chicago Press

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was--to Plato and who else?
  The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!

  Robert Musil

  Plato, Men, What Matters

  7 Copy quote

• If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Money, People, Levels

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2017). “Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went”, p.348, Princeton University Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

  Aristotle

  Truth, History, Giving

  Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius (of Phaleron) (1932). “The poetics”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs.... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.

  Erich Fromm

  Mother, Children, Attitude

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.48, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births.... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive.

  Max Frisch

  Reflection, Views, Order

  4 Copy quote

• The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Justice, African American, Race Relations

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.157, Feminist Press at CUNY

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I shouldn't want you to be surprised, or to draw any particular inference from my making speeches, or not making speeches, out there. I don't recall any candidate for President that ever injured himself very much by not talking.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Talking, President, Speech

  Ferrell, Calvin Coolidge, Robert H. Ferrell, Howard H. Quint (1979). “TALKATIVE PRESIDENT OFF”, Dissertations-G

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details. But in history the matter is far otherwise. Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.

  Bertrand Russell

  Mean, Science, Night

  "On History". The Independent Review 3, pp. 207-215, users.drew.edu. July 1904.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.

  Gertrude Stein

  Country, Passion, Important

  Gertrude Stein, Brenda Wineapple (2002). “Three Lives”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• To take a gloomy view of life is not part of my philosophy; to laugh at the idiocies of my fellow creatures is. However, at this particular moment I cannot find so much to laugh at as I would like.

  Noel Coward

  Philosophy, Writing, Views

  8 Copy quote

• Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.

  Franz Kafka

  Knowledge, Strive, Intensity

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are few instances of the exercise of particular virtues which seem harder to attain to, or which appear more amiable and engaging in themselves, than those of moderation and the forgiveness of injuries.

  Laurence Sterne

  Forgiveness, Exercise, Virtue

  Laurence Sterne (1849). “The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself”, p.409

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Yield, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.

  Noam Chomsky

  Goal, Principles, Analysis

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.11, Walter de Gruyter

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

  Samuel Beckett

  Art, Ignorance, Independent

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however we may vary the particular circumstances which precede the event.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Fate, Events, May

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1986). “1872-1878”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.

  Salvador Dali

  Men, Needs, Earth

  12 Copy quote

• You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.

  Arnold Bennett

  Ideas, Firsts, Bricks

  Arnold Bennett (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of Arnold Bennett (Illustrated)”, p.10463, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a mode of perception that often becomes a style of life, paranoia weaves around the vulnerable self or group an air-tight metaphysic and world view. Paranoia is an antireligious mysticism based on the feeling or perception that the world in general, and others in particular, are against me or us. Reality is perceived as hostile. By contrast, the religious mystic experiences the ground of being as basically friendly to the deepest needs of the self. That which is unknown, strange, or beyond our comprehension is with and for rather than against us.

  Sam Keen

  Religious, Reality, Air

  5 Copy quote

• The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Self, Feelings, Brain

  7 Copy quote