Peculiar Quotes - Page 13

• Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

  Mira Nair

  Fiction, Life Is, Truth Is

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• The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

  Florence Nightingale

  Nursing, Sacrifice, Development

  Florence Nightingale (2017). “Cassandra and Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale”, p.201, Routledge

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• In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.

  Susan Orlean

  Dog, Interesting, Mutts

  "The Social Animal" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. October 1, 2011.

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• Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.

  G. Stanley Hall

  Intimate, Muscles, Organs

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• Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

  Mark Haddon

  Writing, Oddities, People

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• My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Father, Long, Would Be

  Interview with Michael Silverblatt, stephengreenblatt.com. March 16, 2013.

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• The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

  Tim Allen

  Religious, Philosophical, Mean

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

  Nicholson Baker

  Worry, Rooms, Chairs

  Nicholson Baker (2007). “Vintage Baker”, p.86, Vintage

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• It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Eye, Self, Soul

  "Strivings of the Negro People" (1897)

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• The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.

  William Ellery Channing

  Wise, Book, Men

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• Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

  John Jay Chapman

  Life, Teacher, Teaching

  John Jay Chapman (1957). “Selected Writings”

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• There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Past, Vienna, Way

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• My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

  Brian Eno

  Writing, Process, Various

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• It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

  Stephen Fry

  Real, Thinking, Ideas

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• Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Hate, Hatred, Degrees

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (1949). “Words of Goethe: being the conversations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe”

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• All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

  Grace Paley

  Good Life, Survival, Interest In Life

  Grace Paley (2014). “The Collected Stories”, p.63, Macmillan

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• Hollywood is a peculiar beast - people in Hollywood are nuts.

  James Patterson

  Nuts, People, Hollywood

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• [In 1951] we were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real.

  Bob Dylan

  Uncles, Children, Real

  Bob Dylan (2011). “Chronicles”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

  John Stuart Mill

  Opportunity, Errors, Race

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.163, Hackett Publishing

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• What's his offense? Groping for trout in a peculiar river.

  William Shakespeare

  Rivers, Trout, Offense

  William Shakespeare, Nicolaus Delius (1859). “Shakspere's Werke”

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• But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Coffee, Character

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• Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.

  Tom Robbins

  Love, Morning, Stars

  "Jitterbug Perfume". Book by Tom Robbins, 2003.

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• Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine. First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.

  P.D. Ouspensky

  Men, Ego, May

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• The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has it's own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

  Terry Pratchett

  Friday, Dog, Monday

  Terry Pratchett (2009). “Moving Pictures: (Discworld Novel 10)”, p.231, Random House

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• Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Mean, Doubt, Age

  Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.102, CUP Archive

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