Peculiar Quotes - Page 22

• The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Like Love, Superstitions, Evidence

  "London Perceived" by V. S. Pritchett, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Ch. 1, (p. 14), 1962.

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• Every thought is new when an author expresses it in a manner peculiar to himself.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• Poor teaching leads to the inevitable idea that the subject (mathematics) is only adapted to peculiar minds, when it is the one universal science and the one whose four ground-rules are taught us almost in infancy and reappear in the motions to the universe.

  Henry John Stephen Smith

  Teaching, School, Taught Us

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• Every town, like every man, has its own countenance; they have a common likeness and yet are different; one keeps in his mind all their peculiar touches.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Men, Mind, Different

  Hans Christian Andersen (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Hans Christian Andersen (Illustrated)”, p.3630, Delphi Classics

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• Architecture, either practically considered or viewed as an art of taste, is a subject so important and comprehensive in itself, that volumes would be requisite to do it justice. Buildings of every description, from the humble cottage to the lofty temple, are objects of such constant recurrence in every habitable part of the globe, and are so strikingly indicative of the intelligence, character, and taste of the inhabitants, that they possess in themselves a great peculiar interest for the mind.

  Andrew Jackson Downing

  Art, Humble, Character

  Andrew Jackson Downing, Henry Winthrop Sargent (1859). “A treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening, adapted to North America: with a view to the improvement of country residences”, p.318

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• Some people have a peculiar faculty for denying facts.

  George D. Prentice

  People, Facts, Faculty

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• People who don't like cats always seem to think there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Cat, Thinking, People

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• Both ground- rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land are, therefore, perhaps the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.

  Adam Smith

  Real, Land, People

  Adam Smith (1869). “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Volume 2”, p.437

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• Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.

  Charles Mackay

  Age, Gains, Excitement

  "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". Book by Charles Mackay, 1841.

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• I wanted to work with those boys (producers Andy and Larry Wachowski) because they're so eccentric and peculiar. Larry, of course, is halfway towards being a woman now. It's a crazy world.

  John Hurt

  Crazy, Boys, World

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• I think there's no harm, sometimes, to feel on the edge of things. If you're on the margins you can see a bigger picture. And I actually quite like standing at a peculiar angle to the universe.

  Dermot Bolger

  Thinking, Sometimes, Bigger

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• It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

  William Faulkner

  Children, Emotional, Long

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• The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body.

  Isadora Duncan

  Beach, Ocean, Past

  "The Art of the Dance" edited by Sheldon Cheney, (p. 54), 1928.

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• We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

  Robert Wright

  Mean, Trying, Agendas

  "The Moral Animal". Book by Robert Wright, www.wired.com. 1994.

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• I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.

  Terence McKenna

  Jobs, Real, Believe

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• What matters most: passion or competence that was born in? Berkshireis full of people who have a peculiar passion for their own business. I would argue passion is more important than brain power.

  Charlie Munger

  Passion, What Matters, People

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• [Milton's] argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking God's only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a "peculiar comfort" in the society of man and woman "beside, (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed"; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to "play" or "slackening the cords" occurs even in God. That is why the Song of Songs describes a thousand raptures...far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment.

  C. S. Lewis

  Song, Men, Thinking

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• But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares?

  Frederick Buechner

  Thinking, Long, Risk

  Frederick Buechner (2017). “A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory”, p.54, Zondervan

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• When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

  Gabriel Byrne

  Country, America, Way

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• The total amount paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount lost in trading and investment advice, so net dividends to shareholders are zero. This is a very peculiar way to run a republic.

  Charlie Munger

  Running, Zero, Advice

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• The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

  Francis Bacon

  Order, Understanding, Degrees

  Francis Bacon (2016). “Novum Organum”, p.13, Jazzybee Verlag

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• We may all be a peculiar lot...often broke, often dissatisfied because we're not doing more and better work...but we know how to have a ball that makes the rest of the world seem square.

  Vincent Price

  Squares, Balls, World

  Vincent Price (2016). “I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography”, p.294, Open Road Media

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• The signal instances of Providential goodness which we have experienced and which have now almost crowned our labors with complete success demand from us in a peculiar manner the warmest returns of gratitude and piety to the Supreme Author of all good.

  George Washington

  Gratitude, Return, Demand

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson (1778). “The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799”

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• The rate of growth of the relevant population is much greater than the rate of growth in funds, though funds have gone up very nicely. But we have been producing students at a rapid rate; they're competing for funds and therefore they're more frustrated. I think there's a certain sense of weariness in the intellectual realm, it's not in any way peculiar to economics, it's a general proposition.

  Kenneth Arrow

  Thinking, Growth, Frustrated

  Source: www.minneapolisfed.org

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• ... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

  George Orwell

  Ideas, Age, Abandonment

  "Looking Back on the SpanishWar" sec. 4 (1942)

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