Peculiar Quotes - Page 7

• My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Religious, Art, Sacrifice

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• The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

  Carl Sagan

  Christian, Ideas, Perfect

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.212, Ballantine Books

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• I got letters from people that have had peculiar psychic experiences, experiences with the dead - sometimes fairly tranquil experiences and sometimes very terrifying experiences. I do believe that a lot of them are sincere. I do believe, also, that some of them may be misguided. But, I think the majority of them have experienced something.

  Stephen King

  Believe, Thinking, Psychics

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

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• No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Reading, Age, Stories

  Interview with Benjamin Cohen, believermag.com. September 1, 2009.

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• So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Philosophical, Men

  "What Do We Have To Teach Plato?". "Here And Now" with Jeremy Hobson, news.stlpublicradio.org. April 22, 2014.

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• A lot of things in history are timing, and it's very peculiar because in retrospect things [and] people can look more brilliant or necessary than they actually were.

  Robert Greene

  People, Looks, Retrospect

  "Big Think Interview With Robert Greene". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. December 14, 2009.

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• My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.

  George A. Romero

  Doe, Care, Stuff

  Interview with Noel Murray, film.avclub.com. February 12, 2008.

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• Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Laughter, Laughing, Able

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• The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son ofearth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him. It is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Strength, Real, Son

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.361

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• The legislator must be in advance of his age.
  Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events.... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Sight, Mind, Age

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1994). “Papers”

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• Perhaps the most remarkable thing I found about the Bible was how flexible it is. Here we have a book written 3,000 years ago, with bizarre stories, peculiar laws, erratic deity, and yet we are able - through argument, selective reading, and desire - to find a powerful framework of laws and moral reasoning that have built a very successful society. So this Bible, for all its oddities and flaws, serves us beautifully after all these years.

  David Plotz

  Powerful, Book, Reading

  "Biblically Speaking". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

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• TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Stars, Acting, Actors

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

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• You can have lots of feelings and have the same feelings over and over again. It isn't the recognizable feelings that make so much difference. It is sensing the edge, the unclear, what you don't recognize, but it is there, the bodily discomfort that the problem makes, which has meaning; it has its own peculiar quality, implicity, it is complex, it has in it everything that relates to that problem, but not in a way you can say.

  Eugene Gendlin

  Differences, Feelings, Making A Difference

  Source: www.focusing.org

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• As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them.

  Tench Coxe

  Kings, Father, Men

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• Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.

  Dave Hickey

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. November 2007.

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• The peculiar fascination which the speeding train has for us comes from the evident progress it is making toward its definite goal ahead.

  Roderick E. Stevens

  Goal, Progress, Fascination

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• And this exclusion of "women's work" continues, despite United Nations data gathered since 1975 (the beginning of the UN Decade for Women) indicating that women globally contribute two-thirds of the world's work hours, for which - given the imbalanced, unjust, and truly peculiar nature of the accounting characteristic of dominator economics - they globally earn only one-tenth of what men do and own a mere one-hundredth of the world's property.

  Riane Eisler

  Men, Data, Two

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• Virtue is only a conflict by which we get the mastery of our failings; that, by which every man proves his peculiar power of understanding the will and spirit of God, is only a silent working of the inner man.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher

  Men, Understanding, Mastery

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• As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Mother, School, Boys

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• Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.

  J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

  Inspirational, Men, Air

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• For all its apparent tolerance, the USA maintains a peculiar balance between the forces of capitalism and democracy. To achieve this I feel sure the country is guided by some hidden force; an organization working in secrecy, powerful enough to dispose of the Kennedys and of anyone else who gets in its way.

  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

  Country, Powerful, Usa

  "The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77". Book by Asadollah Alam, p. 169, 1991.

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• In truth, it requires not only a large intellect, but a large heart, to judge with becoming charity of the peculiar temptations of riches.

  Shirley Bassey

  Heart, Judging, Temptation

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• The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.

  John von Neumann

  Levels, Facts, Opinion

  John Von Neumann, F. Bródy, Tibor Vámos (1995). “The Neumann Compendium”, p.618, World Scientific

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• Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.

  Mason Cooley

  Asceticism, Way, Cultivating

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• Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Philosophical, Expectations

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience: Top American Literary”, p.131, 谷月社

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