Prodigious Quotes - Page 2

• There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.

  Charles Dickens

  Sorrow, Despair, Tale Of Two Cities

  "A Tale of Two Cities".

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• Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.

  Rob Brezsny

  Blessing, Illumination, Miracle

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• Hitler is a prodigious genius.

  David Lloyd George

  Genius

  "Life with Lloyd George. The Diary of A. J. Sylvester 1931-45". Edited by Colin Cross, 1975.

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• Let us people who are so uncommonly clever and learned have a great tenderness and pity for the poor folks who are not endowed with the prodigious talents which we have.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Clever, People, Talent

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2008). “The Christmas Books of Mr. M.a.titmarsh: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.220, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully - and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives - the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, Men, Thinking

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.231, Penguin

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• I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

  Jodie Foster

  Children, Thinking, People

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• Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.

  Michael Pollan

  Technology, Animal, Diversity

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Order, Achievement, World

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.44, Penguin

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• If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

  Iain Banks

  Giving, Suggestions, Benefits

  "Excession (The Culture, Book 5)". Book by Iain Banks (Chapter 7 "Tier", Section III, p. 219), 1996.

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• When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Children, Writing, Elderly

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

  Richard Dawkins

  Jobs, Offering, Engineering

  "The Blind Watchmaker". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1986.

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• Prodigious actions may as well be done, by weaver's issue, as the prince's son.

  John Dryden

  Son, Issues, Done

  John Dryden, “Absalom And Achitophel”

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• Here is Christianity. Whence came it? It is a force in the world, a prodigious force. It has revolutionized society. It has lifted man out of himself. It has changed the face of the world. There it lies, imbedded in more than eighteen centuries of human history; and history of no mean sort, the best record of the race.

  Herrick Johnson

  Lying, Mean, Men

  Herrick Johnson (1881). “Christianity's Challenge: And Some Phases of Christianity Submitted for Candid Consideration”

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• The performance on the stage has its reasons in the performance induced in thousands of separate minds and this second performance is no less prodigious than the first.

  Domenico Gnoli

  Mind, Firsts, Reason

  Source: observer.com

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• The youth have a prodigious talent for inventing progressive ideas and alternative courses of action that elude the jaded, in-the-box minds of worn-down adults.

  Ian Somerhalder

  Ideas, Mind, Adults

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• Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Pregnancy, Tree, Live Your Life

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• There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell.

  Mark Twain

  Christian, Country, Degrees

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.132, Univ of California Press

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• My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Hate, Fall, Lines

  "My Autobiography". Book by Charlie Chaplin, September 1964.

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• Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Tape, Use

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• The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.

  Ron Chernow

  Art, Book, Character

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• If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work.

  Adolf Hitler

  Christian, Mean, People

  Adolf Hitler (1942). “The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939”

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• With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist-and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Gay, Bravery, Feminist

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• The same Being that fashioned the insect, whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible speck a system of ducts and other organs to perform its vital functions, created the enormous mass of the planet thirteen hundred times larger than our earth, and launched it in its course round the sun, and the comet, wheeling with a velocity that would carry it round our globe in less than two minutes of time, and yet revolving through so prodigious a space that it takes near six centuries to encircle the sun!

  Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

  God, Two, Space

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 274), 1895.

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• Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Writing, Discovery

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.526

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• Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!

  Horace Walpole

  Ignorance, Discovery, Ideas

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