Prodigious Quotes - Page 3

• It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Art, Joy

  8 Copy quote

• Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Delicacy, Landscape, Affluence

  30 Copy quote

• Norway, too, has noble prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!

  Samuel Johnson

  Noble, Lapland, Norway

  In James Boswell 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' (1791) vol. 1, p. 425 (6 July 1763)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are like dogs, cats, cows, rats ... What separates us from them and from the remaining matches against mammals is negligible. To have the same diseases. Rats spread plague like us, but we are just as contagious as them. And the dogs get diabetes, like we do, and get cancer, like us. And age, like us. And die, like us. Why then the biblical claim that man is the king of creation? Perhaps because only man has developed spoken language, the words, wherein lies its prodigious ability to lie.

  Fernando Vallejo

  Dog, Kings, Cancer

  9 Copy quote

• Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.

  Whitney Chadwick

  Art, Responsibility, Privilege

  Whitney Chadwick (2007). “Women, Art, and Society”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A band's only unique thing is its chemistry, especially if none of you are prodigious players or particularly handsome. The one thing you have is your uniqueness, so we hold on to that.

  Chris Martin

  Unique, Player, Handsome

  54 Copy quote

• ... indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the colossuses and majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematieks; and the civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker.

  Thomas Browne

  Wise, Nature, Hands

  "Sir Thomas Browne's Works: Including His Life and Correspondence".

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For those who do not make the transition to a matured, more spiritual self-will reason will indeed be no more than rationalization. Here is a prodigious parallel: just as in antiquity the dysdaimonic personality could not appreciate how his mentality was bound in by his characterological (banausic, doulic) biases, so in modernity the facile or abstractivist rationalist cannot comprehend how his "rationality" merely slavishly subserves his appetites, delusions, preconceptions, ideologies, etc.

  Kenny Smith

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Self

  4 Copy quote

• Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

  Salvador Dali

  Morning, Awakening, Today

  13 Copy quote

• Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. 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. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities - a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Hate, Fall, Voice

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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree...Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.

  David Foster Wallace

  Real, Coffee, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• Avoid fancy words....If you admire fancy words, if every sky is beauteous, every blonde curvaceous, every intelligent child prodigious, if you are tickled by discombobulate, you will have bad time Reminder 14.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Children, Intelligent, Sky

  9 Copy quote

• I wouldn't even begin to presume that the talent of an able actor is anything like the talents of a prodigious musician.

  Juliet Stevenson

  Musician, Actors, Able

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well, my love,” said Alexia with prodigious daring to Lord Maccon, “shall we?” The earl started to move forward and then stopped abruptly and looked down at her, not moving at all. “Am I?” “Are you what?” She peeked up at him through her tangled hair, pretending confusion. There was no possible way she was going to make this easy for him. “Your love?” “Well, you are a werewolf, Scottish, naked, and covered in blood, and I am still holding your hand.” He sighed in evident relief. “Good. That is settled, then.

  Gail Carriger

  Moving, Hair, Blood

  4 Copy quote

• It is true I gained muscular vigour, but with it a prodigious appetite, which I was compelled to indulge, and consequently increased in weight, until my kind old friend advised me to forsake the exercise.

  William Banting

  True Friend, Exercise, Old Friends

  William Banting (1864). “Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public”, p.12

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers

  Peter Singer

  Mean, Animal, Gambling

  10 Copy quote

• Inside was where she lived, physically and mentally. She resided in the horn of plenty of her own prodigious mind, fertilized by inexhaustible curiosity.

  Tim LaHaye

  Curiosity, Mind, Introvert

  Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins (2013). “The Rising: Antichrist is Born / Before They Were Left Behind”, p.10, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• You asked for a loving God: you have one... The consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Sex, Children

  6 Copy quote

• America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

  e. e. cummings

  Sarcastic, Mistake, Moving

  1927 'Why I Like America', in Vanity Fair, May.

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

  David Hume

  Nature, Children, Science

  David Hume (1874). “A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, p.452

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

  Charles Darwin

  Men, Quality, Noble

  Charles Darwin (1875). “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”, p.165

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.

  Thomas Malthus

  Life, Struggle, Science

  Thomas Robert Malthus (1959). “Population: The First Essay”, p.17, University of Michigan Press

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy.

  William Shakespeare

  Hate, Romance, Enemy

  'Romeo And Juliet' (1595) act 1, sc. 5, l. [142]

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup."

  Jacques Monod

  Science, Squares, Roots

  22 Copy quote

• Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

  Cathleen Schine

  Book, Writing, Pie

  4 Copy quote