Sheer Quotes - Page 4

• Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

  Randall Jarrell

  Clothes, Hair, Naked

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry", p. 331, 1969.

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• When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

  Mary McCarthy

  Pain, Memories, Thinking

  "How I Grew". Book by Mary McCarthy, 1987.

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• The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.

  Amos Oz

  Vocabulary, Israel, Ideas

  "Try a Little Tenderness". Haaretz Interview, March 17, 2000.

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• The sheer act of listening speaks volumes that even a great speech can't communicate.

  John C. Maxwell

  Listening, Speech, Speak

  John C. Maxwell (2007). “Leadership Promises for Your Week”, p.148, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Space, Events, Division

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• Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.

  Mortimer Adler

  Work, Self, Toil

  Mortimer Jerome Adler (1984). “Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

  Hannah Arendt

  Mean, Past, Goal

  Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.

  Rudolf Bultmann

  Acceptance, Past, Thinking

  "New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings". Book by Rudolf Bultmann (pp. 3-4), 1984.

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• [T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.:; Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

  George Orwell

  Men, Killing, Accepting

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”

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• The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

  H. L. Mencken

  Wise, Real, Men

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• Your skin is so soft. Smells like...-She had to tilt him to get this other arm free and hated knowing how badly she was hurting him as she did so. Sheer, unadulterated fear?

  Cherry Adair

  Hurt, Fear, Smell

  Cherry Adair (2011). “Hush”, p.171, Simon and Schuster

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• I have always felt it a great privilege to be in the theater, and I am grateful to all the playwrights who have given me so many wonderful roles. It's a terrifying business, but it has its compensations. Where else could I have found someone who for 50 years has given me sheer enchantment?

  Alfred Lunt

  Grateful, Found Someone, Years

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• The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.

  Emanuel Ax

  Reactions, Force, Audience

  "Alex Ross: Time to show our appreciation for classical music". Interview With Alex Ross, www.theguardian.com. March 8, 2010.

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• I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

  Ben Lerner

  Reading, White, Important

  Ben Lerner (2012). “Leaving the Atocha Station”, p.11, Granta Books

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• I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. That's why I buy Kinder Surprise. Horrible chocolate; nasty little toy: a double-whammy of disillusionment! Sometimes I eat the toy out of sheer despair.

  Bill Bailey

  Disappointment, Chocolate, Despair

  "Bewilderness". Documentary, Comedy, 2001.

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• One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.

  Joel Salatin

  Assets, Ecstasy, Farms

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• Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

  Dave Hickey

  Silence, Perversity

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• My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Taken, Typewriters

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• For sheer drama, few accounts of slavery match Solomon Northup's tale of abduction from freedom and forcible enslavement.

  Ira Berlin

  Drama, Slavery, Abduction

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• "The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Self, People

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• A gambit never becomes sheer routine as long as you fear you may lose the king and pawn ending!

  Bent Larsen

  Kings, Long, Routine

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• Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Art, Parent, Invention

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan (2014). “The Critic”, p.33, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• New things always have to experience difficulties and setbacks as they grow. It is sheer fantasy to imagine that the cause of socialism is all plain sailing and easy success, without difficulties and setbacks or the exertion of tremendous efforts.

  Mao Zedong

  Struggle, Effort, Sailing

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.104, Lulu.com

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• I tend to play better in the studio, no pressures, just sheer volume and alcohol.

  Colin Greenwood

  Play, Alcohol, Pressure

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• If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational.

  David Chipperfield

  Simple, Quality, Looks

  "David Chipperfield: perfect harmony" by Jonathan Glancey, www.theguardian.com. February 3, 2010.

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