Subtle Quotes - Page 9

• Nought is there in wealth That serves as bulwark 'gainst the subtle stealth Of Destiny and Doom.

  Aeschylus

  Destiny, Wealth, Stealth

  Aeschylus (1901). “Aeschylos: Agamemnon. The libation-pourers. Eumenides. Fragments. Rhymed choruses from Agamemnon, The libation-pourers, Eumenides”

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• It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.

  John Ruskin

  Hands, Landscape, Strange

  John Ruskin (1885). “Modern Painters: pt. 5. Of mountain beauty”

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• Science proceeds by successive answers to questions more and more subtle, coming nearer and nearer to the very essence of phenomena.

  Louis Pasteur

  Essence, Answers

  Etudes sur le biere Ch. VI, Sect. vi (transl. Rene J. Dubos)

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• My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Disappointment, Night, Land

  Charlotte Bronte (2013). “Jane Eyre”, p.371, Simon and Schuster

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• Faith is the subtle chain which binds us to the infinite; the voice of a deep life within, that will remain until we crowd it thence.

  Elizabeth Oakes Smith

  Faith, Voice, Deep Life

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• When values are contrasting, use subtle color. When values are subtle, use contrasting color.

  Harvey Dunn

  Color, Use, Values

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• Look slowly and hard at something subtle and small.

  Philip Pearlstein

  Looks, Observation, Hard

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• The edge of a painting is its frontier... where the artist negotiates his boundaries with the real world... where art begins and ends and where the eye enters and leaves the image. It determines, in an infinitely subtle number of ways, how you read a painting - which, unlike a book or a piece of music, has no pre-determined beginning or end.

  Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Art, Real, Book

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• Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

  George Eliot

  Love, Dark, Blue

  George Eliot (2006). “Middlemarch: Easyread Edition”, p.35, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Energy, Difficult, Concepts

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.70, Princeton University Press

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• The first principle, when you don't know anything about the subject of a thesis, is to let the candidate talk, nodding now and then with an ambiguous smile. He thinks you know, and are counting his mistakes, and it unnerves him... the second principle of conducting an oral, ... is to pretend ignorance, and ask for explanations of very simple points. Of course your ignorance is real, but the examinee thinks you are being subtle, and that he is making an ass of himself, and this rattles him.

  Robertson Davies

  Mistake, Real, Ignorance

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• Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance... to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man... The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent.

  James G. Frazer

  Philosophy, Men, Sight

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• Success: a marvelous stimulant, bubbling with inspiration and incitement. But for all except the few who are strong and steadfast, there lurks beneath the effervescence a subtle poison.

  Samuel Hopkins Adams

  Strong, Inspiration, Poison

  Samuel Hopkins Adams (2014). “Success”, p.817, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Human beings today are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.

  J. G. Ballard

  Wall, Cities, Tyrants

  "A User's Guide to the Millennium". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1996.

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• Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Errors, Enough, Ends

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

  Maurice Ravel

  Art, Writing, Should Have

  "Ravel: Man and Musician". Book by Arbie Orenstein, p. 126, 1975.

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• The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.

  Arthur Symons

  London, Canvas, Mist

  Arthur Symons (1998). “Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands”, p.162, Northwestern University Press

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• Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

  Roger Scruton

  Agree, Position, Commentators

  Roger Scruton (2012). “Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey”, p.34, A&C Black

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• Sex is of the same clay as Time! -- of the same clay Since both are in their essence but One-Way Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart And subtle biological counterpart.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Sex, Essence, Clay

  Wyndham Lewis (1979). “Wyndham Lewis: collected poems and plays”

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• If the character is getting mad, getting upset or getting turned on, you're getting to see that in the facial tones and the skin tones. That's what I enjoy about acting. It can be very subtle, like that.

  Michael Rooker

  Character, Skin Tone, Mad

  Source: collider.com

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• The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taup.

  Peter Greenaway

  Thinking, White, Skins

  "Fictional character: Philip Emmenthal". 8 1/2 Women, 1999.

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• Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

  Michio Kaku

  Philosophy, Reality, Sophisticated

  Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.317, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Christ was either the grandest, guiltiest of impostors, by a marvelous and most subtle refinement of wickedness, or He was God manifest in the flesh.

  Herrick Johnson

  Wickedness, Flesh, Christ

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

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• "The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

  John Cowper Powys

  Art, Book, Culture

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 134, 1929.

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• More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

  Patrice Pavis

  Wall, Communication, Flirting

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