Subtlety Quotes - Page 3

• He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

  Don DeLillo

  Pain, Self, World

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.24, Pan Macmillan

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• Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Mean, Men, Law

  Thomas Jefferson “Selected letters of Thomas Jefferson”, Lulu.com

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• Life has to be in the moment, spontaneous and venerable. There isn't any winning or losing. Life itself, as it flowers in depth and subtlety, is the reward, and it isn't always an easy or fun process. We must learn to see that the issue of happiness is irrelevant. The relevant quest is the expansion of consciousness.

  Richard Moss

  Fun, Flower, Winning

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• Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Dream, School, Blessing

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• For a good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it seem almost like a live teacher.

  Bertrand Russell

  Teacher, Math, Seems

  "The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell".

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• Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action.

  Greg Thomas

  Music, Integrity, Expression

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• Faces in the everyday impress us as hives of subtlety. That impression must be sharpened in photography, which discloses only a microsecond of the face's behaviour, immersed in a social process.

  Max Kozloff

  Photography, Everyday, Behaviour

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• Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Imagination, World, Thanks

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• There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.

  C. S. Lewis

  Variation, Obvious, Norm

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• Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Suicide, Spiritual, Passion

  Charles Spurgeon (2011). “All of Grace (Authentic Original Classic): An urgent Word with Those Who Are Seeking Salvation by the Lord Jesus Christ”, p.63, Destiny Image Publishers

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• I like songs with a lot of heart and feeling and subtlety.

  Norah Jones

  Song, Heart, Feelings

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• For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

  Francis Bacon

  Nature, Science, History

  Francis Bacon (2010). “Bacon's Advancement of Learning and the New Atlantis”, p.107, Lulu.com

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• If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.

  Steve Martin

  Hurt, Pain, Heart

  "Shopgirl". Book by Steve Martin, October 11, 2000.

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• Synchronicities, epiphanies, peak, and mystical experiences are all cases in which creativity breaks through the barriers of the self and allows awareness to flood through the whole domain of consciousness. It is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.

  F. David Peat

  Moving, Creativity, Past

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• You seem to know a lot about it," she said. "And you do subtleties." "Yeah. Like I've always wanted to destroy the Nine Worlds while committing suicide." "Well, there's no need to be rude," protested Sif.

  Joanne Harris

  Suicide, Rude, Needs

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• I think that sexiness should be in the subtleties.

  Rachel Zoe

  Sexy, Thinking, Should

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• Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.

  Jack Kerouac

  Beautiful, Eye, New Orleans

  Jack Kerouac (1976). “On the Road”, p.241, Penguin

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• How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant. It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness.

  Eric Hoffer

  Writing, Vices, Obscurity

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• Fraternity has subtleties.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Fraternity

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa (1982). Translated by Richard Zenith, p. 53, 2006.

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• Although it takes a long warm-up for an eight to swing, on an erg such subtleties don't matter. For me the sound alone raised my pulse to 120. Tying my feet into the stretchers increased it to 180. My maximum pulse was 200. I didn't need a warmup. I needed a sedative.

  Stefan Kieszling

  Eight, Swings, Feet

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• To become aware of the subtlety of nature you need to be alert. The moment you become alert you become still... thinking subsides. That is actually a higher state of consciousness than thinking.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Thinking, Needs, Consciousness

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• Ayrton Senna was an extraordinary racing driver. His skills, craft, subtlety and courage were of such magnitude that he dwarfed his generation of drivers.

  Ron Dennis

  Skills, Racing, Generations

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• I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Opposites, Issues, Opponents

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.378, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Draw with the brush. Carve the form. Don't be carried away by subtleties of modeling and nice pigmentation at the expense of losing the form.

  John French Sloan

  Nice, Losing, Form

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• I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.

  Robbie Robertson

  Mean, Guitar, Style

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