Surprise Quotes - Page 35

• With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

  Tim Parks

  Book, Different, Best Experiences

  Tim Parks (2012). “Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Search for Health and Healing”, p.13, Rodale

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• I may … surprise you - but I shall not deceive you.

  Eugene Talmadge

  May, Deceiving

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• If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad… DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise.

  Richard Stallman

  Fun, Animal, Practice

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• Science is about predictions based on predictable fact. Life is about surprises based on the unpredictable reality.

  Ori Hofmekler

  Reality, Facts, Life Is

  Ori Hofmekler (2010). “Maximum Muscle, Minimum Fat: The Secret Science Behind Physical Transformation”, p.14, North Atlantic Books

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• The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Caring, Thinking

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• Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness; now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. Some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes, but has created evergreens.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Winter, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2799, Delphi Classics

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• For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.

  Bo Burnham

  Levels, Comedy, Unexpected

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• One mark of good verse is surprise

  John Betjeman

  Mark, Verses

  John Betjeman (2007). “Sweet Songs of Zion: Selected Radio Talks”

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• I could cut silhouettes almost as soon as I could manage to hold a pair of scissors. I could paint, too, and read, and recite; but these things did not surprise anyone very much. But everybody was astonished about the scissor cuts, which seemed a more unusual accomplishment. The silhouettes were very much praised, and I cut out silhouettes for all the birthdays in the family. Did anyone warn me as to where this path would lead? Not in the least; I was encouraged to continue.

  Lotte Reiniger

  Cutting, Accomplishment, Path

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• The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

  Max Lerner

  Astonishment, Kingdoms, Gates

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• Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.

  Philip Jenkins

  Islamic, Scripture, Quran

  "Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran?". "All Things Considered" with Barbara Bradley Hagerty, www.npr.org. March 18, 2010.

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• Everyday Leo Messi surprises us with something different.

  Dani Alves

  Everyday, Messi, Different

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• Give Bush 10 minutes before you hammer him. I think he's going to surprise people. He sounds simple and uncomplicated, but maybe that's what we need now. He's not as stupid as everyone thinks. I like the guy.

  James Woods

  Stupid, Simple, Thinking

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• The notion that the UN is some sort of dispassionate body that, “does right” and just pursues everybody’s best interests is a fantasy. Each individual nation will be pursuing their best interests. That’s the normal behavior of nation-states. It shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should we go to them for permission to do what’s in our national interests.

  Mona Charen

  Doe, Body, Politics

  Interview with John Hawkins, rightwingnews.com. February 3, 2012.

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• Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every class: "Stay awake." "Pay attention." But paying attention is no simple matter. It requires us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and masks. It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open to surprise.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Past, Simple, Class

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• As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

  Emmet Gowin

  Photography, Done, Serious

  "Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'". Interview with Sarah Moroz, www.theguardian.com. May 29, 2014.

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• Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.

  George Gilder

  School, Successful, Opposites

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• No person is free until he or she is free at the center. When we let go there, we are free indeed. When the self is renounced, then one stands utterly disillusioned, apart, asking for nothing. If anything comes to us, it is all sheer gain. Then life becomes one constant surprise.

  E. Stanley Jones

  Letting Go, Freedom, Self

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• Love seizes us suddenly, without giving warning, and our disposition or our weakness favors the surprise; one look, one glance, from the fair fixes and determines us.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Love, Giving, Warning

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• Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.

  David Salle

  Connections, Fluidity, Painting

  Interview with Robert Rosenblum, www.lehmannmaupin.com.

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• There's a sureness to good writing even when what's being written about doesn't make all that much sense. It's the sureness of the so-called seat of an accomplished horseback rider or a sailor coming about in a strong wind. The words have both muscle and grace, familiarity and surprise.

  Anne Bernays

  Strong, Writing, Wind

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• One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us and whereto our passions transport us. But those which by long habit are rooted in a strong and anchored in a powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies, which diverts us here and there.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Forgiveness, Strong, Powerful

  "Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection".

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• While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Food, People, Pork

  Fran Lebowitz (2011). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, p.127, Vintage

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• Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

  Muriel Spark

  Death, Life Is, Should

  Muriel Spark (2014). “Memento Mori”, p.94, New Directions Publishing

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• There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

  James Fallows

  Environmental, Problem, Graves

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