Tension Quotes - Page 8

• The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Movement, Force

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.66, MIT Press

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• The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos the "intellectual sacrifice" is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of "science" and the sphere of "the holy" is unbridgeable.

  Max Weber

  Religious, Sacrifice, Men

  Max Weber (2009). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.154, Routledge

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• Interactive management requires open, honest, and tension-free relationships with others. You do this by negotiating relationships and sharing, so that everybody wins.

  Tony Alessandra

  Winning, Relationships With Others, Management

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• Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Determination, Memories

  "Art and Other Serious Matters". Book by Harold Rosenberg. Chapter: "Being Outside", p. 273, 1985.

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• The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Struggle, Vocabulary, Profound

  "Art & Other Serious Matters" by Harold Rosenberg, University of Chicago Press, (p. 316), 1985.

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• Request an apology when you believe you deserve one, but don't get in a tug of war about it. Instead, be a role model and tender a genuine apology yourself when an apology is due. Your willingness to apologize can be contagious and models maturity for your partner. Also, your non-apologizing partner may use a nonverbal way to reconnect after a fight, defuse the tension, or show you he's in a new place and wants to repair a disconnection. Accept the olive branch however it's offered.

  Harriet Lerner

  War, Believe, Apology

  "Waiting For An Apology? Don’t Hold Your Breath" by Harriet Lerner, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 5, 2012.

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• Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being its theory intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Light, Practice, Negative

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.133, Beacon Press

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• The trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public?

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Mistress, Lines, Cabinets

  "Whether it's hacking or the NSA, some of us don't accept that privacy is dead". www.theguardian.com. October 31, 2013.

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• Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Interesting, Acting, Watches

  Samuel R. Delany (2010). “Dhalgren”, p.358, Hachette UK

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• Our world is integrated to an unprecedented degree, while the global political awakening is injecting into interstate relations an intense amount of tension, emotion, even irrationality, which could cumulatively produce circumstances that preclude an effective and genuinely shared universal response to new global problems.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Our World, Political, Degrees

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• Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.

  Hans Morgenthau

  Successful, Law, Issues

  Hans Joachim Morgenthau (1993). “Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace”, McGraw-Hill Humanities Social

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• The techno-industrial system is exceptionally tough due to its so-called "democratic" structure and its resulting flexibility. Because dictatorial systems tend to be rigid, social tensions and resistance can be built up in them to the point where they damage and weaken the system and may lead to revolution. But in a "democratic" system, when social tension and resistance build up dangerously the system backs off enough, it compromises enough, to bring the tensions down to a safe level.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Levels, May, Safe

  "Hit Where It Hurts" by Theodore Kaczynski, "Why The System Is Tough", point 4, 2002.

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• Another intruder that plagues our good health is sleeplessness. Insomnia is much like constipation in that stress or nervous tension can bring it on or aggravate it until there's almost no coping with it. That's why you find sleeping pills in so many medicine cabinets next to the laxatives.

  Jack LaLanne

  Stress, Sleep, Insomnia

  Jack Lalanne (1995). “Revitalize Your Life After Fifty”, Hastings House Pub

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• It wasn't a case of me sitting down and thinking, right then, what shall I do with my life? Airline pilot? Plumber? Guitar manufacturer? Writer .... yeah, writer. I've always loved writing, from a very early age--I guess I was writing my first stories when I was still in single digits. It progressed, and the love of writing grew in my mind and is still growing. Doing it full-time, there are different stresses and tensions, and the business side of it comes to the fore sometimes. But I still love it, and I'm always thankful that I can do what I do and make a living from it.

  Tim Lebbon

  Stress, Writing, Thinking

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• There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?

  John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Fall, Writing, Animal

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• Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.

  John Carroll

  Religious, Men, Comfort

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.78, Taylor & Francis

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• The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Greatness, Men, Discipline

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.344, Modern Library

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• A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  Powerful, Past, Ethos

  "My Dearest Daughter: A letter from the Death Cell". Book by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, p. 15, 2007.

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• There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

  China Mieville

  Death, Knowing, Doors

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• A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.

  Jack Vance

  Men, Rope, Break

  "To Live Forever". "Emphyrio" by Jack Vance, (Chapter XVI, section 3), 1956.

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• It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Literature, World, Born

  Jeff Vandermeer (2007). “City of Saints and Madmen”, p.261, Spectra

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• ... While nervous tension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension.

  Gabor Mate

  Pain, Stress, Feelings

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• ... our diagnosis and treatment of of tension myositis syndrome represent yet another instance of what is possible when the power of the mind is mobilized for healing the body. It's not magic; it is as scientific as the appropriate use of antibiotics, for science encompasses everything that is true in nature.

  John E. Sarno

  Pain, Healing, Magic

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• Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

  Douglas Coupland

  Pain, Feel Good, Special

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• When coming up with Wonder Woman cover designs, sometimes people will pitch ideas to me, either the writer or the editor. And it's interesting, because I know they're not trying to, but they end up pitching things that end up feeling like damsel-in-distress covers, where the tension comes from her needing to be rescued somehow. And it's something I immediately push back against.

  Cliff Chiang

  Book, Editors, Ideas

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