Touchstones Quotes - Page 2

• the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future - is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did.

  Hannah Arendt

  Morning, Freedom, Decision

  Hannah Arendt (1978). “Willing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• One of the goals of life is to try and be in touch with one's most personal themes-the values, the ideas, styles, colors that are the touchstones of one's own individual life, its real texture and substance.

  Gloria Vanderbilt

  Life, Real, Color

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• Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology ... But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. And for me, what happened in the woods that day is one of these.

  Haruki Murakami

  Memories, War, Struggle

  "Kafka on the Shore". Book by Haruki Murakami, 2002.

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• It was remarked yesterday that a numerous representation was necessary to obtain the confidence of the people. This is not generally true. The confidence of the people will easily be gained by a good administration. This is the true touchstone.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Yesterday, People, Administration

  Alexander Hamilton (1850). “The works of Alexander Hamilton; compris. his corresp. and his polit. and official writings, excl. of the federalist, civil and military. Ed. by John C. Hamilton”, p.440

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• Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming me.

  Carl Rogers

  Ideas, Return, Becoming

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Do certain events in our lives leave a permanent mark, freezing a piece of us in time, and that becomes a touchstone that we measure the rest of our lives against?

  Mary E. Pearson

  Events, Pieces, Mark

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• The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.

  Carl Jung

  Inspirational, Objectivity, Capacity

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1969). “The structure and dynamics of the psyche”

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• Over the years, a lot of rappers - Lil' Wayne, Ice Cube - have used my name in their songs. I'm a real touchstone of history.

  Rodney King

  Song, Real, Rapper

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.

  Matthew Arnold

  Expression, Class, Mind

  Matthew Arnold (1973). “English Literature and Irish Politics”, p.168, University of Michigan Press

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• You get notes from two studios and a network instead of a studio and a network. Although we early on forced them all to do their notes together. I make them all talk to each other first. Because we went through the pains of getting notes from ABC and at the time it was Touchstone, that were opposite - and then CBS notes that were opposite again. So it was, you guys are going to have to work it out as to what is the most important note.

  Edward Allen Bernero

  Pain, Opposites, Two

  Source: deadline.com

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• Tyler Perry's brand is faith, family and this whole thing that I've built, while my company, 34th Street Films, is like Disney's Touchstone. We can do anything. People don't know what to expect from me yet.

  Tyler Perry

  People, Film, Company

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• The question of art songs always came up with Gastr del Sol. I think Jim O'Rourke had it right in being clear that there's a tradition of art song - Ives being the touchstone for the two of us - and what we do doesn't belong to it. It wasn't important to advance those kinds of distinctions, but clearly he thought it was fanciful for anyone to speak of what we were doing as being in that tradition.

  David Grubbs

  Song, Art, Thinking

  Interview with Nick Hallett, logger.believermag.com. May 16, 2013.

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• Touchstone watched, suddenly conscious that he probably only had five seconds left to be alone with Sabriel, to say something, to say anything. Perhaps the last five seconds they ever would have alone together. I am not afraid, he said to himself. "I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind.

  Garth Nix

  Love You, Mind, Say Anything

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• Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

  Rob Sheffield

  America, Twenties, Would Be

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• I don't write songs that don't affect me on some level, because I figure if I am not moved by it, if its not something that I have a longing to celebrate or to be reminded of, if it doesn't affect me, then how can I possibly think it is going to affect somebody else. My touchstone is write something that matters.

  Amy Grant

  Song, Writing, Thinking

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• After finishing the first draft, I work for as long as it takes (for two or three weeks, most often) to rework that first draft on a computer. Usually that involves expansion: filling in and adding to, but trying not to lose the spontaneous, direct sound. I use that first draft as a touchstone to make sure everything else in that section has the same sound, the same tone and impression of spontaneity.

  Kent Haruf

  Writing, Two, Long

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• Sit not down without assurance. Get alone, and bring thy heart to the bar of trial; force it to answer the interrogatories put to it; set the qualifications of the saints on one side, and the qualifications of thy soul on the other side, and then judge what resemblance there is between them.

  Richard Baxter

  Religious, Mistake, Heart

  "The Saint's Everlasting Rest: Or, A Treatise on the Blessed State of the Saints in Heaven".

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• The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions--showing up at work, paying the bills--you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge sadness in ourselves or those close to us--better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Strong, Jobs, Responsibility

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.59, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We are all the sons or daughters of immigrants - some more recent than others - but all dedicated to the triumph of an idea that serves as the touchstone of what it means to be an American. This America is the only America that we have hitherto known - if being conservative has anything to do with conserving the principles of our past, then no conservative has any business bashing legal immigration.

  Jack Kemp

  Daughter, Mean, Son

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• In many ways [those middle-aged black ladies] my touchstone, because they are what I meant when I talked about the audacity of hope.

  Barack Obama

  Black, Way, Audacity

  Source: www.theatlantic.com

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• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Truth, Science

  Philosophical Essays (1910) no. 4

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• At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

  Robert Kennedy

  Heart, Men, Practice

  Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address at the University of Capetown, South Africa, www.mtholyoke.edu. June 6, 1966.

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• The essence of Vanderbilt is still learning, the essence of its outlook is still liberty, and liberty and learning will be and must be the touchstones of Vanderbilt University and of any free university in this country or the world. I say two touchstones, yet they are almost inseparable, inseparable if not indistinguishable, for liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.

  John F. Kennedy

  Country, Freedom, Responsibility

  Vanderbilt University 90th Anniversary Convocation Address, delivered 18 May 1963, Vanderbilt University Stadium, Nashville Tennessee

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• A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Determination, Science, Astrology

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.235, Penguin

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• That's why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don't like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It's unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you're messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that.

  Eric Weiner

  Past, Way, Likes

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