Vague Quotes - Page 12

• Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

  Emile Zola

  People, Atmosphere, Gathering

  Emile Zola (1984). “The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass..., I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was seized with a violent tremour.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Glasses, Appearance, Violent

  Edgar Allan Poe (2014). “The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Illustrated)”, p.846, BookRix

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• As the idea imparted by the term Cataclysm, Catastrophe, or Revolution, is extremely vague, and may comprehend any thing you choose to imagine, it answers for the time very well as an explanation; that is, it stops further inquiry. But it also has had the disadvantage of effectually stopping the advance of science, by involving it in obscurity and confusion.

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Science, Ideas, Imagination

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• The '60s in London obviously brought about the explosion of music, the Beatles especially, and then the Rolling Stones and other forms of music, and then fashion and photography and films - kitchen-sink dramas we called them at that time, which was our nouvelle vague in Britain, films that talk about real life.

  Charlotte Rampling

  Photography, Fashion, Drama

  Interview with Zoë Wolff, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 31, 2014.

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• God's justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is 'too kind' to punish the ungodly has become deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws everyday nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings, we dare not so trifle with our eternal future.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Practice, Justice, Forever

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1965). “The Knowledge of the Holy”, p.95, Fig

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• The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous-and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It's exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Exercise, Safety, Environmental

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• To experience the satisfaction and enjoyment of success in life, a definitive goal is essential. Many people fail at this vital point. The goal must be definite and specific, not in any sense vague or fuzzy. And to prove attainable, its image needs to be sharpened and resharpened continually, so that it stands out vividly in your thoughts. You must know, at all times, precisely and for certain what it is you want to accomplish and achieve. Strong and organized purposefulness toward a definite objective will focus your powers into a strong motivation in attainment of your goal.

  Norman Vincent Peale

  Strong, Motivation, People

  Norman Vincent Peale (1970). “Norman Vincent Peale's treasury of courage and confidence”

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• It is not intuitive ease I am after, but rather a point of view which is sufficiently definite to clear up some difficulties, and to be criticized in rational terms. (Bohr's complementarity cannot be so criticized, I fear; it can only be accepted or denounced - perhaps as being ad hoc, or as being irrational, or as being hopelessly vague.)

  Karl Popper

  Science, Views, Ease

  Karl Popper, W.W. Bartley, III (2013). “Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics: From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.103, Routledge

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• I studied cinema at the university so I had a very classical approach to it. I studied all those silent films, and then the films from the 1940's, the Nouvelle Vague, the late Hollywood films. Now I realize, as a young actor, that it's one of my duties to actually be aware of what is today's industry and today's next big directors.

  Gaspard Ulliel

  Silent Films, Hollywood Films, Today

  Source: collider.com

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• I do have aspirations when it comes to directing, I suppose, but in a sort of a vague way. It would probably come about if I found a project that I really felt passionate about.

  Guy Pearce

  Passionate, Way, Projects

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change... Savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.

  Ezekiel Emanuel

  Cutting, Thinking, Doctors

  "Deadly Doctors" by Betsy McCaughey, nypost.com. July 24, 2009.

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• A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.

  Cesare Pavese

  Decision, Action, Reason

  Cesare Pavese (1961). “This Business of Living: Diary: 1935-1950”, London : P. Owen

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• Religions are vague, of course. This means that they are easy to follow -you can interpret their prescriptions as you like. but it also means that it is easy to slip up -there is always some injunction you are violating. But Islam has no religious establishment - no popes, no bishops - that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Religious, Islamic, Mean

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• Memory is a tenuous thing. . . . flickering glimpses, blue and white, like ancient, decomposing 16mm film. Happiness escapes me there, where faces are vague and yesterday seems to come tied up in ribbons of pain. Happiness? I look for it intead in today, where memory is something I can still touch, still rely on. I find it in the smiles of new friends, the hope blossoming inside. My happiest memories have no place in the past; they are those I have yet to create.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Memories, Pain, Past

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• At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

  Terry Pratchett

  Fun, Past, Color

  Terry Pratchett (2012). “The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld”, p.24, Harper Collins

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• It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up.

  Mark Twain

  Dream, Struggle, Past

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.1257, GENERAL PRESS

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• Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

  John Dewey

  Names, Matter, Void

  John Dewey (2015). “How We Think: Top American Authors”, p.136, 谷月社

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• To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Maturity, Battle

  Maya Angelou (2009). “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, p.267, Random House

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• ...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

  Guy de Maupassant

  Dream, Art, Strange

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• People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define Reality. But what does it mean to be “correct” or “true”? Merely vague concepts… Their Reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?

  Masashi Kishimoto

  Mean, Reality, People

  "Naruto". Manga by Masashi Kishimoto, 1999 - 2014.

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• but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

  Philip K. Dick

  Weed, Fall, Pride

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• But if it couldn't be love and it didn't feel like lust, what was it? Like? Did he like her? Of course, he did, but that word didn't capture his feelings, either. It was a little too... vague and soft around the edges. People liked ice cream. People liked to watch television. It meant nothing, and it didn't come close to explaining why, for the first time, he felt the urge to tell someone the truth.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Ice Cream, People, Feelings

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• You like being vague, don't you? (Amanda) It was a choice of being a Dark-Hunter or a prophet. Personally I like the slash-and-kill stuff much more than prayers and the lotus position. (Acheron)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Prayer, Dark, Choices

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2007). “Night Pleasures”, p.282, Macmillan

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• Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars and all roses are as white as my pain.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Stars, Pain, Heart

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• I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories.

  Charles de Lint

  Song, Couple, Memories

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