Variety Quotes - Page 18

• Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?

  Ian Fleming

  Animal, Breathing, Smoking

  Ian Fleming (1992). “Goldfinger”, Chivers North Amer

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• Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Language, Said, Irrational

  Robert A. Heinlein (2014). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.227, Hachette UK

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• Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

  Aldous Huxley

  Powerful, Ignorance, Knowledge

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

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• Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine-tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck the surface with a noice like a wet kiss, and vanished instantly. With that instinct which prompts one, when depressed, to wallow in every circumstance of gloom, Peter leaned sadly against the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great war; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  War, Kissing, First Love

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• Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

  Laurence Sterne

  Reading, Sunshine, Winter

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• no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death

  D. H. Lawrence

  Love You, Love Is, Long

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.2390, Delphi Classics

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• I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces — a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast — could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second.

  J. D. Salinger

  Beautiful, Art, Lying

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• Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?

  Walt Disney

  Nature, Lying, Flower

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• The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Creativity, Diversity, Making Love

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• I know of no other practise which will make one more attractive in conversation than to be well-read in a variety of subjects. There is a great potential within each of us to go on learning. Regardless of our age, unless there be serious illness, we can read, study, drink in the writings of wonderful men and women. It is never too late to learn.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Writing, Men, Serious Illness

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• Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.

  Michael Pollan

  Yield, Turkeys, America

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• Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

  John Twelve Hawks

  Animal, Significant Change, Eras

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• It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.

  H. G. Wells

  Animal, Law, Perfect

  H. G. Wells “The Time Machine”, Games by CC

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• I thought about how unlikely it was I would ever meet any guy,fall in love, get married, have babies. Especially since I was going to spend the rest of my life in the cellar, where, in the not too distant future, I'd turn into a toadstool. I hoped I'd be the poisonous variety.

  Susan Beth Pfeffer

  Baby, Falling In Love, Guy

  Susan Beth Pfeffer (2015). “The Life As We Knew It Collection”, p.563, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• So you see,' said Stepan Arkadyich, 'you're a very wholesome man. That is your virtue and your defect. You have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to be made up of wholesome phenomena, but that doesn't happen. So you despise the activity of public service because you want things always to correspond to their aim, and that doesn't happen. You also want the activity of the individual man always to have an aim, that love and family life always be one. And that doesn't happen. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Character, Men, Light

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• I didn't want to understand. Bert had been thrilled that the police wanted to put me on retainer. He told me I would gain valuable experience working with the police. All I had gained so far was a wider variety of nightmares.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Police, Want, Gains

  Laurell K. Hamilton (2002). “The Laughing Corpse: An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel”, p.22, Penguin

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• But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

  Charles Darwin

  Lying, Believe, Theory Of Evolution

  Charles Darwin (2012). “On the Origin of the Species and The Voyage of the Beagle”, p.162, Graphic Arts Books

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• It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.

  Hugh Laurie

  Pain, Fifteen, Costumes

  Hugh Laurie (1998). “The Gun Seller”, p.109, Simon and Schuster

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• All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Light, Shadow, Life Is

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)”, p.38, Vij Books India Pvt Ltd

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• Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

  Greg Graffin

  Tragedy, Comfort, Narrative

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• Belgarath turned back to Senji. “All right,” he said. “The Sardion came to Zamad. How?” “It’s said to have fallen out of the sky.” “They always do,” Beldin said. “Someday I’d like to see something rise up out of the earth –just for the sake of variety.

  David Eddings

  Sky, Earth, Sake

  David Eddings (2010). “Sorceress Of Darshiva: (Malloreon 4)”, p.147, Random House

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• ...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.

  H. G. Wells

  Men, Voice, Swearing

  H. G. Wells (2012). “The Invisible Man”, p.29, Courier Corporation

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• Today Lord I am going to do my best with Your help and for Your glory. I realize that there are many different people in the world with a variety of opinions and expectations. I will concentrate on being a God-pleaser and not a self-pleaser or man-pleaser. The rest I leave in Your hands lord. Grant me favor with You and with men and continue transforming me into the image of Your dear Son. Thank You Lord.

  Joyce Meyer

  Son, Men, Self

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• Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

  E. B. White

  Country, Jobs, Tasks

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• I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Thanksgiving, Running, Sweet

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.373, Penguin

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