Various Quotes - Page 34

• One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
  When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
  He mocks the guinea, challenges
  The crow, inciting various modes.
  The sparrow requites one, without intent.

  Wallace Stevens

  Challenges, Crow, Gulls

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.233, Vintage

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• Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known. This was the sound conclusion of the Academic sceptics, who were the least surly of philosophers.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Sound, Philosopher, Affair

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• Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Wine, Afterlife, Order

  Evelyn Waugh (1942). “Put out more flags”

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• When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.

  Marcel Proust

  Fashion, Horse, Children

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• Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

  Bertrand Russell

  Clever, Animal, Men

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• The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

  Franz Kafka

  Travel, Despair, Form

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.

  Walter Pater

  Law, Mind, Association

  Walter Pater (2011). “The Works of Walter Pater”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

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• Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

  James Boswell

  Hero, Character, Air

  James Boswell, Marlies K. Danziger (1989). “Boswell, the great biographer, 1789-1795”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

  Samuel Beckett

  Prayer, Poetry, Paradigm

  Samuel Beckett (2013). “Selected Poems 1930-1988”, p.10, Faber & Faber

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• The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind; and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Way, Authority, States

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.121, Indiana University Press

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• Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Women, Character, Views

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ch. 3 (1792)

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• At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Simple, Thinking

  Charles Darwin (1896). “Charles Darwin's Works: The life and letters of Charles Darwin... ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2v”

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• Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Squares, Cities, Symbolism

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• In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Writing, Years, Work Out

  "A History of Classical Physics: From Antiquity to the Quantum". Book by John Desmond Bernal, p. 116, 1997.

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• Almost everywhere we find . . . the use of various coercive measures, to rid ourselves as quickly as possible of the child withinus--i.e., the weak, helpless, dependent creature--in order to become an independent competent adult deserving of respect. When we reencounter this creature in our children, we persecute it with the same measures once used in ourselves.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Independent, Order

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.58, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live.

  Angelina Grimke

  Sex, Responsibility, Men

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• The ACLU's various policies regarding religious freedom in public schools are a revealing collection of anti-religious bias.

  F. LaGard Smith

  Christian, Religious, School

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• It will be a vast boon to mankind when we learn to prophesy the precise dates when cycles of various kinds will reach definite stages.

  Ellsworth Huntington

  Kind, Stage, Boon

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• English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Simple, Data, Native Language

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Roger F. Gibson (2004). “Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine”, p.93, Harvard University Press

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• The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions - social, economic, and political - of the common life.

  James Luther Adams

  Faith, People, Giving

  James Luther Adams (1976). “On being human religiously: selected essays in religion and society”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• Whatever expectations I had for myself, none of them have come to pass. I grew up thinking I was going to be an actor, which I am. But I thought I'd be a very serious sort of Shakespearean guy going from town to town having sex with various Juliets all over the country.

  Michael Ian Black

  Country, Sex, Thinking

  "The Best-Laid Plans Of Michael Ian Black". Interview with Royal Young, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 27, 2012.

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• Tokyo is like the New York of Asia. Although the people there are all basically from Japan, they celebrate what they like about various cultures.

  Pharrell Williams

  New York, Japan, People

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• I had written three books [Games of Throne], at that point, and each one of them was better than the other. At a certain point, as the books were doing well, I started getting interest from Hollywood, from various producers and studios who were initially interested in doing a feature film. I met with some of those people and I had phone conversations with some of those people, but I didn't see it being done as a feature film.

  George R. R. Martin

  Book, Phones, Games

  Source: collider.com

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• When you're battling against the minds of the studios and the money that can go into promoting larger budget films, it's very hard for a very small-budget Australian film to get a look in. You can get critically acclaimed and go to various film festivals around the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean the majority of people are going to hear about it.

  Hugo Weaving

  Mean, People, Mind

  Source: collider.com

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• [On The Waste Land:] Various critics have done me the honor to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

  T. S. Eliot

  Land, Honor, Criticism

  Quoted in The Waste Land, ed. Valerie Eliot (1971)

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