Vividness Quotes

• Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

  Epictetus

  Feet, Waiting, Trying

  "Discourses". Book by Epictetus. Book II, Chapter 18,

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• Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.

  Richard Holloway

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Art

  "God's Priorities for Your Life for Teens". 2006.

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• Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

  Rose Tremain

  Real, Research, Surroundings

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• Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.

  Italo Svevo

  Fear, Past, Men

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• The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.

  George Henry Lewes

  Artist, Vision, Tests

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Heart, Light, May

  1851 Twice- Told Tales,'The Haunted Mind'.

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• Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Powerful, Healing, Mindfulness

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• For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.

  George Eliot

  Sorry, Passion, Self

  'Middlemarch' (1871-2) bk. 3, ch. 29

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• The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Real, Character, Mean

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.204, Library of America

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• I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

  James M. Cain

  Country, Writing, Character

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• The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

  John French Sloan

  Eye, Artist, Light

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• The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

  John Irving

  Jobs, Memories, Cities

  John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

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• The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.

  James Redfield

  Beautiful, Thinking, Color

  James Redfield (2009). “Celestine Insights - Limited Edition of Celestine Prophecy and Tenth Insight”, p.31, Hachette UK

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• In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Dream, Reality, Brain

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.49, Google Publishing

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• In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Heart, Dark, Grieving

  1851 Twice- Told Tales,'The Haunted Mind'.

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• Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Thinking, Self, Perception

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• A. Douglas Stone, a physicist who has spent his life using quantum mechanics to explore striking new phenomena, has turned his considerable writing skills to thinking about Einstein and the quantum. What he finds and makes broadly understandable are the riches of Einstein's thinking not about relativity, not about his arguments with Bohr, but about Einstein's deep insights into the quantum world, insights that Stone shows speak to us now with all the vividness and depth they had a century ago. This is a fascinating book, lively, engaging, and strong in physical intuition.

  Peter Galison

  Strong, Book, Writing

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• Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive.

  E.F. Benson

  Dream, Memories, Book

  E. F. Benson (2014). “Delphi Works of E. F. Benson with the Complete Mapp and Lucia Novels (Illustrated)”, p.6990, Delphi Classics

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• For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to the average man are merely phantoms) projected themselves with a bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality denied to facts.

  May Sinclair

  Men, Average, Imagination

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• This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, innefective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Individuality, Secret, Special

  Olaf Stapledon (2017). “Star Maker”, p.26, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Life, Dream, Memories

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky's Collections”, p.46, 谷月社

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• The here, the now, and the individual, have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet, and - from time immemorial - the woman. In the small circle of the home she has never quite forgotten the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream. They are the essence of life itself.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Women, Home, Artist

  "Gift from the Sea".

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• Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.

  John Dewey

  Teaching, Responsibility, Imagination

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.11, Courier Corporation

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• I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.

  Frances Mayes

  Southern, Speech, Metaphor

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• No prosaic description can portray the grandeur of 40 miles of rugged mountains rising beyond a placid lake in which each shadowy precipice and each purple gorge is reflected with a vividness that rivals the original.

  Herbert Hoover

  Lakes, Purple, Mountain

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