Notion Quotes - Page 8

• The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men--just not very important, if you know what I mean--doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.

  Edward Albee

  Women, Home, Mean

  Lee Krasner, John Cheim, Edward Albee, Lisa Liebmann, Stephen Westfall (1991). “Lee Krasner: paintings from 1965 to 1970”

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• Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

  David Hume

  Ocean, Gay, Thinking

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.4068, Delphi Classics

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• There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis , because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.

  Karl Barth

  Ideas, Prejudice, Guarantees

  Karl Barth (2004). “Church Dogmatics: The doctrine of the word of God (2 pts.)”, p.469, A&C Black

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• Playboy isn't like the downscale, male bonding, beer-swilling phenomena that is being promoted now by (some men's magazines). My whole notion was the romantic connection between male and female.

  Hugh Hefner

  Beer, Men, Males

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• At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

  William Least Heat-Moon

  Stupid, Sleep, Men

  William Least Heat Moon (1991). “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America”, Mariner Books

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• Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.

  Paul Klee

  Elements, Painting, Standing Out

  Paul Klee, Felix Klee (1968). “The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918”, p.374, Univ of California Press

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• Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Class, Smell

  Rudolf Arnheim (1990). “Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest”, p.163, Univ of California Press

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• Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.

  Robert Nozick

  Art, Humble, Needs

  Robert Nozick (1994). “The Nature of Rationality”, p.181, Princeton University Press

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• it must be plain also that we should not anxiously strive for riches and honors by relying on our own diligence or cleverness or by depending on the favor of men or by trusting in the notion of good luck, but that we should always expect the Lord to direct us to the lot he has provided for us.

  John Calvin

  Good Luck, Men, Honor

  John Calvin, Henry Van Andel (2004). “Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life”, p.42, Baker Books

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• The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.

  John Calvin

  Vices, Sometimes, Virtue

  John Calvin (2004). “Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life”, p.32, Baker Books

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• I have always wanted to play different kinds of stuff, but it's hard, first to find good material, and then to change people's perception of you so they'll let you do it. I mean, I would really like to play a poet, but once they get this notion of you as a street guy, it's hard to change that.

  Matt Dillon

  Mean, Play, People

  "Matter of Maturation? - Actor Swapping Rebellion for Responsibility in Recent Roles". Dayton Daily News, October 01, 1995.

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• The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.

  Edmund White

  Winning, Attention, Might

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.79, Pan Macmillan

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• The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

  Alan Lightman

  Stars, Views, Ideas

  Alan Lightman (2000). “Great Ideas in Physics”, p.4, McGraw Hill Professional

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• The way to "find" the perfect career is to give up the notion that you will ever find it, stumble across it, or that it will somehow magically find you, and to get to work designing it.

  Nicholas Lore

  Giving Up, Careers, Perfect

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• Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin.

  Michel Foucault

  Order, Differences, Giving

  Michel Foucault (2002). “Archaeology of Knowledge”, p.21, Psychology Press

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• No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

  Alexander Cockburn

  Horse, Cheer, Medicine

  "Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy" by Alexander Cockburn, www.counterpunch.org. August 30, 2008.

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• Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.

  Larry Wall

  People, Occasions

  Usenet article <199710211624.JAA17833@wall.org>, 1997.

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• the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of the ' English Constitution ' a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus-pocus, primogeniture, and pageantry!

  Richard Cobden

  Rights, Political, Church

  Richard Cobden (2007). “Richard Cobden's German Diaries”, p.24, Walter de Gruyter

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• I am changing the notion that actresses can’t have happy marriages

  Mercy Johnson

  Happy Marriage, Actresses

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• It's pretty easy to kind of lose your way. Having kids is really helpful. They kind of disabuse you of the notion of your greatness pretty quickly.

  Matt Damon

  Children, Kids, Greatness

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• I used to think I should like to be a bookbinder or bookseller it seemed to me a most delightful trade and I wished or thought of nothing better. More lately I thought I should be a minister, it seemed so serious and useful a profession, and I entered but little into the merits of religion and the duties of a minister. Every one dissuaded me from the notion, and before I arrived at any age to require a real decision, science had claimed me.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Real, Thinking, Decision

  William Stanley Jevons's reflections on his earlier life, written when he was 27 (December 1862); later published in "Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons" edited by Harriet A. Jevons, his wife (p. 12), 1886.

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• [Speaking about same-sex marriage] It's about familiarity, and I think the only reason they're uncomfortable with the notion of same-sex marriages is because they haven't come into contact with gay and lesbian couples enough to understand that it's about love - and that it is a civil right.

  Jennifer Beals

  Sex, Couple, Gay

  "Goodbye to Romance" by Rachel Shatto, www.curvemag.com. December 29, 2009.

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• One of the problems is that the notion of cancer has been so normalized. You hear about it so often, and it's not ok... it's not ok to normalize this disease. And with all of the pinkwashing that goes on where companies are selling products based on breast cancer month it's a lovely gesture, but consumers get so used to it that it becomes more normal.

  Jennifer Beals

  Cancer, Selling Products, Lovely

  "Jennifer Beals Speaks Out Against 'Pinkwashing'". www.nbcwashington.com. November 01, 2011.

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• The decay of the late, great country of South Africa is beginning to become apparent. The name of the Transvaal has been officially changed to 'Gauteng.' (One of our friends has suggested that in view of this its inhabitants in the future should be referred to as Oranggautengs.) ... And now there is a move afoot to wreck the Kruger National Park, one of the wonders of the world, on the notion that a good bit of its land was 'taken from the blacks.' This idea is somewhat akin to giving Yellowstone Park back to the Blackfeet.

  Jeff Cooper

  Country, Taken, Moving

  "Jeff Cooper's Commentaries". "Jeff Cooper's Commentaries", Vol. 3, No. 3, January 1995.

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• One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.

  Glen Duncan

  Optimism, Idiot, Madness

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