Shifting Quotes - Page 2

• The map of what we call reality is an ever-shifting mosaic of ideas.

  Marcelo Gleiser

  Reality, Ideas, Mosaics

  Marcelo Gleiser (2014). “The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning”, p.14, Basic Books

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• You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently -- what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? -- you're right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Thinking, Europe, Twenties

  Briefing at Foreign Press Center, Washington, D.C., 22 Jan. 2003

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• The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Art, Science, Law

  Alfred North Whitehead (1939). “An introduction to mathematics”

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• Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.

  Diane Ackerman

  Inspirational, Thinking, Self

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• Dazzling combinations are for the many, shifting wood is for the few

  Georg Kieninger

  Chess, Woods, Combination

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• Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Writing, Labels

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• Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.

  William Hazlitt

  Nature, Strong, Book

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1091, Delphi Classics

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• TV is shifting into the background of just being another appliance; it’s just a bigger screen.

  Hari Sreenivasan

  Just Being, Tvs, Bigger

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• I could not accept that organizational interpretations, based on shifting human reasoning, could ever be made equal in authority to the actual statements found in God's unchangeable Word.

  Raymond Franz

  Authority, Accepting, Made

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• Colored lights shone right across the northern sky, leaping and flaring, spreading in rainbow hues from horizon to zenith: blood red to rose pink, saffron yellow to delicate primrose, pale green, aquamarine to darkest indigo. Great veils of color swathed the heavens, rising and falling as light seen through cascading curtains of water. Streamers shot out in great shifting beams as if God had put his thumb across the sun.

  Celia Rees

  Fall, Light, Blood

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• From the Israeli perspective, the fear is that if pressure is off of Iran, Israel would be left having to accept the balance of power in the region significantly shifting toward Iran. It's not an existential threat, but it would definitely be a problem for Israel.

  Trita Parsi

  Israel, Iran, Perspective

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred - it is the amphetamine of its believers.

  Arianna Huffington

  Hatred, Promise, Quality

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• I'm 33 now and I seem to have hit a fitness plane. Shifting the wobbly bits isn't as easy as it used to be.

  Matthew Rhys

  Easy, Planes, Used

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• I look upon youth in admiration and admire them for their curiosity about the world, their shape shifting, their ideas about the future.

  Polixeni Papapetrou

  Ideas, Curiosity, Looks

  "Stories from the Other Side: Polixeni Papapetrou Exhibits at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, NYC". Interview with Caia Hagel, logger.believermag.com. April 29, 2013.

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• Studios and networks who ignore either shift - whether the increasing sophistication of storytelling, or the constantly shifting sands of technological advancement - will be left behind.

  Kevin Spacey

  Advancement, Sand, Storytelling

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• We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

  Cate Blanchett

  Country, Government, People

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• Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Empathy, Demand, Ethics

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• Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air. O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Peace, Hero, Air

  "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" l. 11 (1923)

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• In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Reading, Offering

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.

  Ada Lovelace

  Littles, Firsts, Reason Why

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• Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world.

  Sigmund Freud

  Frustration, Suffering, Technique

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Without core convictions to help us navigate, we stand uneasily on shifting sand, and we lack the solid footing with which to stage a life of principle and character. Today is a call to biblical conviction... What is needed today is a battalion of believers who follow Christ and stand for Him and His truth.

  Dennis Rainey

  Character, Biblical, Principles

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• He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

  Simone Weil

  Life, Men, Giving

  Simone Weil (2005). “War and the Iliad”, New York Review of Books

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• You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.

  Francis Schaeffer

  God, Would Be, Sand

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• Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Time, Mind, Sand

  E.L. Doctorow (2009). “Homer & Langley: A Novel”, p.175, Random House

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