Vague Quotes - Page 10

• An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

  Steven Pinker

  Events, Narrative, Way

  "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Book by Steven Pinker, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2011.

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• You will perceive that economy, scientifically speaking, is a very contracted science; it is in fact a sort of vague mathematics which calculates the causes and effects of man's industry, and shows how it may be best applied.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Men, May, Causes

  William Stanley Jevons, Harriet A. Jevons (1886). “Letters & Journal of W. Stanley Jevons, Ed”

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• As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking. ... I am tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of that poor unknown quantity Thinking is really due to its ubiquitous twin-brother Talking.

  Vernon Lee

  Brother, Believe, Thinking

  Vernon Lee (1904). “Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life”

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• Sundays are terrible because it is clear that there is no one in charge of the world. And this knowledge leave you drifting around, grappling with unfulfilled expectations and vague yearnings.

  Sheila Ballantyne

  Sunday, Expectations, World

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• Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Space, Goal, Age

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• One starts gambling for a joke, out of curiosity, as a little challenge to fortune. One goes on, pricked to the quick by delusions, excited by vague desires that grow. Woe to you if you win anything - an AMBO, a small TERNO! It is all up with you, for your chance of winning seems certain. ... It is the devil's money going back to hell.

  Matilde Serao

  Winning, Gambling, Challenges

  Matilde Serao (2017). “The Land of Cockayne (Matilde Serao) (Literary Thoughts Edition)”, p.304, epubli

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• An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it.

  Ayn Rand

  Responsibility, People, Forgiving

  Ayn Rand (1997). “Letters of Ayn Rand”, p.476, Penguin

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• Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Grief, Passion, Heart

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• The tension of a mysterious danger is even more unbearable than danger itself. People hate the vacuum of an unknown situation. They want security. They even prefer war to the insecure expectation of a war with its threat of enemy surprise. This vague fearful expectation acts on their fantasies. They anticipate all kinds of mysterious dangers; they begin to provoke them. It is the evocation of fear and danger in order to escape the tension of insecurity.

  Joost Meerloo

  Hate, War, Insecure

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• I do not like to talk about the future. I don't like to be one of those people. It's so easy to have a very vague idea and say, oh, computers will be 3D-ish and then 10 years later I'll say I predicted it 10 years ahead. I don't think that's honest and I don't think that's valid and worth anything.

  Steve Wozniak

  Thinking, Years, Ideas

  "A Chat with Computing Pioneer Steve Wozniak". "Talk of the Nation" with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. September 29, 2006.

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• At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn't garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture.

  Rolf Potts

  Sacrifice, Mass Culture, Simplicity

  Rolf Potts (2002). “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel”, p.15, Ballantine Books

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• There comes a moment during which almost every girl or boy falls into melancholy; they are tormented by a vague inquietude which rests on everything and finds nothing to calm it. They seek solitude; they weep; the silence to be found in cloister attracts them: the image of peace that seems to reign in religious houses seduces them. They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish.

  Denis Diderot

  Girl, Fashion, Religious

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• It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!

  Charles Dickens

  Beautiful, Death, Memories

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• Intuition is a combination of insight and imagination that was once attributed to spiritual communication. Mathematicians call it 'fuzzy logic,' drawing conclusions from vague or subjective input. The mind becomes aware without the direct intervention of reasoning. Once you can imagine something you can begin the process of creating it. Executives use intuition to make many product, investment, and hiring decisions, even if they deny it. Success in business may depend on an accurate gut.

  Jennifer James

  Spiritual, Business, Communication

  Jennifer James (2012). “Thinking In The Future Tense”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• The gospel of cheerfulness, I had almost said the gospel of amusement, is preached by people who lack experience to people who lack vitality. There is a vague impression that the world would be a good world if it were only happy, that it would be happy if it were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial recreation - that recreation for which we are now told every community stands responsible - were provided for its entertainment.

  Agnes Repplier

  Happiness, People, Community

  Agnes Repplier (1916). “Counter-currents”

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• It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Children, Hero

  John Ruskin, Louisa Caroline Tuthill (1867). “Precious Thoughts: Moral and Religious. Gathered from the Works of John Ruskin, A. M.”, p.77

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• To try to stop war by placing before men's eyes the terrible suffering involved will never succeed, because men are willing (in their thoughts and imaginations at least) to face any kind of suffering when motivated by noble aims like the vague and tremendous concept of freedom ... Or, in their humility (or sloth - who knows?) men are quite willing to leave decisions to others 'who know more about it than we do.

  Dorothy Day

  War, Humility, Eye

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• The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners; but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader.

  Edward Gibbon

  Simple, History, Interesting

  Edward Gibbon (1828). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.410

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• True fighters dare face the sorrows of humanity, and look unflinchingly at bloodshed. What sorrow and joy are theirs! But the Creator's common device for ordinary people is to let the passage of time wash away old traces leaving only pale-red bloodstains and a vague pain; and he lets men live on ignobly and amid these, to keep this quasi-human world going.

  Lu Xun

  Pain, Men, People

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• The planet Mars -- crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms -- has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.

  David Grinspoon

  Long, Mars, Invasion

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• On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.

  A. E. Housman

  Drinking, Beer, Two

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• There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.

  William Ernest Henley

  Character, Men, Two

  William Ernest Henley (1906). “Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation: Literature”

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• Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity.

  Maya Angelou

  Adults, Teens, Pressure

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.208, Modern Library

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• Usually I'm trying to turn something around or turn it inside out and see what's underneath. I know that probably sounds incredibly vague but I never set out to be likeable or funny or anything like that. I'm just trying to tell the story in the best way that I can and serve the writer because it's really about the writer.

  Mary-Louise Parker

  Trying, Sound, Stories

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• Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Spiritual, Lying, Self

  Yogananda (Paramahansa) (1977). “Self-realization”

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