Astonishing Quotes - Page 6

• And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. (4)

  Sheldon B. Kopp

  Feel Better, Want, Patient

  SHELDON B KOPP (1972). “IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD KILL HIM THE PILGRIMAGE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY PATIENTS”

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• It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

  James A. Baldwin

  Mirrors, Order, People

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• If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Art, Race, Blue

  James Howard Kunstler (2007). “The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Cent”, p.21, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Simple, Clouds, Views

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Inexperienced players have a fear of this piece, which seems to them enigmatic, mysterious, and astonishing in its power. We must admit that it has remarkable characteristics which compel respect and occasionally surprise the most wary players.

  Eugene Znosko-Borovsky

  Player, Knights, Chess

  Eugene Znosko-Borovsky (2013). “The Art of Chess Combination”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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• Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Children, Light, Rose

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• Christ taught an astonishing thing about physical death: not merely that it is an experience robbed of its terror but that as an experience it does not exist at all. To "sleep in Christ," like one that wraps the drapery of his couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

  William C. Bryant

  Dream, Lying, Sleep

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• If you could see a photograph of what it took to make an advertising photograph - things you don't think about, like the photo assistant carefully arranging the meatballs - the degree of unnaturalness would be astonishing. Yet it produces an image that looks natural, and is orchestrated to provoke basic emotional responses.

  Sandy Skoglund

  Emotional, Thinking, Assistants

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• It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.

  Franz Kafka

  Average, Sometimes, Life Is

  Franz Kafka (2016). “Collected Works (Complete Editions: The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Trial, ...)”, p.175, Franz Kafka

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• One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

  J. K. Rowling

  Reality, People, Greek

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• It was astonishing to see how angry Cersei could wax over accusations she knew perfectly well to be true.

  George R. R. Martin

  Accusation, Being True, Wells

  George R. R. Martin (2003). “A Clash of Kings: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Two”, p.220, Bantam

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• Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.

  Richard Dawkins

  People, Comforting, Doe

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, Years, Omnipotence

  Bertrand Russell, John Greer Slater, Peter Köllner (1996). “A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42”, p.185, Psychology Press

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• Who knows better than you what it means to have a commander-in-chief who lived his entire life, who lived throughout the entire Cold War, and doesn't know what the nuclear triad is? It's absolutely astonishing. And so it's terrific to have Joe Dunford and you know, perhaps John Bolton and other people in positions of trust.

  Bret Stephens

  War, Mean, People

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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• In most of the world, we have only small remnants of the wildlife that once existed. Africa has the most astonishing wildlife still.

  Patrick Bergin

  World, Wildlife, Remnants

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• I think in terms of best players, I would have to say Ronaldo, the real Ronaldo, the Brazilian one. I was fortunate enough to have a year with him at Real Madrid. He was at the end of his career and was probably half the player he was. But, in his prime, he was quite simply astonishing.

  Michael Owen

  Real, Thinking, Player

  Source: www.insidefutbol.com

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• It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Life Is, States

  Samuel Johnson (1835). “Sermons”, p.308

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• Nevertheless, just as I believe that the Book of Scripture illumines the pathway to God, so I believe that the Book of Nature, with its astonishing details-the blade of grass, the Conus cedonulli, or the resonance levels of the carbon atom-also suggest a God of purpose and a God of design. And I think my belief makes me no less a scientist.

  Owen Gingerich

  Believe, Book, Thinking

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• When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Anger, Sound, Calm

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• Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.

  Carl Sagan

  Dream, Spiritual, Atheist

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• It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

  William James

  Educational, Philosophy, Literature

  William James (2013). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.42, Courier Corporation

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• I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Men, Fiction

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Lectures and biographical sketches”

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• I'm trying to think of - knock on wood - how young people would feel today if our president and our leaders were shot at. But... our young people are being killed at an astonishing rate, and times seem dark.

  John Cho

  Dark, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Profoundness, genius, spontaneity, merit, nobility, ingenuity, voice propriety, feeling, discernment, sensibility, good taste, great tone, rightness, courtliness, vivacity, boldness, style, freshness, harmony, perfection, imagination, purity, correctness. The greatest writer of all times. God's most astonishing creation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Religious, Voice, Imagination

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• Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]

  George Wald

  Life, Running, Stars

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