Canon Quotes - Page 2

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Leslie Fiedler

Depressing, Culture Religion, Criticism

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My fan fiction is canon.

Dwayne McDuffie

Fans, Fiction, Comic Book

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Every religion ... has rituals, practices, holy writings or traditions, etc. Nothing like that has ever developed from Atheism. There are no holy men, holidays or holy books and no agreed-upon canons of faith. In fact, the only thing you can get some Atheists to agree upon is that there is no god.

Darrel Ray

Atheist, Book, Writing

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Since the purpose of reading, of education, is to become good, our most important task is to choose the right books. Our personal set of stories, our canon, shapes our lives. I believe it is a law of the universe that we will not rise above our canon. Our canon is part of us, deeply, subconsciously. And the characters and teachings in our canon shape our characters--good, evil, mediocre, or great.

Oliver DeMille

Believe, Book, Teaching

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English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.

Thorstein Veblen

Law, Effort, Acquisition

Thorstein Veblen (2012). “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, p.255, Courier Corporation

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Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed.

Bell Hooks

Art, Believe, Reading

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If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.

Paul L. Maier

Jesus, Easter, Morning

Paul L. Maier (1991). “In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church”, p.203, Kregel Publications

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The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Validation, Rejection, Doe

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The world is facing a new networked, digital lifestyle, and we will ensure that Canon remains ahead of the game.

Fujio Mitarai

Games, World, Digital

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As both a local resident and a parent with a CF-afflicted child, I'm thankful for companies like Canon, Chase and Outback who believe that giving back to the community is critical to their role as corporate citizens.

Boomer Esiason

Children, Believe, Cfs

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Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

Mark Helprin

Beautiful, Hands, Play

Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.433, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Art, Book, Forgiving

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The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears - and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition.

Mina Loy

Eye, Glasses, Pouring

Mina Loy, Maeera Shreiber, Keith Tuma (1998). “Mina Loy: woman and poet”, Natl Poetry Foundation

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After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. ...a canon of nature's laws, strategies, and principles...
Nature runs on sunlight.
Nature uses only the energy it needs.
Nature fits form to function.
Nature recycles everything.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature banks on diversity.
Nature demands local expertise.
Nature curbs excesses from within.
Nature taps the power of limits.

Janine Benyus

Running, Nature, Law

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I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.

Abraham Lincoln

Children, Cutting, Opportunity

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His best-known piece is probably his "Canon in D." He also has 'Hexachordium Apollonis', which is also quite famous.

Johann Pachelbel

Pieces, Fame, Known

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A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

Joan D. Chittister

Loyalty, Religious, Law

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That beautiful sister of mine was an overwhelming and volatile mixture. One had the feeling that she'd been shot from a canon and showered her sparks over an incredulous world with no thought or care where they fell, a carbon copy of father. She was like some silvery comet who streaked through life with daring speed, the wellspring of which was an inner confidence that I deeply admired. At times, particularly in childhood, I was intimidated by her but she dictated from an aura of affection for me that was never threatening.

Joan Bennett

Beautiful, Father, Childhood

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English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.

Paula Gunn Allen

Views, Ethnicity, Discipline

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Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them.

Noam Chomsky

Country, Religious, Children

Talk at the University of Houston, Texas, October 18, 2002.

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One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect.

F. F. Bruce

Book, Church, Lists

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I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

Michel Leiris

Writing, Doe, Steel

Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

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One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith.

Lancelot Andrewes

Father, Writing, Two

Lancelot Andrewes (1967). “Sermons”

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Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel.

Leon Uris

Cousin, Brother, Father

"The Haj". Book by Leon Uris, 1984.

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The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

Joseph Campbell

Inspirational, Integrity, Fall

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