Characteristics Quotes - Page 23

• The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.

  Vinton Cerf

  Success, Impact, Design

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• The purpose of the present study is not as it is in other inquiries, the attainment of knowledge, we are not conducting this inquiry in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, else there would be no advantage in studying it. For that reason, it becomes necessary to examine the problem of our actions and to ask how they are to be performed. For as we have said, the actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.

  Aristotle

  Order, Would Be, Purpose

  Aristotle (1962). “Nicomachean Ethics”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Science, art, learning and metaphysical research all have their proper functions in life, but if you seek to blend them, you destroy their individual characteristics until, in time, you eliminate the spiritual, for instance, from the religious altogether.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Spiritual, Religious, Art

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.3223, Manonmani Publishers

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• Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Music, Philosophy, Useless

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• I'd say that, to be a good deal maker, you have to have three basic characteristics - timing, timing, and timing.

  Richard Armitage

  Three, Timing, Makers

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• I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that's one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature.

  Jonas Salk

  Moving, Artist, Discovery

  Academy of Achievement interview, May 16, 1991.

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• Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:
  
  1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.
  
  2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.
  
  3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Writing, Successful, Order

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, Raphael Soyer (1981). “Lost in America”, Doubleday Books

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• It was the first and most striking characteristic of Socrates never to become heated in discourse, never to utter an injurious or insulting word -- on the contrary, he persistently bore insult from others and thus put an end to the fray.

  Epictetus

  Insulting, Firsts, Ends

  Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (2016). “Stoic Six Pack: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion”, p.64, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse - all of it slipped away.

  Peter Hessler

  Ambition, Pride, Organization

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• There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.

  Gertrude Stein

  Art, Pulse, States

  Gertrude Stein (2017). “Delphi Complete Works of Gertrude Stein (Illustrated)”, p.6132, Delphi Classics

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• Probably the most distinctive characteristic of the successful politician is selective cowardice.

  Richard Harris

  Successful, Politician, Cowardice

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• I find humor to be the most attractive characteristic, but I certainly won't cancel anything out, considering when you love someone you love someone, and sometimes you just can't explain it.

  Zoey Deutch

  When You Love Someone, Someone You Love, Sometimes

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• Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.

  Marilyn Johnson

  Memories, Skills, Organization

  Marilyn Johnson (2010). “This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All”, p.10, Harper Collins

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• Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Hypocrisy, Politics, Moral

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2013). “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics”, p.95, Westminster John Knox Press

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• In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact.

  A.J. Ayer

  Philosophy, Character, Enquiry

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• In the spiritual domain, criticism is love turned sour... If criticism becomes a habit, it will destroy the moral energy of the life and paralyze the spiritual force... Whenever you are in a critical temper, it is impossible to enter into communion with God. Criticism makes you hard and vindictive and cruel, and leaves you with the flattering unction that you are a superior person. It is impossible to develop the characteristics of a saint and maintain a critical attitude.

  Oswald Chambers

  Love, Spiritual, Attitude

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• The characteristic of a disciple is not that he does good things, but that he is good in his motives, having been made good by the supernatural grace of God.

  Oswald Chambers

  Grace, Doe, Good Things

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “My Utmost for His Highest Classic Edition”, p.421, Discovery House

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• Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

  William Deresiewicz

  Art, Adventure, Imagination

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• The leading and characteristic features of the morbid state to which I would direct your attention are, anaemia, general languor and debility, remarkable feebleness of the heart's action, irritability of the stomach, and a peculiar change of the colour in the skin, occurring in connection with a diseased condition of the suprarenal capsules.

  Thomas Addison

  Change, Heart, Skins

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• There is no permanent status quo in nature; all is the process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure. But man is the first being yet evolved on earth which has the power to note this changefulness, and, if he will, to turn it to his own advantage, to work out genetic methods, eugenic ideas, yes, to invent new characteristics, organs, and biological systems that will work out to further the interests, the happiness, the glory of the God-like being whose meager foreshadowings we the present ailing creatures are.

  Hermann Joseph Muller

  Men, Ideas, Eugenics

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• We weren't getting a fair deal on the budget and I wasn't going to have it. There's a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people - this is our characteristic. There's not a strand of equity and fairness in Europe - they're out to get as much as they can. That's one of those enormous differences. So I tackled it on that basis.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Europe, Differences, People

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• The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.

  Jerome Bruner

  Children, Play, Adults

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• What is necessary for 'the very existence of science,' and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself. We look, and we see what we find, and we cannot say ahead of time successfully what it is going to look like. ... It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Math, Science, Mind

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• To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

  Arthur Eddington

  Cat, Math, Would Be

  Arthur Eddington (1933). “The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900-1931”, p.103, Cambridge University Press

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• Self-production: the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained. It is a natural process which supports the quest for structure, process renewal and integrity.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Integrity, Learning, Self

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