Clarity Quotes - Page 8

• I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

  Albert Camus

  Heart, Echoes, Absurdity Of Life

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.21, Vintage

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• Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.

  Laurie R. King

  Daughter, Distance, Eye

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• Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

  Douglas Adams

  Children, Maturity, Order

  Douglas Adams (2016). “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

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• I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Caring, News, Obvious

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.56, Pan Macmillan

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• A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path [in Mediated Modeling page 43]

  Donella Meadows

  Vision, Pages, Path

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• Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.

  Nicole Krauss

  Hurt, Memories, Fall

  Nicole Krauss (2003). “Man Walks Into a Room”, p.138, Anchor

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• The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

  Dorothy Parker

  Beautiful, Thinking, Boys

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• When I recollect her, I see a long list of colors, but it's the three in which I saw her in the flesh that resonate the most. Sometimes I manage to float far above those three moments. I hang suspended, until a septic truth bleeds toward clarity. That's when I see them formulate: THE COLORS RED: [rectangle] WHITE: [circle] BLACK: [swastika] They fall on top of each other. The scribbled signature black, onto the blinding global white, onto the thick soupy red.

  Markus Zusak

  Fall, Color, Circles

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• The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

  Cory Doctorow

  Stupid, Past, Opposites

  Cory Doctorow (2010). “Little Brother”, p.294, Macmillan

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• He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

  Alice Sebold

  Children, Two, Moments

  Alice Sebold (2014). “The Lovely Bones: Picador Classic”, p.137, Pan Macmillan

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• After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

  Susan Minot

  Should Have, Perspective, Would Be

  Susan Minot (2010). “Evening”, p.17, Vintage

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• To me extreme things are like miracles. There is nothing as boring as a person who is just okay. But I could easily live in a world populated with these disjunctive, bizarre things... I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.

  Joel-Peter Witkin

  Confusion, Miracle, World

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• Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.

  Harlan Coben

  Reality, Thinking, Insanity

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• Once in a while you get a moment of clarity - an inspiration - and they don't come that frequently.

  Paul Reiser

  Inspiration, Moments, Moments Of Clarity

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• There is the refusal of style and the refusal of sentimentalism, there is this desire for clarity.

  Luc Delahaye

  Style, Desire, Refusal

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• [My] goal as an artist is to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision.

  Roger Ballen

  Artist, Goal, Vision

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• The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Stupidity, Honest, Sincere

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• Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I'm willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I'm willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Giving Up, Important, Sanity

  "Lucky me" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. January 9, 2009.

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• I will not pray clarity for you. Clarity is the crutch of the Christian. But I will pray trust for you, that your trust will increase.

  Mother Teresa

  Christian, Praying, Increase

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• When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality.

  Sogyal Rinpoche

  Reality, Discipline, Meditation

  FaceBook post by Sogyal Rinpoche from Feb 12, 2017

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• I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.

  Irving Penn

  Lying, Fall, Simple

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• The people with the best sense of what is essential to a community, of what gives and maintains its spirit, are often doing very humble, manual tasks. It is often the poorest person - the one who has a handica[p, is] ill or old - who is the most prophetic. People who carry responsibility must be close to them and know what they think, because it is often they who are free enough to see with the greatest clarity the needs, beauty and pain of the community.

  Jean Vanier

  Pain, Humble, Responsibility

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• Cultivate clarity, strength, vitality and power from natural, beautiful and organic living foods.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Beautiful, Vitality, Natural

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• Pope John Paul II spoke with a lot of clarity and consistency. But he always spoke with immense compassion. He's the one who said the best way to love somebody is to tell them the truth. So, he did that well.

  Chris Matthews

  Compassion, Consistency, Way

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

  Charles Baxter

  Long, Feelings, Details

  "Off the Page: Charles Baxter". Live Chat, www.washingtonpost.com. October 16, 2003.

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