Defects Quotes - Page 6

• I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently.

  Werner Herzog

  Thinking, Able, Irony

  "Herzog on Herzog". Book by Werner Herzog, 2002.

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• Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.

  Charles Babbage

  Eye, Effort, Mind

  Charles Babbage (1989). “Scientific and Miscellaneous Papers”

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• Well I think it is often the case that the biggest bullies take what they know to be their own defects, as they see it, and they put them right on someone else and then they try and destroy the other and that's what Voldemort does.

  J. K. Rowling

  Thinking, Bully, Trying

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• I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

  Emile M. Cioran

  People, Seems

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Light, World

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.230

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• She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.

  Truman Capote

  Real, Triumph, Admitting

  Truman Capote (2012). “Breakfast at Tiffany's”, p.38, Vintage

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• The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.

  Jean Lorrain

  Real, Men, Law

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• I will now claim - until dispossesed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. ... The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects- devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. ... He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.

  Mark Twain

  Character, Home, Two

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• Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.

  Margaret Sanger

  Children, Mistake, Eugenics

  Margaret Sanger, H. G. Wells (2016). “The Pivot of Civilization”, p.134, Read Books Ltd

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• Endeavor to be patient in bearing with the defects and infirmities of others, of what sort 'soever they be; for that thyself also has many failings which must be borned with by others.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Be Patient, Failing, Endeavor

  St. Augustine, Dr. Howard Taylor, Mrs. Howard Taylor, Apostolic Fathers, J. Oswald Sanders (2010). “Moody Classics Complete Set: Includes 19 Classics of the Faith in a Single Volume”, p.1542, Moody Publishers

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• The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice - all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization - if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works... this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life - he who is the Gospel personified.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Faith, Country, Art

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• Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Nature, Children, Home

  Charles Horton Cooley (1909). “Two Major Works: Social Organization. Human Nature and the Social Order”, Glencoe, Ill., Free P

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• For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge.

  W. Edwards Deming

  Zero, Knowledge, Fire

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• If you love a person, you love him in his stark reality, and refuse to shut your eyes to his defects and errors.

  John Macmurray

  Love, Eye, Reality

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• The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann...for the estimation of temperature from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects.

  Steve McIntyre

  Past, Errors, Data

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• Don’t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful; there is no beatitude for the despairing.

  Amelia Barr

  Cheerful, Mastery, Trials

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• And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them.

  Jane Austen

  Hate, Propensity

  Jane Austen (2015). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.76, BoD – Books on Demand

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• I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.

  Anne Lamott

  Crazy, Sorrow, Ordinary

  Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.37, Penguin

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• A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Witty, Children, Clever

  Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman (2009). “Don Quixote”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Time, Age, Faults

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• The defect of equality is that we desire it only with our superiors.

  Henry Becque

  Equality, Desire, Superiors

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• Because of some defect in my motor skill, I can never COMPLETELY wrap [gifts]....If I had been an ancient Egyptian in the field of mummies, the lower half of the Pharaoh's body would be covered only by scotch tape.

  Dave Barry

  Christmas, Skills, Scotch

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• Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so they'd start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing that in our lives others cannot bring.

  André Aciman

  Breakup, Dream, Party

  André Aciman (2010). “Eight White Nights: A Novel”, p.5, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does his present life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Spiritual, Inspirational Life, Men

  "Moody Classics Complete Set: Includes 19 Classics of the Faith in a Single Volume".

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• Attainment is a poor measure of capacity, and ignorance no proof of defect.

  Cyril Burt

  Ignorance, Ignorant, Poor

  Cyril Burt (1922). “Mental And Scholastic Test”

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