Degrees Quotes - Page 25

• All men are fools, and with every effort they differ only in the degree.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Men, Effort, Fool

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• In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very center of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law.

  Horace Bushnell

  Order, Law, Elements

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• if an author would have us feel a strong degree of compassion, his characters must not be too perfect.

  Anna Letitia Barbauld

  Strong, Character, Compassion

  Anna Letitia Barbauld (2001). “Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.251, Broadview Press

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• a fair degree of literacy of speech ... is increasingly rare in politicians and not necessarily regarded as an asset.

  Rae Foley

  Speech, Literacy, Politician

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• We are not responsible for our feelings, as we are for our principles and actions. ... Our care, then, should be to look to our principles, and to avoid all anxiety about our emotions. Their nature can never be wrong where our course of action is right, and for their degree we are not responsible.

  Harriet Martineau

  Anxiety, Feelings, Looks

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• The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.

  Harriet Martineau

  Honesty, Hunger And Thirst, Politics

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.57

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• Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomen. To the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality.

  Oriana Fallaci

  Power, Leader, President

  "The Agitator: Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam" by Margaret Talbot, in The New Yorker, June 5, 2006.

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• Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

  Djuna Barnes

  Uncles, Hard Work, Mean

  Djuna Barnes (2016). “Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth: The Early Works of Djuna Barnes”, p.190, Courier Dover Publications

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• However benevolent may be the intentions of Providence, they do not always advance the happiness of the individual. Providence has always higher ends in view, and works in a pre-eminent degree on the inner feelings and disposition.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Views, Feelings, May

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• All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

  Storm Jameson

  Sadistic, Pornography

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Parthian Words”, p.59, A&C Black

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• ... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

  Storm Jameson

  Art, Passion, Thinking

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Journey from the North, Volume 2: Autobiography of Storm Jameson”, p.240, A&C Black

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• The future is always fairyland to the young. Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright flowers, and beautiful butterflies and tempting fruits, which we scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees, as we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived--to reach a desert waste.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Beautiful, Flower, Future

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• There are no degrees in honorableness. You either are or you aren't.

  Sam Rayburn

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• Historically, it appears that society has capitalized on what is at most a degree of difference between the sexes in order to institutionalize the polarization of aggression.

  Freda Adler

  Sex, Order, Differences

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• Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.

  Margaret Halsey

  Envy, Adults, Jerusalem

  Margaret Halsey (1944). “...Some of My Best Friends are Soldiers: A Kind of Novel”

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• Who has not experienced how, on near acquaintance, plainness becomes beautified, and beauty loses its charm, exactly according to the quality of the heart and mind? And from this cause am I of opinion that the want of outward beauty never disquiets a noble nature or will be regarded as a misfortune. It never can prevent people from being amiable and beloved in the highest degree.

  Fredrika Bremer

  Beauty, Heart, People

  Fredrika Bremer (1844). “New Sketches of Every-day Life: A Diary. Together with Strife and Peace”, p.94

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• Democracy cannot sustain itself amid a high degree of violence.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Democracy, Violence

  Mary Ritter Beard, Nancy F. Cott (1991). “A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters”, p.317, Yale University Press

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• The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.

  Joan Fontaine

  Teacher, Directors, Actors

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• The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Business, Power, Opportunity

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1984). “Change Masters”, p.18, Simon and Schuster

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• Even the new feminist research on sex-role socialization and sex differences has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of creating a new set of stereotypes about what women feel and how women behave. Despite the large amount of overlap between the sexes in most research, the tendency to label and polarize and thus to exaggerate differences remains in much reporting of data, which may, for example, report the mean scores of male and female populations but not the degree of overlap.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Sex, Mean, Data

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• The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color, is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

  Thomas Starr King

  Gay, Thoughtful, Men

  Thomas Starr King (1864). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.178

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• As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking. ... I am tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of that poor unknown quantity Thinking is really due to its ubiquitous twin-brother Talking.

  Vernon Lee

  Brother, Believe, Thinking

  Vernon Lee (1904). “Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life”

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• I happen to hold a bachelor of science degree in geology... And my greatest contribution to the field of science is that I never entered it.

  Colin Powell

  Science, Fields, Scientist

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• Envy is a weed that grows in all soils and climates, and is no less luxuriant in the country than in the court; is not confined to any rank of men or extent of fortune, but rages in the breasts of all degrees.

  Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon

  Country, Weed, Men

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• There is really nothing left to a genuine idle man, who possesses any considerable degree of vital power, but sin.

  J. G. Holland

  Men, Sin, Genuine

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