Describing Quotes - Page 9

• Once there was a race, quite unlike the human race - quite. I have no way of describing to you what they looked like or how they lived, but they had one characteristic you can understand: they were creative. The creating and enjoying of works of art was their occupation and their reason for being.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Art, Race, Creating

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• Describing life out of the public eye to David Letterman, December 6th, 1996 It's been different. I started driving again. I started cooking again. My driving's better than my cooking. George has discovered Sam's Club.

  Barbara Bush

  Life, Eye, Discovery

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• If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Views, Order, Two

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.139, Penguin

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• The negative way [of describing God] is a cardboard prop of Christianity to conceal its unknowable God. When this prop collapses, theistic agnosticism emerges, complete with its package of contradictions and non-sensical utterances.

  George H. Smith

  Negative, Utterance, Way

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• In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.

  R. D. Laing

  Mad, Insanity, Trying

  "The Divided Self". Book by R. D. Laing, Ch. 1, 1960.

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• Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

  John Backus

  Law, Understanding, Ordinary

  "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?". John Backus' 1977 Turing Award lecture, published in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 21, No. 8 (pp. 639-640), August 1978.

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• We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think - only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.

  Alan Watts

  Eye, Heart, Thinking

  "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts, (p. 112), 1966.

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• And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Christian, Hope, Night

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• I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

  Christian Wiman

  Mind, Weakness, Essentials

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• Some of the funniest things are just situations in life that are funny. The way people interact. People describing their first kiss with someone, to me, is really funny. When someone goes into detail about each moment of that, I really find that enjoyable to listen to.

  Nathan Fielder

  Kissing, Situations In Life, People

  "Nathan For You's star confronts the A.V. Club mom who scorned him". Interview with Bonney Teti, tv.avclub.com. October 15, 2015.

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• For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Matter, Indifference

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.94, Vintage

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• A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.

  William S. Burroughs

  Thinking, Doctors, Lines

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• We need faith, not because there are beings who will punish us or reward us, but because gods are a wonderful way of describing things that are happening to us.

  Ming-Dao Deng

  Rewards, Way, Needs

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• I wouldn't say I'm fixated on describing any kind of relationship whether it is a father and a son, or a family. I don't like it when people say that I'm particularly following the same line or that I'm only interested in family dramas. I'm interested in human relationships. The most intimate, the most delicate, and the most intriguing relationships are those within a family.

  Andrey Zvyagintsev

  Father, Drama, Son

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• All models divide naturally...into two a priori parts: one is kinematics, whose aim is to parameterize the forms of the states of the process under consideration, and the other is dynamics, describing the evolution in time of these forms.

  Rene Thom

  Two, Dynamics, Evolution

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• I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"

  David Brooks

  Trying, Very Good, Happenings

  "Ask the Author Live: David Brooks on the Composure Class". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. January 7, 2011.

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• When I would be on the stage singing, I would see a movie of something that happened, I would be telling the story. I would be describing the story in sound, but my goal would be to make somebody else run their own movie.

  Linda Ronstadt

  Running, Goal, Singing

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Marriage is also a social statement, preeminently describing and defining a person's relationship and place in society. Marital status, along with what we do for a living, is often one of the first pieces of information we give to others about ourselves. It's so important, in fact, that most married people wear a symbol of their marriage on their hand.

  Evan Wolfson

  Hands, People, Giving

  Evan Wolfson (2007). “Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

  Dana Spiotta

  Writing, Character, Emotional

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Most of us have developed a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing pain, as though the journal were a doctor requiring much detail to make the correct diagnosis. The roundness of the spiritual journey cannot be expressed without developing an equally extensive vocabulary for talking to ourselves and others about the nature of wonder, joy, ecstasy, love, transfiguration.

  Christina Baldwin

  Spiritual, Pain, Journey

  Christina Baldwin (1991). “Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest”, Bantam

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• Beware of men who use words that relate pejoratively to females when describing the 'other side.

  Jane Fonda

  Men, Female, Use

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• I'm not promoting myself as the next great American driver, as some people are describing me. If that's what people want to call me, fine. But I've got more important things to focus on.

  Buddy Rice

  People, Focus, Important

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• In the end, I'm convinced we will all benefit if suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue; if the emphasis in our debate turns from a search for talismanic criteria and neat but simplistic answers to an honest - more intelligent - attempt at describing the role religion has in our public affairs, and the limits placed on that role.

  Mario Cuomo

  Intelligent, Answers, Benefits

  New York (State). Governor (1983- : Cuomo), Mario Matthew Cuomo (1989). “Public Papers of Governor Mario M. Cuomo, 1984”

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• Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Eye, Sun, Cameras

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• Mathematicians are inexorably drawn to nature, not just describing what is to be found there, but in creating echoes of natural laws.

  Roger Lewin

  Nature, Science, Creating

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