Description Quotes - Page 17

• Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.

  Marvin Harris

  Mean, People, Portraits

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• We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Explanation

  Garth Hallett, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1977). “A companion to Wittgenstein's "Philosophical investigations"”, Cornell Univ Pr

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• Searching for a better description of this rotting sadness, I came upon the concept of acedia. In Christian theology, it’s an antecedent to sloth, the least sexy of the seven deadly sins. Thomas Aquinas winnowed it down for me: acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.

  Mishka

  Christian, Sexy, Sadness

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• I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

  Giacomo Casanova

  Beautiful, Artist, Drawing

  Giacomo Casanova, Willard R. Trask (1997). “History of My Life”, p.112, JHU Press

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• I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.

  Bridgit Mendler

  Character, Thinking, Scott Fitzgerald

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• One single glance will conquer all descriptions.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Vision, Conquer, Glances

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1850). “Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments. 1st and 2d Series in One Volume”, p.327

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• The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.

  Horace Walpole

  New York, Discovery, Boston

  Letter to Horace Mann, 24 Nov. 1774 See Macaulay 9

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• Euphemism in the workplace does not end with job descriptions. It reaches a pusillanimous peak at the other end of the work process - in dismissal.

  Nigel Rees

  Jobs, Doe, Workplace

  "In other words ..." by Nigel Rees, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2006.

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• Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

  Duane Michals

  Photograph, Insight

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• Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.

  Max Weber

  Bears, Artistic, Type

  Max Weber (2015). “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences”, p.151, Lulu Press, Inc

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• What is mathematics? Ask this question of person chosen at random, and you are likely to receive the answer "Mathematics is the study of number." With a bit of prodding as to what kind of study they mean, you may be able to induce them to come up with the description "the science of numbers." But that is about as far as you will get. And with that you will have obtained a description of mathematics that ceased to be accurate some two and a half thousand years ago!

  Keith Devlin

  Mean, Years, Two

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• The British are proud of their ability to create a muddle and then muddle through all difficulties. I must shake the British pride: muddle is not an exclusively British institution. Read descriptions, for instance, of the over-organized, wonderfully systematic and "thorough" German war machine during the last war.

  George Mikes

  Funny, War, Humorous

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• In this book I do not intend to give a blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic. The circumstances that lead up to sex I find more interesting.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Funny, Sex, Humorous

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• I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say - they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College - "I just hate to talk to a machine!" They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn't go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society.

  Dave Barry

  Hate, Philosophical, Humorous

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• The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.

  John Stuart Mill

  Taken, Science, Being Real

  John Stuart Mill (1858). “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation”, p.200

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• For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Details, Wells

  Stephen King (2001). “On writing: a memoir of the craft”

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• Like most Christians, I believe the Genesis account of creation is a description of six different stages of creation, each of which may have taken eons of time.

  Tony Campolo

  Christian, Believe, Taken

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• I grew up watching stand-ups and thought it was so entertaining and unique - you didn’t see that as a job description anywhere.

  Kevin Nealon

  Jobs, Unique, Grew Up

  "A Minute With: Kevin Nealon returning to stand-up comedy". Interview with Iain Blair, www.reuters.com. August 1, 2012.

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• We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

  Robert Cormier

  Writing, School, Unique

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• The online musical universe has become Balkanized, with many sites focusing on minute niches. That works well for reaching very specific demographics, which is wonderful for advertising, but it flies in the face of the common wisdom that people's tastes have become more diverse as music of any description has become a mouse-click away.

  Michael Azerrad

  Wisdom, People, Musical

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• One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you've seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you're talking about; and then take pictures of them.

  Gene Cernan

  Moon, Talking, Important

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• Politicians, it's in their job description to just lie, every day.

  Rob Delaney

  Jobs, Lying, Politician

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• London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Book, Smell, Light

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• One of the things I like about performing on the stage is that it is a kind of meditative experience. Time does stand still. You have no concept or feeling of the passing of two or three hours' time. It's all kind of one present moment, which is a kind of a description of meditation.

  Michael Emerson

  Two, Meditation, Feelings

  "Actor Michael Emerson". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. May 16, 2012.

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• [M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

  Susan Sontag

  Military, Health, Medicine

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