Description Quotes - Page 20

• Lying to the American people wasn’t part of my job description.

  Ralph W. Moss

  Jobs, Lying, People

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• It takes talent to please the people in a sermon by a flowery style, a cheerful ethic, brilliant sallies and lively descriptions; but such a talent is inadequate. A better sort of talent neglects these extraneous ornaments, unworthy to be used in the service of the Gospel: such a preacher's sermon will be simple, strong and Christian.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Christian, People, Style

  "Of The Pulpit". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.

  August Wilson

  Creativity, Thinking, Input

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• A dream inspiring a story is different than placing a description of a dream in a story. When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way, and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest. If you're writing something fantastical, it can be a really deadly choice because your story already has elements that can seem dreamlike.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Meaningful, Dream, Character

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer.

  Luc Tuymans

  Emotional, People, Elements

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• One night, a group of moths gathered on a shelf watching a burning candle. Puzzled by the nature of the light, they sent one of their members to go and check on it. The scouting moth circled the candle several times and came back with a description: The light was bright. Then a second moth went to examine it. He, too, came back with an observation: The light was hot. Finally a third moth volunteered to go. When he approached the candle he didn't stop like his friends had done, but flew straight into the flame. He was consumed there and then, and only he understood the nature of the light.

  Elif Safak

  Night, Light, Flames

  "Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood". Book by Elif Shafak, 2007.

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• He was born a King. The wise men came from the East and asked, 'Where is He that is born King of the Jews?' (Matthew 2:2). He died a King.
  In Greek, in Latin, and in Hebrew the description was written above His cross, 'This is Jesus, The King' (Matthew 27:37)

  W. A. Criswell

  Wise, Jesus, Kings

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• Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Feelings, Confusing, World

  "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Chance Riches", p. 342, 1983.

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• If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.

  Miguel

  Dream, Religious, War

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• I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

  Doris Lessing

  Desire, Shifting, Youth

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Religious, Intellectual, Quality

  "Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1991.

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• Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Running, Vanity, Expression

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (October 14, 1929), as quoted in "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections" edited by Alice Kimball Smith (p. 136), 1995.

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• There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Exercise

  Jorge Luis Borges (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.43, New Directions Publishing

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• What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

  R. D. Laing

  Understanding, Defining, Explaining

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• I really think my fun personality is my ace in the hole. I will never claim to be the most beautiful or most talented queen, because I can think of many queens who fit that description. However, it's my "charisma" that takes me to a higher level in my drag!

  Manila Luzon

  Beautiful, Queens, Fun

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing — she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision.

  Mary GrandPre

  Book, Writing, Responsibility

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• In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.

  Hans Arp

  Reality, Order, Color

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• Addiction is not a fact of life but a description about how we are choosing to live.

  Paul Pearsall

  Addiction, Facts, Choosing To Live

  Paul Pearsall (2009). “Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, be a Good Blamer and Throttle Your Inner Child”, p.45, Basic Books

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• In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Men, Vivid

  "The Secret of Childhood" by Maria Montessori, (p. 106), 1936.

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• Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

  Franz Kafka

  Reflection, Psychology, World

  Franz Kafka (1954). “Wedding preparations in the country: and other posthumous prose writings. With notes by Max Brod”

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• What we need now is the description of the "describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.

  Heinz von Foerster

  Needs, Theory, Observers

  Heinz von Foerster (2007). “Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition”, p.247, Springer Science & Business Media

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• There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ' holistic ' views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment.

  Francisco Varela

  Strong, Loss, Views

  "From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela's exploration of the biophysics of being" by D. Rudrauf, Biol Res 36: 27-65, 2003.

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• How can you run for president if you dont know the job description?

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Running, Jobs, President

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• Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Plain Language, Understanding, Degrees

  Werner Heisenberg (1962). “Physics and philosophy: the revolution in modern science”, Harpercollins College Div

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• They presented a description of the world to all of us which was very limited and narrow.

  Frederick Lenz

  World, Rama

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