Devices Quotes - Page 7

• PASTIME, n. A device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for intellectual debility.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Exercise, Intellectual, Gentle

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.160, 谷月社

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• Boredom has been used as a technique, it is a device. In Zen, boredom is used as a device: you are bored to death, and you are not allowed to escape. You are not to go outside, you are not to entertain yourself, you are not to do, you are not to talk, you are not to read novels and detective stories. No thrill. No possibility to escape anywhere.

  Rajneesh

  Boredom, Technique, Thrill

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• Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.

  Anna Deavere Smith

  Dark, Night, People

  Anna Deavere Smith (2001). “Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines”, p.134, Random House

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• Any 'transmitting' device or applied technical method, which gets in the way of the 'transmission'/message/story, etc., is a negative element, garbling that which ought to be clear and instantly understood, and ought to be simply-stated with economy!

  Alex Toth

  Negative, Stories, Elements

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• Now that I have seen the device work for so many hours, in my view all chemical energy sources are excluded

  Giuseppe Levi

  Views, Energy, Hours

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• On every commercial flight, the traveler is told, "Your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device". The question is, why doesn't the plane just become a boat?

  Sam Ewing

  Stupidity, Flight, Boat

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• With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Jesus, People, Understanding

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• God can make a new beginning with people whenever God pleases, but not people with God. Therefore, people cannot make a new beginning at all; they can only pray for one. Where people are on their own and live by their own devices, there is only the old, the past.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  New Beginnings, Past, People

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2007). “I Want to Live These Days with You: A Year of Daily Devotions”, p.2, Westminster John Knox Press

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• I am for a government rigorously frugal & simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers & salaries merely to make partisans, & for increasing, by every device, the public debt, on the principle of its being a public blessing.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Blessing, Simple, Government

  Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: 1799-1803”, p.18, Cosimo, Inc.

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• It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Average, Law

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• Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.

  Frances O'Grady

  Government, Stripes, Growth

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• Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

  John W. Gardner

  Running, Being Yourself, Clever

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• Beauty is a living abiding presence completely untouchable by all the devices of man, such as moral codes, creeds, intellectual analysis, games and cliches, the acquisitive instinct, or lust for anything whatsoever.

  Lawren Harris

  Beauty, Men, Games

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• Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Men, Liberty, Saving

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• Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

  Joanne Harris

  Pioneers, Fiction, Use

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• The elite government does have devices that can create earthquakes anywhere in the world that they want. I was just in Russia and I talked to their scientists. They are able to take a field of crops of some unusual shape, and make it rain or snow only on that crop and nowhere else around it. That's how much they can control the weather.

  Drunvalo Melchizedek

  Rain, Earthquakes, Weather

  Source: lovinglifeonearth.wordpress.com

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• It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Sadness, Race, Way

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• It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.

  Christoph Waltz

  Eye, Reality, Looks

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• All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things.

  Charles Yu

  Heart, Ideas, People

  Charles Yu (2010). “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel”, p.124, Vintage

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• Oh, a lion hunter in the jungle dark, And a sleeping drunkard up in central park, and a Chinese dentist and a British queen All fit together in the same machine. Nice, nice, such very different people in the same device!

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Queens, Nice, Sleep

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• I looked around the store and what I saw was not very encouraging. There were rows and rows of violent toys...aisle after aisle of training devices for recreational slaughter. No wonder our world was such a mean and violent place...if we teach children that killing is fun, can we really be surprised if now and then someone is smart enough to learn?

  Jeff Lindsay

  Children, Fun, Smart

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• Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

  Hannah Arendt

  Children, Responsibility, Our World

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• [A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Science, Environmental, Negative

  Erwin Schrodinger (2012). “What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches”, p.73, Cambridge University Press

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• No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

  E. O. Wilson

  Survival, Mind, Technique

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• Science stands, a too competant servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use. ... And on its material side, a modern Utopia must needs present these gifts as taken.

  George Herbert

  Stupid, Taken, Science

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