Devising Quotes - Page 2

• Gods colliding, ethos and mythos trying to combine. The Sacred Band caught up in a whirlwind not of any god's devising: he and Niko had wanted to save twenty-three pairs of fated Theban fighters. Now everything feels fated and fighting oversweeps its boundaries of time and place and plane.

  Janet Morris

  Time, War, Fighting

  Janet Morris, Chris Morris (2010). “The Sacred Band”, p.194, Paradise Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Nature, Science, Challenges

  63 Copy quote

• Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

  Gene Wolfe

  Science, Mind, Facts

  Gene Wolfe (1997). “The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories”, p.351, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.

  Claude Bernard

  Science, Views, Ideas

  Claude Bernard (2012). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.52, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men of genius are not to be analysed by commonplace rules. The rest of us who have been or are leaders, more commonplace in our quality, will do well to remember two things. One is never to forget posterity when devising a policy. The other is never to think of posterity when making a speech.

  Robert Menzies

  Men, Thinking, Two

  26 Copy quote

• To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Nature, Mean, Mind

  Joseph Wood Krutch (1956). “The Modern Temper”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Spiritual, Believe, Emotional

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.178, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.

  Fran Lebowitz

  War, Book, School

  Fran Lebowitz (2011). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, p.43, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

  Neil Gaiman

  Men, Thinking, Our World

  Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlín R Kiernan, Elizabeth Bear (2014). “Lovecraft's Monsters”, p.21, Tachyon Publications

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• With support from institutions like the United Nations as well as the donor community, governments can strengthen their national technological and scientific capacities by devising policies to link up to research networks, encourage technology transfer, and build indigenous capabilities through education and collaborative projects.

  Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

  Technology, Government, Community

  Speech at the Eighth Session of the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, Palais de Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, May 23, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

  John Podhoretz

  Winning, Giving, Political

  58 Copy quote

• I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.

  Alan Bradley

  Interesting, Brain, Enemy

  Alan Bradley (2010). “The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag: A Flavia de Luce Novel”, p.316, Dell

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

  Alan Watts

  Learning, Ignorance, Knowledge

  Alan W Watts (2012). “Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety”, p.98, Random House

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Work outside of school hours was a necessity at an early age, and with such time as I had I turned toward interests of my own devising, making things, experimenting, and planning for the future. I had read of Thomas Alva Edison and other successful inventors, and the idea of making an invention appealed to me as one of the few available means to accomplish a change in one's economic status, while at the same time bringing to focus my interest in technical things and making it possible to make a contribution to society as well.

  Chester Carlson

  School, Mean, Successful

  11 Copy quote

• The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.

  Peter Medawar

  Art, Mean, Science

  7 Copy quote

• Christ taught us truth; the Devil teaches us falsehood, and strives in every way to contradict every truth; devising various calumnies against it.

  John of Kronstadt

  Taught Us, Devil, Way

  4 Copy quote

• The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Taken, Political, Income

  Henry Hazlitt (2010). “Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics”, p.35, Crown Business

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• Here’s what I know about the realm of possibility— it is always expanding, it is never what you think it is. Everything around us was once deemed impossible. From the airplane overhead to the phones in our pockets to the choir girl putting her arm around the metalhead. As hard as it is for us to see sometimes, we all exist within the realm of possibility. Most of the limits are of our own world’s devising. And yet, every day we each do so many things that were once impossible to us.

  David Levithan

  Girl, Airplane, Thinking

  David Levithan (2008). “The Realm of Possibility”, p.198, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.

  Paul Stamets

  Nature, Believe, Communication

  Paul Stamets (2011). “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World”, p.21, Ten Speed Press

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  May, Wonderful, Source

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Silmarillion”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  88 Copy quote

  Show source

• There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Men, Unbearable, Nuisance

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.138, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat, a young author writing his first novel; all of these are in terms of definition, Creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less Creative.

  Carl Rogers

  Children, Writing, Order

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.350, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject.

  Ada Lovelace

  Views, Principles, Use

  7 Copy quote

• The spirit of community will be revived as we succeed in devising ways to reinvolve people in solving the perplexing problems they see about them, not just in talking about them, and certainly not in petitioning government to solve them.

  Richard Cornuelle

  Government, Talking, People

  7 Copy quote

• If the desire to get somewhere is strong enough in a person, his whole being, conscious and unconscious, is always at work, looking for and devising means to get to the goal.

  Frederick Philip Grove

  Strong, Mean, Goal

  8 Copy quote