Difficult Quotes - Page 17

• Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Class, Focus

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.253, Shambhala Publications

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• But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.

  George Saintsbury

  Flirting, Thinking, Meals

  George Saintsbury (1922). “A Scrap Book”

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• Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Art, Government, Mind

  Lewis H. Lapham (1997). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, p.32, Verso

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• Sadness came into the world with Satan - that world our Saviour never prayed for, the world you say I do not know. Oh, it is not so difficult to recognize: it is the world that prefers cold to warmth! What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night?

  Georges Bernanos

  Sadness, Night, World

  "Joy". Book by Georges Bernanos, 1929.

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• Hypertext makes a virtue out of lack of organization, allowing ideas and thoughts to be juxtaposed at will. [...] The advent of hypertext is apt to make writing much more difficult, not easier. Good writing, that is.

  Donald A. Norman

  Writing, Organization, Ideas

  "The Design of Everyday Things". Book by Don Norman, ch. 7, pp. 212 - 213., 1988.

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• Researchers find it very necessary to keep blinkers on. They don't want to admit that the animals they are working with have feelings. They don't want to admit that they might have minds and personalities because that would make it quite difficult for them to do what they do; so we find that within the lab communities there is a very strong resistance among the researchers to admitting that animals have minds, personalities and feelings.

  Jane Goodall

  Strong, Animal, Personality

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• People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Real, People, Fake

  "The West Wing Scriptbook". Book by Aaron Sorkin, 2003.

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• The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Views, Avant Garde

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.19, Beacon Press

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• The separation of families to me is very close to my heart because we lived that as immigrants. I strongly feel that we all connected, and having felt people's love and support first-hand through difficult moments in my life, makes me feel it's our responsibility to help one another. I am privileged to help in some way, and I will always take that opportunity.

  Gloria Estefan

  Heart, Responsibility, Opportunity

  The Associated Press, September 10, 2005.

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• I don't think that there's substantiated evidence that shows that voter fraud is such a rampant problem that we have to put in place measures that people have to pass in order to exercise that constitutional free right. Voting should be -- and is required to be -- a right that is unencumbered. That does not have tests that people must pass.... Anything put in place to restrict that right, or to make it more difficult for people to exercise it, should be outlawed, and should not be allowed.

  Clay Aiken

  Exercise, Thinking, Order

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• You can raise good children in single parent households, and many of you perhaps here today come from that type of environment. It is possible and many do it in heroic situations, but it's much more difficult and the numbers move against us in a broad society.

  Sam Brownback

  Children, Moving, Numbers

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• One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.

  James Russell Lowell

  Character, Break Through, Style

  James Russell Lowell (2015). “Abraham Lincoln”, p.22, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The reputation of a Don Juan gives to a man the most dangerous power. Wise virgins resist it, but foolish virgins frequently yield to the desire to take a celebrated lover from a rival - even from a friend. This emotion is a complex one, mad up of vanity, respect for another woman's taste, and the need to establish self-assurance by winning a difficult victory. Don Juan chose his first mistresses; later he was chosen.

  Andre Maurois

  Wise, Winning, Men

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.

  Andre Maurois

  Adventure, Soul, Age

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.

  Marcel Proust

  People, Regimes, Oneself

  Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.419, Wordsworth Editions

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• I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.

  Mark Twain

  Russia, Europe, Turkeys

  Mark Twain (1869). “The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress”, p.443

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• What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  People, Understanding, Important

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Carl Klagge, Alfred Nordmann (1993). “Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951”, p.161, Hackett Publishing

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• Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change and difference is a relationship.

  Gregory Bateson

  Data, Differences, Events

  Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory Bateson (2006). “Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry”, p.173, Transaction Publishers

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• After initial needs are met—enough food, shelter, comfort—there is no correlation between money and happiness. That's a difficult thing for people to believe.

  Geneen Roth

  Money, Believe, People

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• It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

  Donald Barthelme

  Ideas, Demand, Next

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• It's really difficult to have your voice heard and feared when you both speak softly and carry a twig.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Voice, Speak, Twigs

  " Fareed Zakaria GPS", www.cnn.com. July 27, 2014.

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• There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. that it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty.

  David Hume

  Morning, Night, Silence

  David Hume (2015). “A Treatise of Human Nature: Top Philosophy Collections”, p.339, 谷月社

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• In the name of Israel's God, if every man would do right, and when he has done what he knows is right, then stops till he knows what next, there never would be a jar in the camp. And I defy the man to come forward that ever led so large a people in such difficult and trying circumstances, in so much peace, as I have led this people during this campaign, with the help of God and my brethren.

  Brigham Young

  Men, Names, Israel

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• Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

  Northrop Frye

  Teaching, Literature, Impossible

  Northrop Frye (2014). “The Northrop Frye Quote Book”, p.313, Dundurn

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• Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Costumes, Absence, Modern

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p.338, 1980.

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