Distinction Quotes - Page 16

• An assembly of the states, a court of justice, shows nothing so serious and grave as a table of gamesters playing very high; a melancholy solicitude clouds their looks; envy and rancor agitate their minds while the meeting lasts, without regard to friendship, alliances, birth or distinctions.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Clouds, Gambling, Envy

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• A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth.

  William Hazlitt

  Air, Understanding, Feelings

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1468, Delphi Classics

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• To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.

  Alexander Smith

  Death, Men, Proud

  Dreamthorp Ch. II (1863)

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• All the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man or the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in heaven or in hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions.

  Thomas Paine

  Equality, Men, Heaven

  Thomas Paine (2016). “THE RIGHTS OF MAN: The French Revolution – Ideals, Arguments & Motives (Political Classic): Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution”, p.34, e-artnow

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• The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Kings, Greatness, Pedestal

  Walter Savage Landor (1824). “Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen”, p.313

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• Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.

  Blaise Pascal

  Men, Practice, Judging

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• I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.

  Margaret Atwood

  School, Character, Gossip

  Margaret Atwood (1984). “Second words: selected critical prose”, Beacon Press, 1984

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• No distinction is 'tween man and man,
  But as his virtues add to him a glory
  Or vices cloud him.

  William Habington

  Men, Clouds, Vices

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• Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

  Tillie Olsen

  Book, Men, Years

  Tillie Olsen (2014). “Silences”, p.38, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• While women were tortured, drowned and burned by the thousands, scarce one wizard to a hundred was ever condemned ... The same distinction of sex appears in our own day. One code of morals for men, another for women.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sex, Men, Wizards

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2012). “The Woman's Bible”, p.156, tredition

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• To the Baptist Churches on Neal's Greek on Black Creek, North Carolina I have received, fellow-citizens, your address, approving my objection to the Bill containing a grant of public land to the Baptist Church at Salem Meeting House, Mississippi Territory. Having always regarded the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented itself

  James Madison

  Government, Land, House

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• The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

  Bill Brandt

  Photographer, Produce, Appeals

  Bill Brandt (1993). “Bill Brandt: Selected Texts & Bibliography”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Many oriental cultures make a distinction between two ways of looking - 'hard eyes' and 'soft eyes'. When we look with hard eyes, we see specific details with sharp focus, but we don't see the relationships between different details as well. When we look with soft eyes we see the relationships between everything in our field of vision, but with this softer focus, we don't see all the details as clearly. It's possible to look in two ways at once.

  John Paul Caponigro

  Eye, Two, Focus

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• We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

  Edward Snowden

  Country, War, Nsa

  "Edward Snowden, NSA files source: 'If they want to get you, in time they will'". Interview with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, www.theguardian.com. June 10, 2013.

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• The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.

  Norman O. Brown

  Reality, Self, Ego

  Norman O. Brown (1990). “Love's Body, Reissue of 1966 edition”, p.143, Univ of California Press

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• Distinction is an eminence that is attained but too frequently at the expense of a fireside.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Greatness, Expenses, Eminence

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• Americans have two ardent passions; the love of liberty, and love of distinction.

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Passion, Two, Liberty

  Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1835). “Traits of American Life”, p.159

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• Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Real, Friendly, Way

  "The Pasteboard Past" by Witold Rybczynski, www.nytimes.com. April 6, 1997.

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• To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.

  Edith Hamilton

  Beautiful, Greek, Gone

  Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub

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• In the home we make certain distinctions about functions of rooms and corridors; we do not deliver the groceries straight into the baby's crib. In hospitals we do not take the food trolleys right through the operating chamber, and we rarely have the recreation room next to the convalescent room. We sort out the functions. We have to sort out the functions of the city and the streams of traffic and re-create arterial systems that allow us to breathe ... the shape, pattern and sense of community which you expect if it were a home.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Baby, Home, Cities

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• Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten.

  Stella Benson

  Age, Twenties, Three

  Stella Benson (1916). “I Pose”

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• Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Character, Men, Organization

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• There is a distinction, but no opposition, between theory and practice. Each to a certain extent supposes the other. Theory is dependent on practice; practice must have preceded theory.

  Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

  Practice, Theory, Certain

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• I feel that women of my kind are a profound mistake. There have been few women poets of distinction, and, if we count only the suicides of Sappho, Lawrence Hope and Charlotte Mew, their despair rate has been very high.

  Anna Wickham

  Suicide, Mistake, Profound

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• In the last few years, race relations in America have entered upon a period of intensified craziness wherein fear of being called a racist has so thoroughly overwhelmed fear of being a racist that we are in danger of losing sight of the distinction.

  Florence King

  America, Race, Sight

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