Elements Quotes - Page 17

• The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.

  Agnes Repplier

  Humor, Essence, Mind

  Agnes Repplier (2015). “Americans and Others”, p.21, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• I am not so repelled by Communism: an element of Communism in politics is necessary and inevitable. In any involved society there must be a feeling that something must be done about poverty - which is the basis of communism.

  Rebecca West

  Feelings, Done, Poverty

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• When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself - the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change.

  Rachel Carson

  Ocean, Water, World

  Rachel Carson, Sue Hubbell (1998). “The Edge of the Sea”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Conscience and covetousness are never to be reconciled; like fire and water they always destroy each other, according to the predominancy of the element.

  Jeremy Collier

  Fire, Water, Conscience

  Jeremy Collier (1732). “Essays upon several moral subjects”

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• every artist is both male and female, and ... sometimes, the two great elements are in conjunction with him, so that all by himself he suddenly gets the melody and the burst of feeling of a great symphony without any external stimuli.

  Ruth St. Denis

  Artist, Two, Symphony

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• the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Fire, Islands, Air

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1991). “The Islands of Italy: Sicily, Sardinia, and the Aeolian Islands”, Houghton Mifflin

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• Such is the nature of the marriage relation that a breach once made cannot be healed, and it is the height of folly to waste one's life in vain efforts to make a binary compound of two diverse elements. What would we think of the chemist who should sit twenty years trying to mix oil and water, and insist upon it that his happiness depended upon the result of the experiment?

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Marriage, Thinking, Oil And Water

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot (Stanton). Blatch (Mrs) (1922). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences”

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• The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Silence, Works Of Art

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.230, Macmillan

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• There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

  Susan Sontag

  Pleasure, Position

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• The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.

  Mary McCarthy

  Fashion, Kissing, Clothes

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

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• The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

  Mary McCarthy

  Comedy, Creation, Comic

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

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• I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Real, Believe

  "Photography at the Crossroads". Essay by Berenice Abbott, 1951.

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• If any one element of French cooking can be called important, basic and essential, that element is soup.

  Louis Diat

  Food, Cooking, Important

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• The tyranny of distance is such an important element of policy and the allocation of resources.

  George Brandis

  Distance, Important, Resources

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• It's the repetitive thing that brings space. That's one of the things I love secretly about hip-hop. Jazz doesn't have that element. It changes every bar, nothing is ever the same.

  Robert Glasper

  Space, Hip Hop, Bars

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.

  George Clooney

  Fun, Sound And Music, Film Directing

  "The Ides of March - George Clooney interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• I always like to try different things, different genres; stories that have a dramatic element and can generate conflict which I find appealing; where the characters have to overcome obstacles. That kind of thing is challenging.

  Clint Eastwood

  Character, Challenges, Trying

  "Gran Torino - Clint Eastwood interview". Interview with Jack Foley, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.

  Karl Ove Knausgard

  Writing, Modern Novel, Trying

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• In part of Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism, he says that "music improves the relish of a banquet." That I deny,--any more than painting might do. They may both be additional pleasures, as well as conversation is, but are perfectly distinct notices; and cannot, with the least propriety, be said to mix or blend with the repast, as none of them serve to raise the flavor of the wine, the sauce, the meat, or help to quicken appetite. But music and painting both add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor.

  Laurence Sterne

  Music, Wine, Criticism

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• Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

  Camille Paglia

  Rose, Flight, Human Life

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.26, Canongate Books

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• I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Philosophy, Italian

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• New York is a meeting place for every race in the world, but the Chinese, Armenians, Russians, and Germans remain foreigners. So does everyone except the blacks. There is no doubt but that the blacks exercise great influence in North America, and, no matter what anyone says, they are the most delicate, spiritual element in that world.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Spiritual, New York, Exercise

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• It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work.

  Theodore Parker

  Nature, Nice, Butterfly

  Theodore Parker “Centenary Edition [of the Writings of Theodore Parker]”

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• My vocation is to write and I have known this for a long time. I hope I won't be misunderstood; I know nothing about the value of the things I am able to write. I know that writing is my vocation. When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me, I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands. But when I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

  Natalia Ginzburg

  Country, Children, Wall

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• In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very center of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law.

  Horace Bushnell

  Order, Law, Degrees

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