Elusive Quotes - Page 5

• It is like a dream. I didn't sleep for two nights because I was under so much pressure. That elusive medal is probably what has kept me going. I had none of the self-doubts which have bothered me in the past. I was totally positive.

  Michaela Dorfmeister

  Dream, Sleep, Past

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• The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign.

  Noel Ignatiev

  Keys, Race, White

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• It doesn't matter if you're good. If you're just good, you won't succeed. If you have patience and persistence and talent and that's it, you will not have a successful career as an actor. The elusive thing you need is luck.

  Bryan Cranston

  Successful, Persistence, Careers

  "The Last Stand of Walter White". Interview with Brett Martin, www.gq.com. July 15, 2013.

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• Freedom is an elusive concept. Some men hold themselves prisoner even when they have the power to do as they please and go where they choose, while others are free in their hearts, even as shackles restrain them.

  Brian Herbert

  Heart, Men, Shackles

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• If you can play guitar and sing, you can probably get a gig down the road playing at a restaurant, but don't throw your life away chasing something that is so elusive it will only lead you to regret and may turn you bitter.

  Cliff Richard

  Regret, Guitar, Play

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• You must also realize that the stuff of excellence-truth, real scientific truth-can be elusive... It is too often covered by the heavy fog of fear and hidden by the darkness of your detractors.

  Daniel Goldin

  Real, Fog, Darkness

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• Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

  Phil Jackson

  Basketball, Team, Player

  Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty (2013). “Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success”, p.84, Penguin

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• The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

  Umberto Eco

  Gains, Ambiguous, Significance

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• An empathic way of being can be learned from empathic persons. Perhaps the most important statement of all is that the ability to be accurately empathic is something which can be developed by training. Therapists, parents and teachers can be helped to become empathic. This is especially likely to occur if their teachers and supervisors are themselves individuals of sensitive understanding. It is most encouraging to know that this subtle, elusive quality, of utmost importance in therapy, is not something one is "born with", but can be learned, and learned most rapidly in an empathic climate.

  Carl Rogers

  Teacher, Parent, Empathy

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• Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.

  Dennis Nurkse

  Art, Dark, Silence

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• And there are no stars and that you're never really sure who's doing what and what voice is what and, you know what I mean? It's supposed to be quite elusive

  Damon Albarn

  Stars, Mean, Voice

  "Gorillaz in tha Midst". Interview with Spence D., www.ign.com. June 29, 2001.

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• The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

  Lukas Foss

  Creative, Target, May

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• The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail. All of the Grail quests are to serve God. If one understands this and drops his idiotic notion that the meaning of life is personal happiness, then one will find that elusive quality immediately at hand.

  Robert A. Johnson

  Hands, Quality, Meaning Of Life

  Robert A. Johnson (1989). “He: Understanding Masculine Psychology”, Harpercollins

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• Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable, and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks-drinks which they see others taking with impunity.

  William Duncan Silkworth

  Recovery, Men, Alcohol

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• Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

  William Styron

  Painful

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• The culture of drink endures because it offers so many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love.

  Pete Hamill

  Lonely, Promise, Love And Friendship

  Pete Hamill (1994). “A Drinking Life: A Memoir”, Wheeler Pub Incorporated

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• The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.

  Robert Plant

  Rocks, Once Upon A Time, Special

  "A little bit country, a little bit rock'n'roll" by Sylvie Simmons, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2008.

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• On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Crafts, Austerity

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• With a profound first-hand knowledge of participants, encompassing linguistic competence, and engaging prose, Padraic Kenney recreates the simultaneously serious and playful currents of East Europe's overthrow of repressive state socialism. What an invaluable guide to the elusive exhilaration that motivated the actors and captivated all of us who followed the transformation with such hope! We can appreciate neither the ebullience of 1989 nor the disappointment with the quotidian reality that followed without understanding Kenney's 'carnival.'

  Charles S. Maier

  Disappointment, Reality, Hands

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• Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

  Caroline Knapp

  Single Mom, Simple, Air

  Caroline Knapp (1999). “Drinking: A Love Story”, p.8, Dial Press

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• A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Learning, Thinking, Profound

  Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1976). “A Discipline of Programming”, Prentice Hall

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• The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

  Warren Buffett

  Brother, Thinking, Growth

  Warren Buffett (2009). “Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha”, p.110, John Wiley & Sons

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• I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft.

  David Ives

  People, Theatre, Stories

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• I've sort of heard that "it" girl thing, but not really. Hearing it from a few people doesn't solidify it in my mind and I wouldn't know how to solidify that title. It's so elusive and what does it mean, I don't know?

  Rachel McAdams

  Mean Girls, People, Mind

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• For at the heart of the uniform, reasoning is shaky and elusive: a mind in search of ideas should first stock up on appearances.

  Francis Ponge

  Heart, Ideas, Mind

  Francis Ponge, Beth Archer Brombert (1972). “The voice of things”

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